Steve Reich

Steve Reich was born in New York on 3 October 1936. His father, Leonard Reich, was a lawyer; his mother, June Sillman, was a singer and Broadway lyricist. His parents divorced when he was one. Between 1939 and 1942 he made many train journeys between New York, where his father lived, and Los Angeles, where his mother lived, accompanied by his governess. He did not yet know it, but as a Jewish child, had he lived in Europe at the same time, he would have travelled on very different trains: this thought would later inspire one of his major works.

He took piano lessons as a child, but at fourteen he discovered three kinds of music that overwhelmed him: Bach’s Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and the bebop of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. He then took up the drums. He studied philosophy at Cornell University, graduating in 1957, then composition at the Juilliard School in New York and at Mills College in California with Luciano Berio and Darius Milhaud.

In California he worked as a taxi driver and took part in the 1964 premiere of Terry Riley’s In C, suggesting that Riley add a steady pulse. In 1965 in San Francisco he recorded a street preacher repeating “It’s gonna rain”. Playing the same recording on two tape recorders, he noticed that the two tapes slowly drifted apart, creating surprising echo and rhythmic effects. He thus discovered “phasing”, the principle of his first important work, It’s Gonna Rain.

Back in New York he founded his own ensemble in 1966, Steve Reich and Musicians, to perform his music. He applied phasing to live instruments: in Piano Phase (1967) two pianists play the same pattern, one speeding up very slightly until they are one note apart, then two, and so on. In 1970 he went to Ghana to study African drumming at the University of Accra. On his return he composed Drumming (1971), a work of about an hour for percussion, voices and piccolo.

In 1972 he composed Clapping Music for two performers clapping their hands: one always repeats the same rhythm while the other shifts it by one beat every twelve repetitions, until the two rhythms coincide again. He also studied Balinese gamelan and Hebrew cantillation, the traditional way of chanting biblical texts. In 1976 he composed Music for 18 Musicians, a work of about an hour based on eleven chords, which achieved considerable success beyond the contemporary-music audience.

In 1988 he composed Different Trains for string quartet and tape, premiered by the Kronos Quartet. In it he sets side by side the American trains of his childhood and the trains that, at the same time, were taking Europe’s Jews to the death camps. The string melodies reproduce the intonation of recorded voices: his governess, a railway porter and Holocaust survivors. The work won him a Grammy Award. That same year he composed Electric Counterpoint for the jazz guitarist Pat Metheny.

Reich has also composed video operas with his wife, the artist Beryl Korot, such as The Cave (1993), on the common roots of Judaism and Islam, and Three Tales (2002). In 2009 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Double Sextet. His music, based on pulse, repetition and gradual change, has deeply influenced electronic music, rock and pop: artists such as Brian Eno, Radiohead and Aphex Twin have cited him as an influence. His ninetieth birthday in 2026 is being celebrated around the world.