Steve Reich

Steve Reich (New York City, United States; 1936) was raised between New York and California. He started out studying piano then moved on to percussion. In 1953, he entered Cornell University where he graduated with a degree in philosophy, as well as studying musical history from Bach to the 20th century as an assistant to William Austin. Back in New York, he took composition classes with the jazz musician Hall Overton.

From 1958 to 1961, he studied at the Juilliard School of Music with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti, then returned to California to enroll at Mills College, where he worked with Luciano Berio and Darius Milhaud. It was as a student of Berio’s that he turned his back on the European heritage of the Second Viennese School and plunged into the stream of American contemporary music. In 1963, he obtained his MA in Music, and one year later took part in the premiere of ‘In C’ by Terry Riley, who would be influential in drawing him to repetitive music.

He discovered Indonesian music reading Music in Bali by Colin McPhee and also frequented painters of his generation like Sol LeWitt and Robert Smithson, performing regularly at the Park Place Gallery from 1966 to 1967. He had by now become a leading exponent of minimalism, with the emblematic Pendulum Music, located somewhere between sound sculpture and performance art, which he premiered with painter William Wylie in 1968. In 1969, he and Philip Glass spent time with the avant-garde artist Moondog whom they hailed as the founding father of “minimalism.” In summer 1970, Reich took a course on African percussion at the University of Ghana’s Institute for African Studies, an experience that would later resonate in his celebrated Drumming (1971-1972) for voice and percussion.

After a time collaborating closely with dancer and choreographer Laura Dean in 1973-1974, he practiced the technique of Balinese gamelan Semar Pegulingan and Gambang at the American Society for Eastern Arts in Seattle and Berkeley, California.

In the year 1974, he met his future wife Beryl Korot, who reawakened his interest in Judaism and the Hebrew language. From 1976 to 1977, he studied the traditional forms of cantillation (chanting) of the Hebrew scriptures in New York and Jerusalem. Reich’s output has since moved progressively away from its minimalist beginnings.

In 1994, Reich was elected to the American Academy of Arts. From 1998 to 2002, he composed Three Tales, a digital video opera that explores the role of technology in the 20th century. He received Japan’s Praemium Imperial award in 2006, Sweden’s Polar Music Price in 2007 and the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his composition Double Sextet. It was premiered in March 2011 by the Kronos Quartet, at Duke University in North Carolina.

On March 5, 2013 the London Sinfonietta, conducted by Brad Lubman, gave the world premiere of Radio Rewrite (for ensemble with 11 players), inspired by the music of Radiohead. In 2016, he premiered Runner, a piece written for the London-based Royal Ballet, and Pulse, whose debut performance was at New York’s Carnegie Hall.

Steve Reich does honor to both the name and spirit of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards. In his professional enterprise, he has consistently broken through temporal, geographic and stylistic boundaries to compose a body of work that, while recognizably American, is also noted for its ability to fuse elements from different cultures.

The international jury deciding the award cites two main reasons for settling on the U.S. composer. The thread that connects them is the ability of Steve Reich’s musical propositions to cut through the habits and conventions that have erected barriers between “popular” and “high” culture, and between the old, traditional musics of Africa and Asia and the music of western creation.

But myriad other elements of no less importance come together in Reich’s work, and are part of what makes it so intensely personal: the use of everyday, natural sound objects; references to science, religion, the plastic and performing arts (theater and dance), new technologies and, in short, the plurality of human thought; references to news and events from his (our) time, which typically reveal him as a committed artist; and the way his music converses with diverse brands of folk, with jazz, with rock, with pop… For the figure of Steve Reich transits with ease from concert halls to wide, crowded spaces, from communications media of all persuasions to the Internet space, and is equally at home headlining concerts at the Carnegie Hall with Zubin Mehta and the New York Symphony Orchestra or featuring in video creations with millions of YouTube views; most famously James Murphy’s Hello Steve Reich Mix, which starts with his fascinating Clapping Music then segues into a David Bowie song.

Steve Reich studied philosophy and went on to earn his PhD with a thesis on Wittgenstein. Musically, he trained as a pianist, and, while interested in the ‘great repertoire’ of European music composed from the 18th century to the year 1900 — with its hegemony over symphony and opera programs and recording catalogues — was not truly drawn in until he got to know 20th-century and contemporary music. He studied jazz with Overton, composition with Bergsma and Persichetti, and attended courses taught by Milhaud and Berio, where, he confesses, he mainly learned what he didn’t want to do.

He studied traditional Indonesian music (the gamelan) in Seattle and Berkeley, and African percussion at the University of Ghana. The repetitive patterns that are at the heart of both these popular musical forms, and the richness and subtlety of their rhythms, were, for Reich, a source of fascination and instruction, and would underpin many of his later works that became prototypes of “repetitive music,” the sound version of minimal art. Reich also studied the traditional ways of declaiming Hebrew sacred texts in the United States and Jerusalem, a formative experience in developing the interplay of music and speech that would feature in his own writing.

In the United States, he was an active participant in the first experiments in electroacoustic music and the concerts that launched the minimalist trajectory proposed by La Monte Young and Terry Riley. He also came into contact with the influential aesthetic and sound world of John Cage, and shared musical interests and, occasionally, platforms with Philip Glass at the start of their respective careers. Steve Reich has enjoyed a rich and lasting relationship with the world of dance, which has seen him work alongside choreographers like Laura Dean, Anne T. De Keersmaeker, Jirí Kylián, Jerome Robbins, Alvin Ailey, and Maurice Béjart, as well as collaborating extensively with creators in the visual arts.

Loath to separate theory from practice or composition from performance, Reich has gone hands-on in disseminating his music worldwide, both solo and in groups of his own formation (Steve Reich and Musicians), and has contributed to a radical renewal of the forms of the concert, music theater and performance art, proposing new creative experiences that enshrine different modes of communication and explore different kinds of space, while reaching out to new publics.

Among Steve Reich’s pathbreaking compositional experiments is his work on “phasing”: repetitive figures, in or out of synch, that may involve fixed media — closed recordings — (It’s Gonna Rain, for tape), the processing of live performances or a mix of both types of sound source (Piano Phase, Violin Phase, Phase Patterns, Dance Patterns). Feedback from sounds produced live and captured by microphone, and the ‘augmentation’ of durations, are procedures in which Reich moves with total assurance.

He has also explored the possibilities of rhythm and percussion in works that have become career milestones and carved out new creative paths; among them Drumming (for percussion) and Clapping Music (for musicians clapping hands), which also draw on the phasing technique. An emblematic work from this fecund early period is Music for 18 Musicians, in which phase patterns and rhythmic structures are enriched by contrapuntal concepts and original timbric and harmonic effects. The New York composer’s fascination for Pérotin, choirmaster at the Notre Dame School in Paris (12th-13th century), shines through in compositions like New York Counterpoint (for clarinet or saxophones, in various versions) or Electric Counterpoint (for electric guitar and tape or guitar ensemble), as well as finding echoes in other Reich scores, like the just-mentioned Music for 18 Musicians.

The relationship in Reich’s oeuvre between music and speech is best manifest in pieces like Tehillim (for voices and ensemble, based on Hebrew psalms), Daniel Variations or Proverb (for voices and ensemble), and also in The Cave and Three Tales, with an added operatic (theatrical) dimension resting on the video creations of Beryl Korot.

Nor has Reich neglected the orchestra formation. Different Trains for string quartet and tape, and other pieces, many devised for atypical ensembles, form part of a long list of scores that includes Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards, Three Movements, The Four Sections, or The Desert Music in its two versions, for orchestra and amplified chorus or 10 singers and reduced orchestra. Currently, Steve Reich is working on a composition for the Royal Ballet in London and the Signal Ensemble Theatre in Chicago.