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Stephen Michael Reich (born October 3, 1936) is an American composer who pioneered the style of minimalist music. His 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 simple, audible processes to explore musical concepts (for instance, Pendulum Music and Four Organs). These compositions, marked by their use of repetitive figures, slow harmonic rhythm and canons, have significantly influenced contemporary music, especially in the US.
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Quotations
What I don't want to do is to go and buy a bunch of exotic-looking drums and set up an Afrikanische Musik in New York City.
The truth, however, is that a composer need not work in isolation; there is no reason for us to suppose that Reich's popularity and commercial success brands him as a cult figure unworthy of our attention.
I discovered that the most interesting music of all was made by simply lining the loops in unison, and letting them slowly shift out of phase with other...
...in serial music, the series itself is seldom audible... What I'm interested in is a compositional process and a sounding music that are one in the same thing.
Encyclopedia
Stephen Michael Reich (born October 3, 1936) is an American composer who pioneered the style of minimalist music. His 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 simple, audible processes to explore musical concepts (for instance, Pendulum Music and Four Organs). These compositions, marked by their use of repetitive figures, slow harmonic rhythm and canons, have significantly influenced contemporary music, especially in the US. Reich's work took on a darker character in the 1980s with the introduction of historical themes as well as themes from his Jewish heritage. Different Trains (1988) has been called "the only adequate musical response—one of the few adequate artistic responses in any medium—to the Holocaust", and was credited with earning Reich a place among the great composers of the 20th century.
Reich's style of composition has influenced many other composers and musical groups. Reich has been described by The Guardian as one of "a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history", and the Village Voices Kyle Gann has said Reich "may [...] be considered, by general acclamation, America's greatest living composer." On January 25, 2007, Reich was named the 2007 recipient of the Polar Music Prize, together with Sonny Rollins.
Career
Early life
Reich was born in New York City to the Broadway lyricist June Sillman. When he was one year old his parents divorced and Reich divided his time between 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. Reich studied drums with Roland Kohloff in order to play jazz and attended Cornell University; he took some music courses there, but graduated in 1957 with a B.A. in philosophy. Reich's B.A. thesis was on Ludwig Wittgenstein; later he would set texts by that philosopher to music in Proverb (1995) and You Are (variations) (2006).
For a year following graduation he studied composition privately with Hall Overton before he enrolled at Juilliard to work with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti (1958 to 1961). Subsequently he attended Mills College in Oakland where he studied with Luciano Berio and Darius Milhaud (1961–63) and earned a master's degree in composition, where Reich composed Melodica for melodica and tape, which appeared in 1986 on the three-LP release Music from Mills.
Reich worked with the California Tape Music Center along with Pauline Oliveros, Ramon Sender, Morton Subotnick and Terry Riley (he was involved with the premiere of Riley's "In C" and suggested the use of the eighth note pulse which is now standard in performance of the piece).
1960s
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. The soundtrack for Oh Dem Watermelons, composed in 1965, involved basic tape work, using repeated phrasing together in a large five-part canon.
Reich was influenced by fellow minimalist Terry Riley, whose 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 used recordings of a sermon about the end of the world given by a black Pentecostal street-preacher known as 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.
The 13-minute Come Out (1966) uses similarly manipulated recordings of a single spoken line given by an injured survivor of a race riot. 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 speech's rhythmic and tonal patterns.
A similar, lesser known example of process music is Pendulum Music (1968), which consists of the sound of several microphones swinging over the loudspeakers to which they are attached, producing feedback as they do so. Pendulum Music has never been recorded by Reich himself, but was introduced to rock audiences 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. In Piano Phase the performers repeat a rapid twelve-note melodic figure, initially in unison. As one player keeps tempo with robotic precision, the other speeds up very slightly until the two parts line up again, but one sixteenth note apart. The second player then resumes the previous tempo. This cycle of speeding up and then locking in continues throughout the piece; the cycle comes full circle three times, the second and third cycles using shorter versions of the initial figure.
Violin Phase, also written in 1967, is built on these same lines. Reich also tried to create the phasing effect in a piece "that would need no instrument beyond the human body". He found that the idea of phasing was inappropriate for the simple ways he was experimenting to make sound. Instead, he composed Clapping Music (1972), in which the players do not phase in and out with each other, but instead one performer keeps one line of a 12-quaver-long phrase and the other performer shifts by one quaver beat every 12 bars, until both performers are back in unison 144 bars later. Piano Phase and Violin Phase both premiered in a series of concerts given in New York art galleries.
The 1967 prototype piece Slow Motion Sound was never performed, but the idea it introduced of slowing down a recorded sound until many times its original length without changing pitch or timbre was applied to Four Organs (1970), which deals specifically with augmentation. The piece has maracas playing a fast eighth note pulse, while the four organs stress certain eighth notes using an 11th chord. This work therefore dealt with repetition and subtle rhythmic change. 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.
1970s
In 1971, Reich embarked on a five-week trip to study music in Ghana, during which he learned from the master drummer Gideon Alerwoyie. He also studied Balinese gamelan in Seattle. From his African experience, as well as A. M. 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. He investigated other musical processes such as augmentation (the temporal lengthening of phrases and melodic fragments). It was during this period that he wrote works such as Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ (1973) and Six Pianos (1973).
In 1974, Reich began writing what many would call his seminal work, Music for 18 Musicians. This piece involved many new ideas, although it also hearkened back to earlier pieces. It is based on a cycle of eleven chords introduced at the beginning (called "Pulses"), followed by a small section of music based around each chord ("Sections I-XI"), and finally a return to the original cycle ("Pulses"). This was Reich's first attempt at writing for larger ensembles. The increased number of performers resulted in more scope for psychoacoustic 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 than any other work he had written. Steve Reich and Musicians made the premier recording of this work on ECM Records.
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). Human voices are part of the musical palette in Music for a Large Ensemble but the wordless vocal parts simply form part of the texture (as they do in Drumming). With Octet and his first orchestral piece Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards (also 1979), Reich's music showed the 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. An updated collection, Writings On Music (1965–2000), was published in 2002.
1980s
Reich's work took on a darker character in the 1980s with the introduction of historical 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; the setting of texts several lines long rather than the fragments used in previous works makes melody a substantive element. Use of formal counterpoint and functional harmony also contrasts with the loosely structured minimalist works written previously.
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. 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. The Kronos Quartet recording of Different Trains was awarded the Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition in 1990.
1990s to present
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. The work, for percussion, voices, and strings, is a musical documentary, named for the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron, where a mosque now stands and Abraham is said to have been buried. The two collaborated again on the opera Three Tales, which concerns the Hindenburg disaster, the testing of nuclear weapons on Bikini Atoll, and other more modern concerns, specifically Dolly the sheep, cloning, and the technological singularity.
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 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 an interview with The Guardian, Reich stated that he continues to follow this direction with his most recent piece Double Sextet (2007) 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. It will again be with tape, and Reich states that he was 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 John Adams, the progressive rock band King Crimson, the new-age guitarist Michael Hedges, the art-pop and electronic musician Brian Eno, the experimental art/music group The Residents, the composers associated with the Bang on a Can festival (including David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe), and numerous indie rock musicians including songwriter Sufjan Stevens and instrumental ensembles Tortoise, The Mercury Program (themselves influenced by Tortoise), So Many Dynamos, Do Make Say Think and A Silver Mt. Zion. Godspeed You! Black Emperor composed a song, unreleased, entitled "Steve Reich". His music has also been a source of inspiration to ambient and techno musicians.
John Adams commented, "He didn't reinvent the wheel so much as he showed us a new way to ride." 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.
In featuring a sample of Reich's Electric Counterpoint (1987) the British Ambient act The Orb exposed a new generation of listeners to the composers music with their 1990 production Little Fluffy Clouds Further acknowledgment of Steve Reich's music by various electronic dance music producers came with the release in 1999 of the Reich Remixed tribute album which featured reinterpretations by artists such as DJ Spooky, Mantronik, Ken Ishii, and Coldcut, among others.
Reich often cites Pérotin, J.S. Bach, Debussy and Stravinsky as composers he admires, whose tradition he wished as a young composer to become part of. 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; of particular interest was the album Africa/Brass, which "was basically a half-an-hour in F." Reich's influence from jazz includes its roots, also, from the West African music he studied in his readings and visit to Ghana. Other important influences are Kenny Clarke and Miles Davis, and visual artist friends such as Sol Lewitt and Richard Serra.
Reich recently contributed the introduction to Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (The MIT Press, 2008) edited by Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky.
Quotations
Works
The Plastic Haircut, tape (1963)It's Gonna Rain, tape (1965)Soundtrack for Oh Dem Watermelons, tape (1965)Come Out, tape (1966)Melodica, melodica and tape (1966)Piano Phase for two pianos, or two marimbas (1967)Slow Motion Sound concept piece (1967)Violin Phase for violin and tape or four violins (1967)My Name Is for three tape recorders and performers (1967)Pendulum Music for 3 or 4 microphones, amplifiers and loudspeakers (1968) (revised 1973)Four Organs for four electric organs and maracas (1970)Phase Patterns for four electric organs (1970)Drumming for 4 pairs of tuned bongo drums, 3 marimbas, 3 glockenspiels, 2 female voices, whistling and piccolo (1970/1971)Clapping Music for two musicians clapping (1972)Music for Pieces of Wood for five pairs of tuned claves (1973)Six Pianos (1973) - transcribed as Six Marimbas (1986)Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ (1973)Music for 18 Musicians (1974–76)Music for a Large Ensemble (1978)Octet (1979) - withdrawn in favor of the 1983 revision for slightly larger ensemble, Eight LinesVariations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards for orchestra (1979)Tehillim for voices and ensemble (1981)Vermont Counterpoint for amplified flute and tape (1982)The Desert Music for chorus and orchestra or voices and ensemble (1984, text by William Carlos Williams)Sextet for percussion and keyboards (1984)New York Counterpoint for amplified clarinet and tape, or 11 clarinets and bass clarinet (1985)Three Movements for orchestra (1986)Electric Counterpoint for electric guitar or amplified acoustic guitar and tape (1987, for Pat Metheny)The Four Sections for orchestra (1987)Different Trains for string quartet and tape (1988)The Cave for four voices, ensemble and video (1993, with Beryl Korot)Duet for two violins and string ensemble (1993)Nagoya Marimbas for two marimbas (1994)City Life for amplified ensemble (1995)Proverb for voices and ensemble (1995, text by Ludwig Wittgenstein)Triple Quartet for amplified string quartet (with prerecorded tape), or three string quartets, or string orchestra (1998)Know What Is Above You for four women’s voices and 2 tamborims (1999)Three Tales for video projection, five voices and ensemble (1998–2002, with Beryl Korot)Dance Patterns for 2 xylophones, 2 vibraphones and 2 pianos (2002)Cello Counterpoint for amplified cello and multichannel tape (2003)You Are (Variations) for voices and ensemble (2004)For Strings (with Winds and Brass) for orchestra (1987/2004)Variations for Vibes, Pianos, and Strings dance piece for three string quartets, four vibraphones, and two pianos (2005)Daniel Variations for four voices and ensemble (2006)Double Sextet for violin, cello, piano, vibraphone, clarinet, flute and pre-recorded tape (2007)
Selected discography
Drumming. Steve Reich and Musicians (Two recordings: Deutsche Grammophon and Nonesuch) So Percussion (Cantaloupe)Music for 18 Musicians. Steve Reich and Musicians (Two recordings: ECM and Nonesuch) Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble (Innova)Octet/Music for a Large Ensemble/Violin Phase. Steve Reich and Musicians (ECM)Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards/Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ/ Six Pianos. San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, Edo de Waart, Steve Reich & Musicians (Deutsche Grammophon)Tehillim/The Desert Music. Alarm Will Sound and OSSIA, Alan Pierson (Cantaloupe)Different Trains/Electric Counterpoint. Kronos Quartet, Pat Metheny (Nonesuch)You Are (Variations)/Cello Counterpoint. Los Angeles Master Chorale, Grant Gershon, Maya Beiser (Nonesuch)
Further reading
Steve Reich: A Bio-Bibliography. Greenwood Press, 2002.Steve Reich. Writings about Music. Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1974.K. Robert Schwarz. Minimalists. Phaidon Press, 1996.
See also
External links
Interviews
- , selected as one of the most important musical works of the 20th century. Realaudio format, timing: 12:46, July, 2000
- , by Joshua Klein, November 22, 2006.
- from NPR
Fresh Air broadcast October 6, 2006 includes interview about "It's Gonna Rain", "Drumming", and "Tehillim" that first aired in 1999 and another on "Different Trains" from 1989 (Realaudio format, timing: 39:25), Cité de la musique, Paris, France
Listening
- (November 7, 1970) Streaming audio
- "October 15, 2006" MP3
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Others
- from Duke University, includes sound samples and quotes
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Steve Reich by Roger Sutherland by Steve Reich from NPR Article by Alex Ross from The New Yorker. Press release of Polar Prize announcement
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