Steve Reich

Abstract

Steve Reich (b. 1936) is an American composer who, alongside Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young, is considered an originator of musical minimalism. His compositions consist primarily of instrumental pieces for various ensembles, ranging from solo instruments with prerecorded tape to pieces for full orchestra. The most frequent configurations make prominent use of melodic percussion instruments, attesting to his training as a percussionist. Reich engaged periodically with disparate musical traditions throughout his early career—technological experimentalism in the 1960s, African drumming and Hebrew cantillation in the 1970s—and has since forged a compositional idiom distinguished by its attention to pattern and pulsation. Born and raised primarily in New York City, Reich studied philosophy at Cornell University and music at Juilliard before moving across the country in 1961 to study at Mills College with Luciano Berio. Moving within the Bay Area’s experimental art scenes, Reich discovered the process of phasing when working with tape loops, leading to his first acknowledged pieces: It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966). After relocating to downtown New York in 1965, Reich translated this phasing process into instrumental music, resulting in works such as Piano Phase and Violin Phase (both 1967), as well as his influential manifesto, “Music as a Gradual Process.” In the early 1970s, Reich’s palette expanded to encompass new timbres and processes of pattern and repetition. The large-scale Drumming (1970–1971) and Music for 18 Musicians (1974–1976)—both conceived for his ensemble, Steve Reich and Musicians—are exemplars of his mature minimalist style and helped establish his reputation both within and outside of the classical music world. By the early 1980s, Reich’s music began a process of legitimation within academia and performance institutions: Tehillim (1981) and The Desert Music (1983), for instance, were composed for major orchestras. Both reveal a rekindled interest in voice, text, and speech which found new expression in Different Trains (1988), a string quartet which utilized speech fragments of Holocaust survivor testimonies as generative melodic and harmonic material. Reich continued to explore this technique in large-scale documentary music video theater works (The Cave [1990–93] and Three Tales [2000–03]), as well as chamber works such as City Life (1995) and WTC 9/11 (2010). By the end of the millennium, Reich was widely regarded as America’s foremost living composer; his Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for Double Sextet (2007) seemed a belated affirmation of this perspective.