Steve Reich

Early Life

While Reich was born in New York City, much of his early life was divided between the East and West coasts of the US – a consequence of his parents’ divorce. He had piano lessons as a child, but it wasn’t until he started drumming that a passion for music began to blossom.

During the 1950s, he studied at two of New York’s most prestigious schools: Cornell (Philosophy and Music) and Juilliard (Composition). Then, in 1961, he enrolled at Mills College in San Francisco, where his teachers included Darius Milhaud and Luciano Berio. It was here, while working in a new electronics studio, that Reich made his chief creative breakthrough. He discovered that, when playing the same loop simultaneously on two separate machines, the natural variance in technology caused the repetitions to drift in and out of sync – a process he called ‘phase music’.

The ‘Downtown’ Scene

Following a return to New York City in 1966, Reich began applying the principles of phase music to acoustic instruments and voices, adding influences from West African drumming music and jazz. He quickly made a name for himself within the city’s Downtown scene, giving concerts at galleries with his tuned-percussion ensemble Steve Reich and Musicians. Attending one of these concerts was Philip Glass. The pair, who had much in common musically, struck up an artistic relationship and together they became associated with the burgeoning minimalist movement.

International Recognition

Reich’s first gig for a major musical institution came in 1971, when the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas invited him to perform Four Organs – for four electronic organs and maraca – with members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. At this point minimalism was still the preserve of the counterculture, and a subsequent performance at Carnegie Hall caused a major ruckus among the orchestra’s well-heeled audience. (MTT later recalled how one woman walked down the aisle and banged her head on the stage, wailing: ‘Stop, stop, I confess.’)

But Reich’s notoriety was short-lived. As the concert-going public became used to this new sound-world, his star among the establishment quickly rose. Encouraged by the huge success of his Music for 18 Musicians, he began publishing his music and accepting major commissions. This gave him the opportunity to compose for bigger forces, and to develop a richer and more intricate musical language.

Still, he never abandoned his roots and continued to write chamber and percussion-ensemble music, as well as works featuring tape. Today Reich is probably the most famous of the minimalists, and his music continues to be performed across the globe.

Unlike many 20th-century composers, Reich never rejected the past. Though ‘phase music’ was inspired by a modern process, he combines his methods with traditional musical practices – tonality and modes, for example – and cites Pérotin, Bartók, Stravinsky and J S Bach as major influences. His music shares with Bach in particular a sense of being simultaneously mechanical and organic.

Among Reich’s early teachers were Hall Overton and Vincent Persichetti, both of whom drew on a wide variety of vernacular styles in their own work. The same can be said of Reich’s Mills College teacher Luciano Berio. Though a dedicated avant-gardist – he founded Italy’s first electronic music studio, and showed Reich how speech could be compelling source material for electronic music – Berio kept up with pop culture and drew on classical and folk traditions.

Reich shares this all-encompassing musical vision. He played jazz with friends as a teenager, and much of that musical language seeped into his own – particularly the innovations of saxophonist John Coltrane, whom Reich saw perform many times during the 1960s, and whose album Africa/Brass became a vital touchstone.

Non-Western traditions have also been a major inspiration, and much of what Reich borrowed he learnt from source. In 1971 he studied West African drumming in Ghana, then in 1973 sought lessons in Balinese gamelan from teachers in Seattle. Later that decade, in an exploration of his own Jewish roots, he visited Israel, where he heard singers from different eastern Sephardi communities.