Steve Reich

Steve Reich has been hailed as “America’s greatest living composer” (The Village Voice), “the most original musical thinker of our time” (The New Yorker), and “among the great composers of the century” (New York Times). From his early taped speech pieces It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966) to his and video artist Beryl Korot’s digital video opera Three Tales (2002), Reich’s path has embraced not only aspects of Western Classical music, but the structures, harmonies, and rhythms of non-Western and American vernacular music, particularly jazz. “There’s just a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history, and Steve Reich is one of them,” states The Guardian (London).

Performing organizations around the world marked Steve Reich's 70th-birthday year, 2006, with festivals and special concerts. In the composer's hometown of New York, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Carnegie Hall, and Lincoln Center joined forces to present complementary programs of his music, and in London, the Barbican mounted a major retrospective. Concerts were also presented in Amsterdam, Athens, Brussels, Baden-Baden, Barcelona, Birmingham, Budapest, Chicago, Cologne, Copenhagen, Denver, Dublin, Freiburg, Graz, Helsinki, Los Angeles, Paris, Porto, Vancouver, Vienna, and Vilnius among others. In addition, Nonesuch Records released its second box set of Steve Reich’s works, Phases: A Nonesuch Retrospective, in September 2006. The five-CD collection comprises 14 of the composer’s best-known pieces, spanning the 20 years of his time on the label.

In October 2006, in Tokyo, Reich was awarded the Preamium Imperial Award in Music, which recognizes areas in the arts not covered by the Nobel Prize. Former winners in various fields include Pierre Boulez, Lucian Berio, Gyorgy Ligeti, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Richard Serra, and Stephen Sondheim. That December, Reich was awarded membership in the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, and in April 2007, he was awarded the Chubb Fellowship at Yale University.

In May 2007, Reich was awarded The Polar Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, presented by King Carl XVI Gustaf. The Swedish Academy said: "Steve Reich has transferred questions of faith, society, and philosophy into a hypnotic sounding music that has inspired musicians and composers of all genres." Former winners of the prize include Pierre Boulez, Bob Dylan, György Ligeti, and Paul McCartney. He was elected to the Academy a year later.

Born in New York and raised there and in California, Reich graduated with honors in philosophy from Cornell University in 1957. For the next two years, he studied composition with Hall Overton, and, from 1958 to 1961, he studied at the Juilliard School of Music with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti. In 1963, Reich received his M.A. in Music from Mills College, where he worked with Luciano Berio and Darius Milhaud.

During the summer of 1970, with the help of a grant from the Institute for International Education, Mr. Reich studied drumming at the Institute for African Studies at the University of Ghana in Accra. In 1973 and 1974, he studied Balinese Gamelan Semar Pegulingan and Gamelan Gambang at the American Society for Eastern Arts in Seattle and Berkeley, California. From 1976 to 1977, he studied the traditional forms of cantillation (chanting) of the Hebrew scriptures in New York and Jerusalem.

In 1966, Steve Reich founded his own ensemble of three musicians, which rapidly grew to 18 members or more. Since 1971, Steve Reich and Musicians have frequently toured the world, and have the distinction of performing to sold-out houses at venues as diverse as Carnegie Hall and the Bottom Line Cabaret.

Reich's 1988 piece Different Trains marked a new compositional method, rooted in It's Gonna Rain and Come Out, in which speech recordings generate the musical material for musical instruments. The New York Times hailed the piece as "a work of such astonishing originality that breakthrough seems the only possible description ... [It] possesses an absolutely harrowing emotional impact." In 1990, Reich received a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Composition for Different Trains as recorded for Nonesuch by Kronos Quartet.

In June 1997, in celebration of Reich's 60th birthday, Nonesuch released a 10-CD retrospective box set of Mr. Reich's compositions, featuring several newly recorded and re-mastered works. He won a second Grammy Award in 1999 for his piece Music for 18 Musicians, also on Nonesuch. In July 1999, a major retrospective of the composer’s work was presented by the Lincoln Center Festival. Earlier, in 1988, the South Bank Centre in London had mounted a similar series of retrospective concerts.

In 2000, Reich was awarded the Schuman Prize from Columbia University, the Montgomery Fellowship from Dartmouth College, the Regent’s Lectureship at the University of California at Berkeley, an honorary doctorate from the California Institute of the Arts and was named Composer of the Year by Musical America magazine.

The Cave, Steve Reich and Beryl Korot's music theater video piece exploring the Biblical story of Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Ishmael, and Isaac, was hailed by Time magazine as "a fascinating glimpse of what opera might be like in the 21st century."Three Tales, a three-part digital documentary video opera, also by Reich and Korot, examines three well-known events from the 20th century, reflecting on the growth and implications of technology in that time: "Hindenburg," on the crash of the German zeppelin in New Jersey in 1937; "Bikini," on the atom-bomb tests at Bikini atoll from 1946 to 1954; and "Dolly," the sheep cloned in 1997, on the issues of genetic engineering and robotics.

Over the years, Steve Reich has received commissions from the Barbican Centre London; the Holland Festival; San Francisco Symphony; the Rothko Chapel; Vienna Festival; Hebbel Theater, Berlin; the Brooklyn Academy of Music for guitarist Pat Metheny; Spoleto Festival USA; West German Radio, Cologne; Settembre Musica, Torino; the Fromm Music Foundation for clarinetist Richard Stoltzman; the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra; Betty Freeman for Kronos Quartet; and the Festival d'Automne, Paris, for the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution.

Steve Reich's music has been performed by major orchestras and ensembles around the world, including the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas; New York Philharmonic conducted by Zubin Mehta; the San Francisco Symphony conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas; The Ensemble Modern conducted by Bradley Lubman; The Ensemble Intercontemporain conducted by David Robertson; the London Sinfonietta conducted by Markus Stenz and Martyn Brabbins; the Theater of Voices conducted by Paul Hillier; the Schoenberg Ensemble conducted by Reinbert de Leeuw; the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Robert Spano; the Saint Louis Symphony conducted by Leonard Slatkin; the Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by Neal Stulberg; the BBC Symphony conducted by Peter Eötvös; and the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas.

Several noted choreographers have created dances to Steve Reich's music, including Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, whose Fase (1983) is set to four early works and Rain, set to Music for 18 Musicians; Jirí Kylían, whose Falling Angels is set to Drumming, Part I; Jerome Robbins for the New York City Ballet (Eight Lines); and Laura Dean, who commissioned Sextet. The last, set to the ballet Impact, was premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival and earned Steve Reich and Laura Dean a Bessie Award in 1986. Other major choreographers using Mr. Reich's music include Eliot Feld, Alvin Ailey, Lar Lubovitch, Maurice Bejart, Lucinda Childs, Siobhan Davies, and Richard Alston.

Steve Reich was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994 and to the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1995; in 1999, he was named Commandeur de l’ordre des arts et lettres in France.