Steve Reich

Since the 1960s, Steve Reich has drawn together an eclectic range of musical approaches and passions as a groundbreaking avant-garde composer and central architect of minimalist music. Early landmark works such as Piano Phase, Violin Phase, Four Organs, and Drumming illustrate the singular synthesis he created, one that left a lasting mark on musicians and sound artists spanning many genres. Over time his language grew to encompass not only Western classical traditions but also the forms, harmonies, and rhythms drawn from non-Western sources and American popular idioms, especially jazz. Among his creations are the chamber work Music for 18 Musicians, the psalm oratorio Tehillim, and The Desert Music, an orchestral and choral meditation on the poetry of William Carlos Williams that Michael Tilson Thomas conducted with an ensemble of 106 musicians.

Different Trains, Reich’s Grammy-winning three-movement composition for string quartet and tape that draws on the journeys of Jews transported to Nazi concentration camps, was commissioned and performed by Kronos Quartet; it appeared in 1989 on the same recording as Electric Counterpoint, in which guitarist Pat Metheny performed live over a multi-tracked tape of ten guitars and two electric basses. Although Reich spent much of the early 1990s overseeing orchestral recordings of earlier pieces, he still produced striking new releases, among them the 1993 opera The Cave. His hypnotic idiom resonated with a younger generation of DJs and producers who contributed to the 1999 album Reich Remixed, which included reworkings by Howie B, Ken Ishii, Andrea Parker, and others. Kronos Quartet commissioned and recorded the three-movement Triple Quartet, issued in 2001.

Continuing to hear fresh interpretations of his major works by varied ensembles, Reich released Radio Rewrite in 2014, a piece inspired by several Radiohead songs; the same album presented a new recording of Electric Counterpoint with Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood as soloist. As a child Reich studied piano, yet his decisive early encounters with music occurred at age fourteen upon hearing Bach and Stravinsky; at the same time he discovered bebop and began playing drums in a jazz band with friends. While attending Cornell University, which he entered at sixteen and from which he earned a philosophy degree focused on Wittgenstein, he continued weekend performances. In 1957 he enrolled at Juilliard to study with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti, where he met fellow student Philip Glass, and there he first encountered twelve-tone composition. Further exposure came during graduate work at Mills College in Oakland with Luciano Berio and Darius Milhaud, culminating in a master’s degree.

Around this period Reich met Terry Riley, then composing In C (1964). Reich participated in its premiere, and the piece’s tonal language and repeating patterns strongly shaped his own writing; in return he proposed the eighth-note pulse that has become standard in performances of the work. He had already begun tape experiments, fashioning loops of speech and allowing them to drift in and out of phase. These explorations produced the early pieces It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966) and soon extended to live performers, beginning with Piano Phase for two pianos (1967). Back in New York, Reich and Glass assembled an ensemble to present their music between 1968 and 1971; several of those musicians later formed the core of Steve Reich and Musicians, a group that has toured extensively.

In 1970 Reich spent several weeks studying at the University of Ghana, an experience that directly informed the ambitious Drumming (1970). Equally formative were his encounters with Indonesian gamelan in Seattle and Berkeley during 1973–1974, which expanded his rhythmic and timbral resources. Music for 18 Musicians (1974–1976), a large-scale and vividly colored composition, brought him international acclaim. In the mid-1970s Reich began Torah study with video artist Beryl Korot, his future wife, and investigated traditional Jewish cantillation, elements he incorporated into the psalm settings of Tehillim (1981). Numerous chamber and orchestral scores followed throughout the 1980s. For Different Trains (1988), another Grammy recipient, he employed a digital sampler to capture speaking voices and extracted the work’s rhythmic and melodic material from those recordings. Recognizing that Different Trains pointed toward a new documentary form combining video and music, Reich collaborated with Korot for the first time on the theater piece The Cave (1993). They continued this integration of music and video in Three Tales (1998–2002).

By the close of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Reich’s contribution received widespread recognition. Following a new recording of Music for 18 Musicians that earned a Grammy in 1998, he was awarded honorary doctorates from Juilliard, Budapest’s Franz Liszt Academy, and other institutions, along with the 2007 Polar Music Prize, the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Music for Double Sextet, and the 2012 American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Music.

Marking his eightieth birthday in 2016, Reich introduced fresh works: Pulse, scored for winds, strings, piano, and electric bass, received its premiere at Carnegie Hall on November 1 as part of a celebratory concert, while Runner, a dance score for winds, percussion, pianos, and strings, was presented by London’s Royal Ballet on November 10. Nearly two years later, in February 2018, Nonesuch issued Pulse; Quartet. The former, performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble, employs electric bass in a gesture recalling Giorgio Moroder through Daft Punk alongside repeating piano figures set against the pastoral colors of supple strings and woodwinds, producing a striking textural contrast. Quartet, a jazz-inflected work for two pianos and two vibraphones, was written for and performed by the Colin Currie Group, Reich’s preferred percussionists.