Musicians - Steve Reich

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	Musicians - Steve Reich

Steve Reich (born Stephen Michael Reich, October 3, 1936) is an American composer. Reich is known as one of the pioneers of minimalism, although he sometimes deviates from a purely minimalist style. Ideas Reich has developed include using tape loops to create phasing patterns (such as in his first works, It's Gonna Rain, Come Out, Drumming); and using processes to create and explore musical concepts (Pendulum Music, Four Organs). These compositions, marked by their use of repetitive figures and phasing effects, have been a major influence in contemporary American music as well as contemporary music as a whole; The Guardian has described Reich as one of the few composers to have "altered the direction of musical history".

Early life and work

While Reich was born in New York, his childhood years were split between divorced parents in 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, and began studying drums with Roland Koloff in order to play jazz. His college years were spent at Cornell, where he took some music courses but graduated (in 1957) with a B.A. in philosophy. (Reich's B.A. thesis was on Ludwig Wittgenstein; later he would set text by the philosopher to music in Proverb (1990) and You Are (variations) (2004).)

In the following year he studied composition privately with Hall Overton; he then moved on to Juilliard to study with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti (1958 to 1961). Subsequently he attended Mills College in Oakland where he studied with Luciano Berio (composing a student piece for string orchestra) and Darius Milhaud (1961–63) and earned a master's degree in composition.

Process music and Minimalism

Reich's early forays into composition involved experimentation with twelve-tone composition, but had found the rhythmic aspects of the twelve-tone series more an interest than the melodic aspects. Reich had also composed one film soundtrack for The Plastic Haircut and Oh Dem Watermelons, two films by Robert Nelson. The soundtrack for Oh Dem Watermelons, composed in 1965, involving basic tape work, using repeated phrasing together in a large five-part canon.

Later, Reich was influenced by fellow minimalist Terry Riley. Riley's loosely structured aleatoric 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, It's Gonna Rain is made up of recordings of a sermon about the end of the world given by the African American Pentecostal preacher 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.

Come Out (1966) was constructed along similar lines. A single spoken line given by an injured survivor of a race riot is manipulated. 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 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 rhythmic and tonal patterns of speech.

The 11-minute piece is an example of process music. So is 1968's Pendulum Music, which consists of the sound of a microphone swinging over a loudspeaker, producing feedback as it swings. (Pendulum Music was recorded by Sonic Youth in the late 1990s.)

Reich's first attempt at applying this phasing technique to live performance rather than recorded work was the 1967 Piano Phase, for two pianos. The performers begin by repeating a rapid twelve-note melodic figure in unison. One player continues, keeping tempo with robotic precision, while the other slowly speeds up until they are lined up, one note apart, and then resumes the previous tempo. The cycle of speeding up and locking in continues throughout the piece, with a new figure being introduced once the original figure has come full circle. Violin Phase, also written in 1967, is built on these same lines, a theme later explored in Clapping Music (1972) and The Desert Music (1984). Piano Phase and Violin Phase both premiered in a series of concerts given in New York art galleries.

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Musicians - Steve Reich

Early life and work

Process music and Minimalism

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