Steve Reich’s first attempts at composition, of which no traces remain, date from the late 1950s. Reich had just quit studying philosophy at Harvard to enroll at The Juilliard School (1958-1961). His musical education was still patchy, his tastes eclectic. But in the early sixties he made some important musical discoveries. He encountered African music in 1962 through A. M. Jones’s Studies in African Music (1959) and Indonesian music not long afterward thanks to Music in Bali (1966) by Colin McPhee.

The music of Bartók, especially the late quartets, would prove a formative influence on Reich, teaching him much about modality and canonic writing. Early music — the organum of Perotinus in particular, but also Bach — revealed new contrapuntal possibilities. In Stravinsky, whose Rite of Spring he had discovered as an adolescent, Reich found an echo of his own search for a melodico-rhythmic material that could develop through repetition within a tonal/modal language.

Reich’s interest in twentieth-century “art” music would combine harmoniously with an appreciation for popular music and jazz. From early on, he adopted a critical view of the hierarchization of the music world, blaming Schoenberg for the divorce between the popular and the highbrow. His whole musical life is grounded in practice; this basic fact has remained fundamental to his creative activity. He has played in the jazz clubs of downtown New York, and he absorbed a strong influence from John Coltrane. As in jazz, a stable pulse would become the backbone of his music, and tonality/modality its substance. Also like jazz, his is the kind of music in which the need to perform precedes the step of writing down. Reich would nevertheless distance himself from jazz after 1965, when he attended a concert of Coltrane in the atonal style that he rejects.

As early as 1958, Reich felt little affinity for the work of John Cage; he questioned the degree of interest inherent in indeterminacy and the liberation of the musician that such music claims to achieve. His time in California (1961-1963), where he continued his studies at Mills College, shows a composer still searching for his voice. With Luciano Berio he studied his teacher’s own music but also that of Webern, Boulez, and Bruno Maderna. Reich was much taken with the sense of economy of means in the music of the Second Viennese School, as well as its penchant for canonic writing and its tendency to repeat certain pitch-classes (a feature that he was not the only minimalist to notice). Berio had him study the Structures pour deux pianos by Boulez, a composer who, although aesthetically as dissimilar as possible, has always interested Reich, who no doubt sees something of himself in Boulez’s compositional rigor. Reich had in fact already tried his hand at serial writing in May 1961, in Music for String Orchestra, a work that takes a single form of a row built entirely of minor seconds and thirds and subjects it to a process of constant repetition.

The Four Pieces for trumpet, saxophone, piano, contrabass, and percussion, written in 1963 for Reich’s final examination at Mills College, display an idiosyncratic writing that could be called proto-minimalist. Their hybrid language tries to reconcile elements of jazz with that repetitive treatment of tone-rows, producing something “between Reich, Bill Evans, and Schoenberg’s opus 11,” according to the composer himself. The pieces would be performed only once, with Reich at the piano, already demonstrating his ambition to fuse the roles of composer and performer. The attitude attests to Reich’s desire during this period to approach creation through collective improvisation with the group he had organized for that purpose. However, the disappointing results quickly forced him to accept the need for a preliminary composed material suitable for live development. Reich then made a crucial acquaintance: that of Terry Riley, alongside whom he participated in the first performance of In C, in 1964 (for which, incidentally, it was Reich who suggested adding a constant pulse). An “open work” consisting of 53 figures playable by any number of musicians, In C inaugurated a radically new approach to composition and left a profound mark on Reich, to the point that he envisaged composing in its style. The minimalism of Riley, La Monte Young, and Glass won him over by seeming to offer an alternative to the discontinuity and disharmony of 1960s serialism as well as Cage’s indeterminacy. It also represented a response to the neoclassicism and neoromanticism that Reich condemned.

Another breakthrough for Reich came when he embraced magnetic tape, having frequented the San Francisco Tape Music Center. Whereas the avant-garde mainly used synthetic sounds, Reich has preferred the natural sounds of musique concrète, which he discovered through the creations of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. He was especially interested by Berio’s manipulation of vocal material in Thema: Omaggio a Joyce (1958), a work that no doubt revealed to him a new world to explore in the spoken voice. After trying out loops of recordings, and then superpositions of those loops, along the lines of Riley’s works for tape, Reich, in It’s Gonna Rain (1965), hit upon the new technique that would underpin all his compositions until 1971: gradual dephasing. This piece, which uses a recording of a sermon on the Flood by a young black preacher whose musical declamation, halfway between speech and song, had caught Reich’s attention, rests on a very simple idea. Two tape recorders, perfectly synchronized, play the same segment of the sermon in unison. At a certain point, Reich gradually slows down one of the tapes by pressing on the reel with his thumb, thereby creating a desynchronization. This dephasing generates new “resultant” rhythms, melodies, and timbres, which considerably enrich the listening experience. Then the thumb relaxes, gradually reversing the canon effect until the initial situation returns.

Now back in New York, Reich perfected this procedure in another piece for recorded voice, Come Out (1966), based on a single sentence from the testimony of a young black man beaten by the police during the violent Harlem riots of 1964. Yet he soon felt the need to go beyond the narrow limits of music for magnetic tape alone; he applied the principle of phasing and dephasing to instrumental music in Reed Phase for saxophone and tape (1966), Piano Phase (1967) for two pianos, and Violin Phase for four violins or violin and magnetic tape (1967). In Piano Phase, his first completely instrumental work from this period, the modal twelve-note melody uses only five pitch classes, played in quarter notes. The dephasing arises as one of the pianists gradually accelerates while the other holds a steady tempo. This shift toward instrumental music coincided with the foundation in 1966 of Reich’s own ensemble, Reich and Musicians, with which the composer would play his own music. Four Organs (1970) reflects his curiosity to explore the technique of dephasing in a multidirectional fashion. A single dominant eleventh chord is repeated until, gradually, one and then several of its notes are lengthened such that the music transforms progressively into a melody, giving the impression of slowing down despite the constant pulse held by the maracas. At the time, Reich was distancing himself from electronics, whose perfect execution he found rigid and unmusical. As he wrote, “in all music based on a steady pulse … it is in reality the tiny variations in pulse created by human beings that, when they play or sing, give life to the music.”¹

Reich has clarified his musical ideas in several articles, most notably “Music as a Gradual Process” (1968).² In that essay, he proposes the basic idea of a fully audible process unfolding over a long time; once set up, it runs on its own, like sand trickling through an hourglass. Pendulum Music, a piece halfway between sound-sculpture and performance art, premiered in 1968 with the painter William Wylie, dates from this period, during which Reich showed more interest in the visual artists of his generation (such as Robert Rauschenberg, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Smithson) than the composers. Pendulum Music illustrates his idea in singularly Cageian and minimalist fashion. Microphones placed laterally or suspended above loudspeakers describe a pendular motion, periodically generating feedback in the form of sonic beating. The piece ends on its own once the motion has ceased.

Though similarly based on the principle of repetition, Reich’s aesthetic would grow apart from that of the minimalists, whom he criticized for, among other things, lacking a concrete doctrine. Reich’s own, in his instrumental music of the time, was characterized by tonal/modal melodic material limited to a few notes and simple rhythms with a steady pulse, cyclical dephasing of this material, and a predilection for percussive sonorities and homogeneous timbres. Reich drew inspiration from a wide cultural spectrum, predicting that “non-Western music in general, and African, Indian, and Indonesian music in particular, will provide new structural models for Western musicians.”³ Convinced of the need to learn to play such music, he studied African percussion in Ghana in the summer of 1971. The experience confirmed his intuition that acoustic instruments can produce music authentically richer in sonority than electronic ones, and also his natural affinity for percussion. Reich subsequently wrote Drumming (1971), for percussion, two female voices, whistlers, and piccolo. Although this work, much like Phase Patterns for four electronic organs (1970), extends the compositional principle of Piano Phase, adding the technique of hocket and acoustic beats (in place of silences) to the motivic richness produced by dephasing, it shows a new attention to color. This appears especially in the fourth and last part, in which all the instrumental forces, until then divided into families, finally come together. It was no doubt the simple means of sound-production in African music, such as hand-clapping, that inspired the composition of two rhythmic pieces: Clapping Music (1972) for two performers, which also recalls flamenco music, and Music for Pieces of Wood (1973) for five pairs of claves.

In 1973-1974, Reich studied the techniques of the Balinese gamelan at the University of Washington in Seattle. Balinese influence is already apparent in the shimmering sounds of the glockenspiels and marimbas in Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ (1973). Music for Eighteen Musicians (1974-1976), built from a cycle of eleven chords, reflects an evolution of Reich’s language toward greater concern for harmony. His music was steadily growing in complexity. His increasing interest in large forces culminated in Music for a Large Ensemble (1978), while Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards (1979) displays longer melodic lines. The growing number of performers would also lead Reich to pay more attention to the deployment of timbre as well as the psychoacoustic effects produced by combinations of instruments.

Having returned to Judaism in 1974, Reich studied the traditional methods of cantillating the Hebrew scriptures (1976-1977) and composed Tehillim (1981), for four voices and ensemble, with a text from the psalms. His return to vocal music continued with The Desert Music (1984), for amplified choir and orchestra, after a poem by William Carlos Williams.

In 1988, with Different Trains, for string quartet and band, which evokes his childhood train journeys between New York and Los Angeles and the “different trains” that in Europe were winding their way to the death camps, Reich explored a new compositional method by generating the melodic and rhythmic material played by the quartet from brief recordings of speech.

In 1995, Reich adopted the techniques of sound sampling in City Life, for instrumental ensemble and sampler, a work that synthesized his recent musical innovations with his early vocal experiments of the 1960s. City Life uses urban noise and words extracted from conversations recorded during the bombing of the World Trade Center on 26 February 1993. With WTC 9/11 (2010), for string quartet and digital tape (an instrumentation similar to that of Different Trains), Reich continued the experiment by using sound sources originating in the attacks of September 11.

In the early 1990s, Reich collaborated with his wife, the filmmaker Beryl Korot, on the multimedia opera The Cave (1990-1993), which explores the roots of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam through the words of Israelis, Americans, and Palestinians, echoed musically by the instrumental ensemble. Scored for percussion, voices, and strings, The Cave is a musical documentary whose title refers to the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, where Abraham is said to be buried. In 2002 Reich and Korot also brought out the opera Three Tales, which recounts the stories of the Hindenburg disaster, the nuclear bomb tests on Bikini Atoll, and the cloning of the sheep Dolly. Reich’s compositions draw on his contemporaries as well as the old masters: while the organum of Perotinus serves as a model for Proverb (1995), Bartók’s string quartets, the music of Alfred Schnittke, and the piece Yo Shakespeare (1992) by Michael Gordon are all sources for Triple Quartet (1998).

The slow processes of continuous transformation in Reich’s music have long attracted the interest of choreographers. In 1982, the Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker produced Fase: Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich, consisting of three duets and a solo choreographed to Piano Phase, Come Out, Violin Phase, and Clapping Music. In 1998, the same artist created Drumming from Reich’s eponymous music, which had earlier inspired the New York choreographer Laura Dean in 1975. De Keersmaeker’s remarkable work interested Reich himself to the point that in 2002 he wrote a new work for her, Dance Patterns for percussion ensemble including two pianos, two vibraphones, and two xylophones.

In the 2000s, Reich wrote purely instrumental works of which several are based on variation form: You Are (Variations) (2004) for amplified ensemble and voices, Variations for Vibes, Pianos, and Strings (2005), and Daniel Variations (2006), in memory of Daniel Pearl, the Jewish American journalist kidnapped and killed in Pakistan in January 2002.

In 2018, Music for Ensemble and Orchestra marked the composer’s return to orchestral writing after a hiatus of more than thirty years. Yet Reich’s aesthetic has never congealed into a single style. His approach to interpretation and instrumentation took a new turn in 2008 with 2x5, a piece strongly inspired by rock and which includes four electric guitars, two basses, and two drum sets in addition to two pianos. Reich would go further down this road in 2012 with Radio Rewrite, for an ensemble of twelve musicians, directly indebted to certain compositions of the British rock group Radiohead. This convergence of influences from popular and highbrow music seen in Reich, and perhaps more importantly the mutual appreciation, is testimony to his powers of inspiration — one might even say of bridge-building.

By profoundly renewing Western music, Reich participated in the cultural revolutions of the 1960s and ’70s that shook an America stifled by conformism. Over the decades, his music has gained a large following that spans several generations, while also influencing a growing number of musicians from diverse backgrounds. Among European composers in the art-music tradition, the first to come to mind is the Hungarian György Ligeti, who titled the middle part of his Trois Pièces pour deux pianos (1976) “Self-Portrait with Reich and Reilly (and Chopin Is in There Somewhere Too).” From the younger generation, one could cite, among others, the German Max Richter and the Americans John Adams, David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe, who have openly acknowledged Reich’s influence. In the world of popular music, the impact has been just as strong, if not more so. Brian Eno, David Bowie, Björk, Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth, the German electronic groups Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, and the English progressive rock group King Crimson have all recognized the role, whether ephemeral or long-lasting, played by Reich’s music in their artistic practice. In 1999, the album Reich Remixed (Nonesuch Records) presented “remixes” of Reich’s works by various producers of electronic music, including DJ Spooky, Kurtis Mantronik, Ken Ishii, and Coldcut.

Steve Reich’s music enjoys a rare privilege: that of reaching a large audience beyond the little world of new-music aficionados, but without giving in to facility. Anchored in the sociopolitical, philosophical, and spiritual concerns of his time as much as the artistic ones, his musical thought has taken shape methodically, through a series of adjustments, questioning of models, interrogation of the present and the past, the here and the elsewhere, the popular and the elite, giving coherence and style to a regenerated tonal and metrical musical discourse.

Translated from the French by Tadhg Sauvey

<sup>1. Steve REICH, “Four Organs” (1970), in Steve REICH, Different Phases, Écrits 1965-2016, La Rue musicale, Philharmonie de Paris, 2016, p. 55.↩
2. Steve REICH, “La musique comme processus progressif” (1968), in REICH, Different Phases, pp. 39-42.↩
3. Steve REICH, “Quelques prédictions optimistes sur l’avenir de la musique,” in REICH, Different Phases, p. 63.↩</sup>