Born: October 3, 1936, New York
American composer. Along with Terry Riley and Philip Glass, a pioneer in the minimalist style.
Steve Reich began his career as a percussionist, and his music is marked by an almost overriding interest in rhythm. He studied philosophy at Cornell before beginning studies in composition, first at Juilliard and then at Mills College in California. It was there, studying with Luciano Berio and Darius Milhaud, that he was introduced to the music of Bali and of Africa. Both of these had a decisive influence on his musical development. In 1971 he traveled to Africa to study drumming with the master drummers of Ghana's Ewe tribe.
Reich's first works were almost exclusively for percussion, and in them he used both the rhythmic energy and repetitive patterns he found in African music and the concept of gradual change that marks Balinese music. The result was a music in which repeating rhythmic ideas slowly go out of phase with each other, creating gradual change and increasing complexity. The basic idea of this can be seen in one of his simplest pieces, Pendulum Music (a piece you could easily perform on your own). Here, two microphones are suspended above upturned speakers and then set into motion. As each swings over the center of the speaker, it creates feedback. Since the differing lengths of the microphone wire create a different period of swing, the two sounds keep changing their relationship to each other. And as the force of gravity works on them, they both head toward a "steady state" of feedback. The process of that change is the basis of the piece, and the sound (changing with each performance) is the result of the process. Reich utilizes this process of gradual change with live performers, as well as by means of tape manipulations (such as making two tape loops of the same sound, but of slightly different lengths).
As Reich continued his experiments with rhythm and phases, he began to incorporate other elements (such as melodic motives and harmonic change). Works such as Music for 18 Musicians (1976) make use of repeating melodic cells and harmonic progressions that function in the same way as the rhythmic patterns of his earlier works. More recently, he has added the rhythms and inflections of human speech as material for his compositions, especially in Different Trains (1988) and City Life (1995).
Reich's music, along with that of the other minimalists, causes us to rethink the way we listen to music. Not surprisingly, his approach, steeped in non-Western ideals, violates many of the assumptions about music that have developed in the West (harmonic goals for example, and forms based on a hierarchy of structure). At the same time, it is different from its non-Western models, in that its function as concert music is the same as that of all Western music from the eighteenth century on.
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