Composer, born in New York City, USA. He studied at the Juilliard School, New York City, and at Mills College, and in 1965 formed a New York ensemble. Strongly influenced by Stravinsky, jazz, African and Balinese music, and his training in drumming, he has evolved a style of vigorous tonality, repetitive contrapuntal patterns, and percussive virtuosity. He uses a variety of vocal and instrumental timbres, including taped and electronic effects. Among his works are Different Trains (1988), The Cave (1993, with Beryl Korot), and a trilogy with Korot, Three Tales (19982001).
Reich's 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 processes to create and explore musical concepts (for instance, Pendulum Music and Four Organs). The Guardian described Reich as one of the few composers to have "altered the direction of musical history".Early life and work
Steve Reich was born in New York. When he was one year old his parents divorced, and Reich divided his time between New York and California. Reich's B.A. Subsequently he attended Mills College in Oakland where he studied with Luciano Berio (Reich composed 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 he found the rhythmic aspects of the twelve-tone series more interesting than the melodic aspects. Reich also composed film soundtracks for The Plastic Haircut and Oh Dem Watermelons, two films by Robert Nelson.
Reich was influenced by fellow minimalist Terry Riley, whose 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. 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. Reich rerecorded the fragment "come out to show them" on two channels, which are initially played in unison. (Pendulum Music was recorded 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. Reich also tried to create the phasing effect in a piece "that would need no instrument beyond the human body". 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.
In 1971, Reich embarked on a five-week trip to study music in Ghana, during which he learned from the master drummer Gideon Alerwoyie. 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 9-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.
In 1974, Reich began writing what many would call his seminal work, Music for 18 Musicians. This was Reich's first attempt at writing for larger ensembles. The increased number of performers resulted in more scope for psycho-acoustic 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 then any other work he had written. Reich's recording of the work was the first release in ECM Records' "New Series".
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" (liner notes for Music for a Large Ensemble). With Octet and his first orchestral piece Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards (also 1979), Reich's music showed 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 the late 1970s Reich published a book, Writings About Music, containing essays on his philosophy, aesthetics, and musical projects written between 1963 and 1974.
The 1980s
Reich's work took on a darker character in the 1980s with the introduction of political 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;
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, following the earlier example of Scott Johnson's John Somebody (1978). 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.
New directions
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.
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. This series continued with Dance Patterns (2002), Cello Counterpoint (2003), and 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).
In a very recent interview with The Guardian, Reich stated that he continues to follow this direction with a yet unnamed piece 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 thinks that it will again be with tape, and he also states that he is thinking about Stravinsky's Agon (1957) as a model for the instrumental writing.
Influence
Reich's style of composition has influenced many other composers and musical groups, including Philip Glass (especially his early pieces), John Adams, the prog-rock band King Crimson, the new-age guitarist Michael Hedges, the art-pop and electronic musician Brian Eno, the composers associated with the Bang on a Can festival (including David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe), and indie rock musician Sufjan Stevens.
He has also influenced visual artists such as Bruce Nauman, and has expressed admiration of choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's work set to his pieces.
Reich often cites Pérotin, J.S. Jazz is a major part of the formation of Reich's musical style, and two of the earliest influences on his work were vocalists Ella Fitzgerald and Alfred Deller, whose emphasis on the artistic capabilities of the voice alone with little vibrato or other alteration was an inspiration to his earliest works. John Coltrane's style, which Reich has described as "playing a lot of notes to very few harmonies", also had an impact; Reich's influence from jazz includes its roots, also, from the West African music he studied in his readings and visit to Ghana.
Reich on himself
[...] I drove a cab in San Francisco, and in New York I worked as a part-time social worker. —From an Interview with Jakob Buhre
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