Steve Reich

Composer

• Born: October 3, 1936
• Place of Birth: New York, New York

MUSICIAN AND COMPOSER

A leading composer, Reich is credited with helping to create the minimalist style of music.

AREA OF ACHIEVEMENT: Music

Early Life

Steve Reich was born in New York on October 3, 1936. After his parents’ divorce, he spent his childhood shuttling between New York and California. The long train rides taken between visiting parents would feature in one of his later compositions, Different Trains (1988).

As a boy, he had piano lessons, but he took little interest in them. His interest in music was aroused when at age fourteen he studied drums with Roland Kohloff. Reich enrolled at Cornell University, where he majored in philosophy, and graduated in 1957. He took a music theory course from William Austin, covering music from the time of Johann Sebastian Bach forward, which further stimulated his interest in music.

Returning to New York City, Reich determined to study composition and began private lessons before enrolling at the Juilliard School in 1958, where he studied with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti. He went back to California in 1961 to study with Darius Milhaud and Luciano Berio at Mills College, where he received his master’s degree in 1963.

While remaining in San Francisco, several experiences formed the basis of his later musical style. The music of John Coltrane and African drumming showed him the effects of static harmonies and of short, repeated rhythmic patterns. He also performed in fellow composer Terry Riley’s famous minimalist piece In C (1964). Reich discovered that two tape recorders playing identical loops of recorded speech starting at the same time would gradually move out of phase with each other (that is, after a while they would slowly no longer be synchronous with each other), producing slowly moving and changing patterns and rhythms. He called this process “phasing” or “phase shifting.”

Life’s Work

His first acknowledged composition using the technique of phase shifting was the tape piece It’s Gonna Rain (1965), which he created by using segments of a preacher expostulating about the deluge. The work’s first series used phase shifting of one segment; a second series begins with two voices and shifts phases until eight voices appear to be heard. For Reich, the importance of phase shifting was its impersonality: once started, it works itself out by rule with nothing left to chance.

Reich moved permanently back to New York in 1966, where he extended his idea of phasing to live instrumental performers to create in the listener the sensation of gradual change. His first instrumental piece of 1967 was Piano Phase for two pianos. Reich builds up many cycles; instead of tapes running out of synchronicity, both pianists begin a twelve-note pattern simultaneously, and one gradually speeds up until the patterns are one note apart; that pattern is held, and then the process repeated, and so on. The effect of Reich’s repetitive pieces hovers between movement (the motoric pulse and sense of change) and stasis (long stretches of repetition in which new patterns emerge).

Reich’s pieces were performed in New York art galleries, where the works of other minimalists, who worked in film, in the visual arts, and in music, were also appearing. These and other pieces were performed and recorded by his ensemble, Steve Reich and Musicians.

Reich had been interested in West African music since 1962; after an important concert given at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1970, Reich was accepted at the University of Ghana to study drumming.

Reich realized his compositions and West African drumming had much in common: Both were based on repeated patterns, with each performer playing a different rhythmic pattern; both featured unrelenting repetition and emphasized percussive sound qualities; and both submerged the individuality of the performer into the emerging process.

Reich put this new musical experience into his next piece, Drumming (1971), which marked his first large-scale composition, both in its ninety-minute length and in the number of instruments, including nine percussionists and a piccolo player, plus two female voices. Drumming is recognized as the first masterpiece of musical minimalism.

In 1973 and 1974, Reich explored another world music tradition, the gamelan music of Bali, by studying in Seattle, Washington, and Berkeley, California. This experience is reflected in Music for Eighteen Musicians (1976). Constructed in eleven sections and using mallet instruments such as in the gamelan tradition, this work has broad harmonic movement, ebbs and flows of sounds, pulsating chords, dense textures, and rich timbres. Its recording took his music to a large audience, bringing Reich commissions and allowing him to write pieces with larger musical forces.

Reich was raised as a secular, assimilated Jew, but he did explore a variety of Eastern and Indian spiritual practices. In 1974, he began to rediscover his Jewish roots. In 1976 and 1977, he immersed himself in the study of Hebrew, of the Torah, and of cantillation, chanting from the Hebrew Bible. In 1977, he travelled to Israel to hear authentic singers from Sephardic communities. In cantillation, Reich discovered the ta’amim, the notation of the melodic fragments out of which longer melodies are created. The first product of his immersion in Jewish traditions was a setting of psalm verses, Tehillim (1981), for four women’s voices and ensemble. Tehillim does not imitate Jewish cantillation, but the influence is present in the lyricism and the colorful instruments.

After creating a large-scale work, The Desert Music (1984), a setting of William Carlos Williams’s poems for orchestra and chorus, Reich returned to small percussion pieces and tape pieces. A darkening of tone and a use of chromatic modes in his works of this time reflect his awareness of Jewish music and worship and of the Israeli-Arab conflict. Reich’s later works became more programmatic. Several explored his Jewish heritage.

Different Trains harkens back to Reich’s cross-country train journeys as a child. In this piece, he uses recorded train sounds and taped spoken testimony (including from Holocaust survivors) as sources of melody (a speech-music technique). Its theme is trains, both those that took him across the country and those that took other Jewish children to their deaths in Nazi camps. A recording of the piece made by the experimental classical group Kronos Quartet won a Grammy Award in the contemporary classical category in 1990.

The Cave (1993), a staged audio-video collaboration with his wife Beryl Korot, is about the cave at Hebron, which tradition considers the burial site of Abraham and Sarah. The recorded words of Israelis, Palestinians, and Americans mix and echo among the sounds of amplified voices and percussion and string instruments, creating a “cave” of listening.

Reich continued to compose prolifically through the late 1990s and into the twenty-first century, writing works for the concert hall using instrumental ensembles and tape and collaborating on multimedia projects. His work became more and more well-known and critics and other artists alike frequently acknowledged his lasting influence on classical music, experimental music, and even popular styles. His ensemble piece Radio Rewrite, which premiered in 2013, saw Reich bring his influence full circle by drawing inspiration from the rock band Radiohead; the band's guitarist Jonny Greenwood had previously performed Reich compositions. The composition marked the first time Reich had directly engaged with preexisting works of popular music. After this, Reich composed Quartet (2013), Pulse (2015), Runner (2016), For Bob (2017), Music for Ensemble and Orchestra (2018), Reich/Richter (2019), and Traveler's Prayer (2020). Reich's composition Jacob's Ladder (2023) is based on Genesis 28:12 and depicts Jacob's dream of a ladder on Earth that stretches into Heaven. Musical scales represent God's messengers going up and down the ladder.

Reich received many awards, including another Grammy in 1998 for a recording of Music for 18 Musicians, the Polar Music Prize in 2007, a 2009 Pulitzer Prize for his Double Sextet (2007), and a gold medal for music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2012. He was also given many honorary degrees, including from notable music institutions such as the New England Conservatory of Music and the Royal College of Music.

Significance

Reich was one of the leading composers of the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. His early works helped form what is called the minimalist school of musical composition along with fellow composers Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and LaMonte Young. His manipulation of taped voices and the rule-driven impersonality of his compositions were techniques fundamental to the creation of the experimental music of the 1960s and 1970s. Many musicians ranging from fellow classical composers to rock bands and producers of electronic dance music have cited his deep influence.

Bibliography

"Ascending and Descending Jacob's Ladder--Interview with Steve Reich." Adventures in Music, 10 May 2023, jarijuhanikallio.wordpress.com/2023/10/05/ascending-and-descending-jacobs-ladder-interview-with-steve-reich/. Accessed 2 Sept. 2024.

"Biography." Steve Reich. Steve Reich, n.d. Web. 22 Mar. 2016.

Mertens, Wim. American Minimal Music: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass. New York: Alexander Broude, 1983. Print.

Morrison, Chris. "Steve Reich: Biography." AllMusic. AllMusic, 2016. Web. 22 Mar. 2016.

Potter, Keith. Four Musical Minimalists. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Print.

Reich, Steve. Writings on Music, 1965-2000. Ed. Paul Hillier. New York: Oxford UP, 2002. Print.

Schwarz, K. Robert. Minimalists. London: Phaidon, 1996. Print.

Strickland, Edward. Minimalism: Origins. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. Print.