Stephen Michael “Steve” Reich (; born October 3, 1936) is an
American composer who pioneered the style of
minimalist music. His innovations include using
tape loops to create
phasing patterns (examples are his early compositions, "
It's Gonna Rain" and "
Come Out"), and the use of simple, audible processes to explore musical concepts (for instance, "
Pendulum Music" and "
Four Organs"). These compositions, marked by their use of repetitive figures, slow harmonic rhythm and canons, have significantly influenced
contemporary music, especially in the US. Reich's work took on a darker character in the 1980s with the introduction of historical themes as well as themes from his
Jewish heritage, notably the
Grammy Award-winning
Different Trains.
Reich's style of composition influenced many other composers and musical groups. Reich has been described by The Guardian as one of "a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history", and the critic Kyle Gann has said Reich "may...be considered, by general acclamation, America's greatest living composer." On January 25, 2007, Reich was named the 2007 recipient of the Polar Music Prize, together with jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins. On April 20, 2009, Reich was awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Music for his Double Sextet.
Career
Early life
Reich was born in
New York City to the Broadway lyricist
June Sillman. When he was one year old, his parents divorced, and Reich divided his time between New York and
California. He was given piano lessons as a child and describes growing up with the "middle-class favorites", having no exposure to music written before 1750 or after 1900. At the age of 14 he began to study music in earnest, after hearing music from the
Baroque period and earlier, as well as music of the 20th century. Reich studied drums with
Roland Kohloff in order to play
jazz. While attending
Cornell University, he took some music courses, but he graduated in 1957 with a
B.A. in
Philosophy. Reich's B.A. thesis was on
Ludwig Wittgenstein; later he would set texts by that philosopher to music in
Proverb (1995) and
You Are (variations) (2006).
For a year following graduation, Reich studied composition privately with Hall Overton before he enrolled at Juilliard to work with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti (1958–1961). Subsequently he attended Mills College in Oakland, California, where he studied with Luciano Berio and Darius Milhaud (1961–1963) and earned a master's degree in composition. At Mills, Reich composed Melodica for melodica and tape, which appeared in 1986 on the three-LP release Music from Mills.
Reich worked with the California Tape Music Centre along with Pauline Oliveros, Ramon Sender, Morton Subotnick, and Terry Riley. He was involved with the premiere of Riley's In C and suggested the use of the eighth note pulse, which is now standard in performance of the piece.
1960s
Reich's early forays into composition involved experimentation with
twelve-tone composition, but he found the rhythmic aspects of the twelve-tone series more interesting than the melodic aspects. Reich also composed film
soundtracks for
Plastic Haircut,
Oh Dem Watermelons, and
Thick Pucker, three films by
Robert Nelson. The soundtrack of
Plastic Haircut, composed in 1963, was a short tape collage, possibly Reich's first. The
Watermelons soundtrack used two old
Stephen Foster minstrel tunes as its basis, and used repeated phrasing together in a large five-part
canon. The music for
Thick Pucker arose from street recordings Reich made walking around
San Francisco with Nelson, who filmed in black and white 16mm. This film no longer survives. A fourth film from 1965, about 25 minutes long and tentatively entitled "Thick Pucker II", was assembled by Nelson from outtakes of that shoot and more of the raw audio Reich had recorded. Nelson was not happy with the resulting film and never showed it.
Reich was influenced by fellow minimalist Terry Riley, whose work In C combines simple musical patterns, offset in time, to create a slowly shifting, cohesive whole. Reich adopted this approach to compose his first major work, It's Gonna Rain. Written in 1965, the piece used recordings of a sermon about the end of the world given by a black Pentecostal street-preacher known as Brother Walter. Reich built on his early tape work, transferring the sermon to multiple tape loops played in and out of phase, with segments of the sermon cut and rearranged.
The 13-minute "Come Out" (1966) uses similarly manipulated recordings of a single spoken line given by Daniel Hamm, one of the falsely accused Harlem Six, who was severely injured by police. The survivor, who had been beaten, punctured a bruise on his own body to convince police about his beating. The spoken line includes the phrase "to let the bruise’s blood come out to show them." Reich rerecorded the fragment "come out to show them" on two channels, which are initially played in unison. They quickly slip out of sync; gradually the discrepancy widens and becomes a reverberation. The two voices then split into four, looped continuously, then eight, and continues splitting until the actual words are unintelligible, leaving the listener with only the speech's rhythmic and tonal patterns.
A similar, lesser known example of process music is "Pendulum Music" (1968), which consists of the sound of several microphones swinging over the loudspeakers to which they are attached, producing feedback as they do so. "Pendulum Music" has never been recorded by Reich himself, but was introduced to rock audiences by Sonic Youth in the late 1990s.
Reich's first attempt at translating this phasing technique from recorded tape to live performance was the 1967 Piano Phase, for two pianos. In Piano Phase the performers repeat a rapid twelve-note melodic figure, initially in unison. As one player keeps tempo with robotic precision, the other speeds up very slightly until the two parts line up again, but one sixteenth note apart. The second player then resumes the previous tempo. This cycle of speeding up and then locking in continues throughout the piece; the cycle comes full circle three times, the second and third cycles using shorter versions of the initial figure. Violin Phase, also written in 1967, is built on these same lines. Piano Phase and Violin Phase both premiered in a series of concerts given in New York art galleries.
Reich also tried to create the phasing effect in a piece "that would need no instrument beyond the human body". He found that the idea of phasing was inappropriate for the simple ways he was experimenting to make sound. Instead, he composed Clapping Music (1972), in which the players do not phase in and out with each other, but instead one performer keeps one line of a 12-quaver-long (12-eighth-note-long) phrase and the other performer shifts by one quaver beat every 12 bars, until both performers are back in unison 144 bars later.
The 1967 prototype piece Slow Motion Sound was never performed, but the idea it introduced of slowing down a recorded sound until many times its original length without changing pitch or timbre was applied to Four Organs (1970), which deals specifically with augmentation. The piece has maracas playing a fast eighth note pulse, while the four organs stress certain eighth notes using an 11th chord. This work therefore dealt with repetition and subtle rhythmic change. It is unique in the context of Reich's other pieces in being linear as opposed to cyclic like his earlier works— the superficially similar Phase Patterns, also for four organs but without maracas, is (as the name suggests) a phase piece similar to others composed during the period. Four Organs was performed as part of a Boston Symphony Orchestra program, and was Reich's first composition to be performed in a large traditional setting.
1970s
In 1971, Reich embarked on a five-week trip to study music in
Ghana, during which he learned from the master drummer Gideon Alorwoyie. Reich also studied
Balinese
gamelan in
Seattle. From his African experience, as well as
A. M. Jones's
Studies in African Music about the
music of the Ewe people, Reich drew inspiration for his 90-minute piece
Drumming, which he composed shortly after his return. Composed for a nine-piece percussion ensemble with female voices and
piccolo,
Drumming marked the beginning of a new stage in his career, for around this time he formed his ensemble,
Steve Reich and Musicians, and increasingly concentrated on composition and performance with them. Steve Reich and Musicians, which was to be the sole ensemble to interpret his works for many years, still remains active with many of its original members.
After Drumming, Reich moved on from the "phase shifting" technique that he had pioneered, and began writing more elaborate pieces. He investigated other musical processes such as augmentation (the temporal lengthening of phrases and melodic fragments). It was during this period that he wrote works such as Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ (1973) and Six Pianos (1973).
In 1974, Reich began writing what many would call his seminal work, Music for 18 Musicians. This piece involved many new ideas, although it also hearkened back to earlier pieces. It is based on a cycle of eleven chords introduced at the beginning (called "Pulses"), followed by a small section of music based on each chord ("Sections I-XI"), and finally a return to the original cycle ("Pulses"). This was Reich's first attempt at writing for larger ensembles. The increased number of performers resulted in more scope for psychoacoustic effects, which fascinated Reich, and he noted that he would like to "explore this idea further". Reich remarked that this one work contained more harmonic movement in the first five minutes than any other work he had written. Steve Reich and Musicians made the premier recording of this work on ECM Records.
Reich explored these ideas further in his frequently recorded pieces Music for a Large Ensemble (1978) and Octet (1979). In these two works, Reich experimented with "the human breath as the measure of musical duration … the chords played by the trumpets are written to take one comfortable breath to perform". Human voices are part of the musical palette in Music for a Large Ensemble but the wordless vocal parts simply form part of the texture (as they do in Drumming). With Octet and his first orchestral piece Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards (also 1979), Reich's music showed the influence of Biblical cantillation, which he had studied in Israel since the summer of 1977. After this, the human voice singing a text would play an increasingly important role in Reich's music.
In 1974 Reich published a book, Writings About Music (ISBN 0814773583), containing essays on his philosophy, aesthetics, and musical projects written between 1963 and 1974. An updated and much more extensive collection, Writings On Music (1965–2000) (ISBN 0195111710), was published in 2002.
1980s
Reich's work took on a darker character in the 1980s with the introduction of historical themes as well as themes from his
Jewish heritage.
Tehillim (1981),
Hebrew for
psalms, is the first of Reich's works to draw explicitly on his Jewish background. The work is in four parts, and is scored for an ensemble of four women's voices (one high
soprano, two lyric sopranos and one
alto),
piccolo,
flute,
oboe,
English horn, two
clarinets, six
percussion (playing small tuned
tambourines without jingles, clapping,
maracas,
marimba,
vibraphone and
crotales), two
electronic organs, two
violins,
viola,
cello and
double bass, with amplified voices, strings, and winds. A setting of texts from psalms 19:2–5 (19:1–4 in Christian translations), 34:13–15 (34:12–14), 18:26–27 (18:25–26), and 150:4–6,
Tehillim is a departure from Reich's other work in its formal structure; the setting of texts several lines long rather than the fragments used in previous works makes melody a substantive element. Use of formal
counterpoint and functional
harmony also contrasts with the loosely structured minimalist works written previously.
Different Trains (1988), for string quartet and tape, uses recorded speech, as in his earlier works, but this time as a melodic rather than a rhythmic element. In Different Trains Reich compares and contrasts his childhood memories of his train journeys between New York and California in 1939–1941 with the very different trains being used to transport contemporaneous European children to their deaths under Nazi rule. The Kronos Quartet recording of Different Trains was awarded the Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition in 1990. The composition was described by Richard Taruskin as "the only adequate musical response—one of the few adequate artistic responses in any medium—to the Holocaust", and he credited the piece with earning Reich a place among the great composers of the 20th century.
1990s to present
In 1993, Reich collaborated with his wife, the video artist
Beryl Korot, on an
opera,
The Cave, which explores the roots of
Judaism,
Christianity and
Islam through the words of
Israelis,
Palestinians, and
Americans, echoed musically by the ensemble. The work, for percussion, voices, and strings, is a musical
documentary, named for the
Cave of Machpelah in
Hebron, where a
mosque now stands and
Abraham is said to have been buried. The two collaborated again on the opera
Three Tales, which concerns the
Hindenburg disaster, the testing of
nuclear weapons on
Bikini Atoll, and other more modern concerns, specifically
Dolly the sheep,
cloning, and the
technological singularity.
As well as pieces using sampling techniques, like Three Tales and City Life (1994), Reich also returned to composing purely instrumental works for the concert hall, starting with Triple Quartet (1998) written for the Kronos Quartet that can either be performed by string quartet and tape, three string quartets or 36-piece string orchestra. According to Reich, the piece is influenced by Bartók's and Alfred Schnittke's string quartets, and Michael Gordon's Yo Shakespeare. This series continued with Dance Patterns (2002), Cello Counterpoint (2003), and sequence of works centered around Variations: You Are (Variations) (2004) (a work which looks back to the vocal writing of works like Tehillim or The Desert Music), Variations for Vibes, Pianos, and Strings (2005, for the London Sinfonietta) and Daniel Variations (2006).
Invited by Walter Fink, he was the 12th composer featured in the annual Komponistenporträt of the Rheingau Musik Festival in 2002.
In an interview with The Guardian, Reich stated that he continues to follow this direction with his piece Double Sextet (2007) commissioned by eighth blackbird, an American ensemble consisting of the instrumental quintet (flute, clarinet, violin or viola, cello and piano) of Schoenberg's piece Pierrot Lunaire (1912) plus percussion. Reich states that he was thinking about Stravinsky's Agon (1957) as a model for the instrumental writing.
Reich was awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Music, on April 20, 2009, for Double Sextet.
Influence
Reich's style of composition has influenced many other composers and musical groups, including
John Adams, the
progressive rock band
King Crimson, the new-age guitarist
Michael Hedges, the art-pop and electronic musician
Brian Eno, the experimental art/music group
The Residents, the composers associated with the
Bang on a Can festival (including
David Lang,
Michael Gordon, and
Julia Wolfe), and numerous
indie rock musicians including songwriter
Sufjan Stevens and instrumental ensembles
Tortoise,
The Mercury Program (themselves influenced by Tortoise),
So Many Dynamos,
Do Make Say Think and
A Silver Mt. Zion.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor composed a song, unreleased, entitled "Steve Reich". His music has also been a source of inspiration to
ambient and
techno musicians.
John Adams commented, "He didn't reinvent the wheel so much as he showed us a new way to ride." He has also influenced visual artists such as Bruce Nauman, and many notable choreographers have made dances to his music, Eliot Feld, Jiří Kylián, Douglas Lee and Jerome Robbins among others; he has expressed particular admiration of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's work set to his pieces.
In featuring a sample of Reich's Electric Counterpoint (1987) the British ambient techno act the Orb exposed a new generation of listeners to the composer's music with its 1990 production “Little Fluffy Clouds.” Further acknowledgment of Reich's influence on various electronic dance music producers came with the release in 1999 of the Reich Remixed tribute album which featured reinterpretations by artists such as DJ Spooky, Kurtis Mantronik, Ken Ishii, and Coldcut, among others. Reich's influence from jazz includes its roots, also, from the West African music he studied in his readings and visit to Ghana. Other important influences are Kenny Clarke and Miles Davis, and visual artist friends such as Sol LeWitt and Richard Serra. Reich recently contributed the introduction to Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (The MIT Press, 2008) edited by Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky.
Upcoming Projects
Reich has the world premiere of a piece,
WTC 9/11, written for String Quartet and Tape, a similar instrumentation to that of
Different Trains. It will premiere in March 2011 by the
Kronos Quartet, at
Duke University, North Carolina, USA.
Piano Counterpoint is being written for the London Steve Reich Ensemble, for premiere in 2011-12, a piece for six pianos, or solo piano and tape.
London Sinfonietta have also commissioned a piece with working title
London Counterpoint, for ensemble and tape; an ensemble playing against a recording of themselves.
Quotations
Works
Soundtrack for The Plastic Haircut, tape (1963)
Music for two or more pianos (1964)
It's Gonna Rain, tape (1965)
Soundtrack for Oh Dem Watermelons, tape (1965)
Come Out, tape (1966)
Melodica, for melodica and tape (1966)
Reed Phase, for soprano saxophone and tape (1966)
Piano Phase for two pianos, or two marimbas (1967)
Slow Motion Sound concept piece (1967)
Violin Phase for violin and tape or four violins (1967)
My Name Is for three tape recorders and performers (1967)
Pendulum Music for 3 or 4 microphones, amplifiers and loudspeakers (1968) (revised 1973)
Four Organs for four electric organs and maracas (1970)
Phase Patterns for four electric organs (1970)
Drumming for 4 pairs of tuned bongo drums, 3 marimbas, 3 glockenspiels, 2 female voices, whistling and piccolo (1970/1971)
Clapping Music for two musicians clapping (1972)
Music for Pieces of Wood for five pairs of tuned claves (1973)
Six Pianos (1973) - transcribed as Six Marimbas (1986)
Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ (1973)
Music for 18 Musicians (1974–76)
Music for a Large Ensemble (1978)
Octet (1979) - withdrawn in favor of the 1983 revision for slightly larger ensemble, Eight Lines
Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards for orchestra (1979)
Tehillim for voices and ensemble (1981)
Vermont Counterpoint for amplified flute and tape (1982)
The Desert Music for chorus and orchestra or voices and ensemble (1984, text by William Carlos Williams)
Sextet for percussion and keyboards (1984)
New York Counterpoint for amplified clarinet and tape, or 11 clarinets and bass clarinet (1985)
Three Movements for orchestra (1986)
Electric Counterpoint for electric guitar or amplified acoustic guitar and tape (1987, for Pat Metheny)
The Four Sections for orchestra (1987)
Different Trains for string quartet and tape (1988)
The Cave for four voices, ensemble and video (1993, with Beryl Korot)
Duet for two violins and string ensemble (1993)
Nagoya Marimbas for two marimbas (1994)
City Life for amplified ensemble (1995)
Proverb for voices and ensemble (1995, text by Ludwig Wittgenstein)
Triple Quartet for amplified string quartet (with prerecorded tape), or three string quartets, or string orchestra (1998)
Know What Is Above You for four women’s voices and 2 tamborims (1999)
Three Tales for video projection, five voices and ensemble (1998–2002, with Beryl Korot)
Dance Patterns for 2 xylophones, 2 vibraphones and 2 pianos (2002)
Cello Counterpoint for amplified cello and multichannel tape (2003)
You Are (Variations) for voices and ensemble (2004)
For Strings (with Winds and Brass) for orchestra (1987/2004)
Variations for Vibes, Pianos, and Strings dance piece for three string quartets, four vibraphones, and two pianos (2005)
Daniel Variations for four voices and ensemble (2006)
Double Sextet for 2 violins, 2 cellos, 2 pianos, 2 vibraphones, 2 clarinets, 2 flutes or ensemble and pre-recorded tape (2007)
2x5 for 2 drum sets, 2 pianos, 4 electric guitars and 2 bass guitars (2008)
Mallet Quartet for 2 marimbas and 2 vibraphones or 4 marimbas (or solo percussion and tape) (2009)
WTC 9/11 for String Quartet and Tape (2010)
Selected discography
Drumming. Steve Reich and Musicians (Two recordings: Deutsche Grammophon and Nonesuch) So Percussion (Cantaloupe)
Music for 18 Musicians. Steve Reich and Musicians (Two recordings: ECM and Nonesuch), Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble (Innova), Ensemble Modern (RCA).
Octet/Music for a Large Ensemble/Violin Phase. Steve Reich and Musicians (ECM)
Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards/Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ/ Six Pianos. San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, Edo de Waart, Steve Reich & Musicians (Deutsche Grammophon)
Tehillim/The Desert Music. Alarm Will Sound and OSSIA, Alan Pierson (Cantaloupe)
Different Trains/Electric Counterpoint. Kronos Quartet, Pat Metheny (Nonesuch)
You Are (Variations)/Cello Counterpoint. Los Angeles Master Chorale, Grant Gershon, Maya Beiser (Nonesuch)
. Various performers (Nonesuch).
Daniel Variations, with Variations for Vibes, Pianos and Strings. London Sinfonietta, Grant Gershon, Alan Pierson (Nonesuch)
Double Sextet/2x5, Eighth Blackbird and Bang on a Can (Nonesuch)
Piano Phase, transcribed for guitar, Alexandre Gérard (Catapult)
Phase to Face, a film documentary about Steve Reich by Eric Darmon & Franck Mallet (EuroArts) DVD
Further reading
D.J. Hoek. Steve Reich: A Bio-Bibliography. Greenwood Press, 2002.
Steve Reich. Writings about Music. Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1974.
K. Robert Schwarz. Minimalists. Phaidon Press, 1996.
See also
Minimalist music
Steve Reich and Musicians
Notes
References
Potter, Keith (2000). ''Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass. Music in the Twentieth Century series. Cambridge, UK; New York, New York: Cambridge University Press.
External links
SteveReich.com - Official Website
Boosey & Hawkes, Official Publisher: biography, works list, resources
London Steve Reich Ensemble - Official website
Music and the Holocaust - Different Trains
;Interviews
A Steve Reich Interview with Christopher Abbot
Two interviews with Steve Reich by Bruce Duffie (October, 1985 & November, 1995)
Steve Reich Interview (7/98) with Richard Kessler
Time and Motion: an interview with Steve Reich, by Robert Davidson, 1999
A Steve Reich Interview with Marc Weidenbaum, 1999
"Drumming" - Interview & analysis, selected as one of the NPR 100 most important musical works of the 20th century. Realaudio format, timing: 12:46, July, 2000
Steve Reich Interview with Jakob Buhre, August 2000
In Conversation with Steve Reich, by Molly Sheridan, June 2002
Steve Reich and Beryl Korot interviewed by David Allenby, 2002
An interview in The Guardian, January 2, 2004
The Next Phase: Steve Reich talks to Richard Kessler About Redefinition and Renewal, 2004
"How Small a Thought it Takes to Fill a Whole Life" - An Interview with Not-So-Minimalist Composer Steve Reich on AdventuresInMusic.biz, 2005
A Steve Reich Interview with Hermann Kretzschmar on You Are (Variations), 2005
The beaten track, an interview with Reich, by Andrew Clements, The Guardian, October 28, 2005
An interview with Steve Reich on RTE television, National Broadcaster in Ireland, May 29, 2006
An interview with Steve Reich on musicOMH.com, October 2006
Interview: Steve Reich, by Joshua Klein, November 22, 2006.
"Steve Reich at 70" from NPR Fresh Air broadcast October 6, 2006 includes interview about "It's Gonna Rain", "Drumming", and "Tehillim" that first aired in 1999 and another on "Different Trains" from 1989 (Realaudio format, timing: 39:25)
"Video Interview (Feb. 2006)", Cité de la musique, Paris, France
"Two Arts Beating As One" - Interviews with Steve Reich and his wife Beryl Korot with video and audio clips, May 2009
;Listening
Steve Reich at UC Berkeley University Museum (November 7, 1970) Streaming audio
Steve Reich at the Whitney "October 15, 2006" MP3
Reich speaks about Daniel Variations for the South Bank Show
;Others
Classical Music Pages: Steve Reich biography
A Description/documentary of Steve Reich from Duke University, includes sound samples and quotes
EST: Steve Reich by Roger Sutherland
Music as a Gradual Process by Steve Reich
Steve Reich: You Are (Variations) premiere in LA (October 2004)
New York Fetes Composer Steve Reich at 70 from NPR
Fascinating rhythm. Celebrating Steve Reich. Article by Alex Ross from The New Yorker.
Steve Reich & Sonny Rollins winners of the Polar Music Prize for 2007 Press release of Polar Prize announcement
Category:20th-century classical composers
Category:21st-century classical composers
Category:Postmodern composers
Category:Minimalist composers
Category:Jewish American classical composers
Category:Opera composers
Category:Nonesuch Records artists
Category:Grammy Award winners
Category:ECM artists
Category:Pulitzer Prize winners
Category:Deutsche Grammophon artists
Category:Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
Category:Juilliard School of Music alumni
Category:Cornell University alumni
Category:American people of Austrian-Jewish descent
Category:American Orthodox Jews
Category:1936 births
Category:Living people
Category:Guggenheim Fellows
