Born 3 October 1936 in New York, Steve Reich grew up in New York and California. He first studied piano, but later turned to percussion after hearing drummer Kenny Clarke accompany Miles Davis. He enrolled at Cornell University in 1953, graduating four years later with a Bachelor’s degree in philosophy. While at university, he broadened his knowledge of Western music history (from Bach to 20th century repertoire) through classes with William Austin. Upon his return to New York, he studied composition with jazz musician Hall Overton, and subsequently with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti at the Juilliard School (1958-1961), where he met Philip Glass. Reich later returned to California for further studies of composition at Mills College with Darius Milhaud and Luciano Berio. It was during this period that he rejected serialism, embracing instead the modal jazz of John Coltrane. In 1963, he graduated with a Master of Arts, and in 1964, he attended the premiere of the repetitive work In C by Terry Riley, which would have strong influence on his approach to repetitive music.

In the mid-1960s, Reich worked at the San Francisco Tape Music Center and composed his first works for fixed media. Notably, It’s Gonna Rain (1965) demonstrates a process of gradual dephasing, a technique that he would later apply in his instrumental works. Upon returning to New York in 1966, Reich founded his own ensemble, “Steve Reich and Musicians”, which would go on to enjoy considerable international success. He discovered Indonesian music through a lecture by Colin McPhee titled Music in Bali. Reich socialised with the visual artists of his generation, including Sol LeWitt and Robert Smithson, and performed at the Park Place Gallery in 1966 and 1967. His work came to embody the musical branch of minimalist art; Pendulum Music, a work occupying the space between performance and sonic sculpture, was premiered in 1968 by the composer and painter William Wylie. In 1969, Steve Reich and Philip Glass worked for a period with composer and poet Moondog, whom they proclaimed to be the “founder of minimalism.” In the Summer of 1970, Reich studied African drumming at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana in Accra. Enriched by this experience, he composed Drumming (1971-1972) for percussion instruments and voice, a work which represents the final stage of the process of refinement of Reich’s dephasing technique, and contains the first use of the gradual, systematic substitution of beats for rests (and vice versa).

From 1970 to 1973, Reich collaborated closely with dancer and choreographer Laura Dean. In 1973 and 1974, he studied the Semar Pegulingan and Gambang styles of Balinese gamelan at the American Society for Eastern Arts in Seattle and at Berkeley University. Notable works from this period include Six Pianos (1973) and Music for Eighteen Musicians (1976). In 1974, he met his future wife, Beryl Korot, through whom he would later re-embrace Judaism and learn Hebrew. From 1976 to 1977, he studied traditional forms of cantillation of sacred Hebrew texts in New York and Jerusalem, giving rise to the composition of Tehillim (1981), a setting of biblical Psalms. This work, along with Desert Music (1984), a setting of texts by William Carlos Williams, marked the beginning of a period in which Reich was particularly interested in combining text and music. In the late 1980s, he once again used magnetic tape, notably in Different Trains for string quartet and fixed media, a work which seeks to evoke both the composer’s memories of traveling between New York and Los Angeles by train as a child, and the trains which were, during the same period, delivering thousands to Nazi death camps in Europe. His approach to composing at this time frequently used recorded speech as a means of generating instrumental material.

Over the years, Reich’s aesthetic has become progressively more distanced from minimalism. City Life (1995), for chamber ensemble and samplers, marked a leap forward in his use of technology: in it, two electronic keyboards are used to play back fragments of pre-recorded speech and urban sounds. Reich’s fascination for early music (notably that of Pérotin) gave rise to the composition of Proverb (1995). His first multimedia work, The Cave (1989-1993), for chamber ensemble with video by Beryl Korot, was based on the life of Abraham, the father of the three major monotheistic religions.

In 1994, Steve Reich became a member of the American Academy of Arts. From 1998 to 2002, he composed Three Tales, a video opera about the pervasive nature of technology in the 20th century, comprising three acts: 1. Hindenburg, on the Hindenburg disaster of 1937; 2. Bikini, on American nuclear tests in the Pacific between 1946 and 1952; and 3. Dolly, on the cloning of a sheep in 1997. In 2006, he was awarded the Praemium Imperial Prize (Japan), in 2007 the Polar Music Prize (Sweden), in 2009 a Pulitzer Prize for Music for Double Sextet, and in 2012, the Gold Medal in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In 2022, Reich published a book, Conversations, which reflects on his career and music through a series of conversations with artists like Stephen Sondheim, Michael Tilson Thomas, Brian Eno, Richard Serra, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, and Jonny Greenwood.

Steve Reich is the guest of honour at Radio France’s Présences Festival 2024. To mark the occasion, a preview will be presented at Ircam, where Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood will perform Electric Counterpoint (1987).