Steve Reich built whole pieces from two identical loops drifting slowly apart
In 1965 Steve Reich took three words from a street preacher's sermon, it's gonna rain, copied them onto several tape loops and let the loops slip gradually out of step. The overlapping echoes produced patterns nobody had recorded, and that simple process of phasing launched one of minimalism's pioneers.
Born in New York City on October 3, 1936, to the Broadway lyricist June Sillman and Leonard Reich, he split his childhood between New York and California once his parents split up in his first year. He grew up on middle-class favourites, knowing nothing composed before 1750 or after 1900, until at 14 he discovered Baroque and 20th-century music. He studied drums to play jazz, graduated from Cornell in 1957 with a philosophy degree and a thesis on Wittgenstein, then trained at Juilliard and at Mills College under Luciano Berio and Darius Milhaud.
His guiding idea, set out in the essay Music as a Gradual Process, was that listeners should be able to hear a process unfolding. Terry Riley's In C showed him how offset patterns could shift into a coherent whole; Reich even suggested the steady eighth-note pulse now standard in performing it. In 1967 Piano Phase moved the technique to live players: two pianists repeat a fast twelve-note figure, one holding tempo while the other edges ahead until they lock together a sixteenth note apart. Clapping Music in 1972 needs only hands, one performer shifting a beat every 12 bars until the pair realign 144 bars later.
A five-week trip to the University of Ghana in June 1970, studying with the Ewe master drummer Gideon Alorwoyie, fed into Drumming, written for nine percussionists with female voices and piccolo. Around then he formed his own ensemble, Steve Reich and Musicians. Summers spent learning Balinese gamelan in 1973 and 1974 left further marks.
Music for 18 Musicians, begun in 1974, cycles through eleven chords and, he remarked, packs more harmonic movement into five minutes than anything he had written. His later work turned darker, drawing on history and his Jewish heritage in Different Trains of 1988. Critic Andrew Clements counts him among the few living composers to have changed music's direction.
Source: Steve Reich
