Steve Reich

Steve Reich was recently called "America's greatest living composer" in the Village Voice. From his early taped speeches, It's Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966) to his and video artist Beryl Korot's digital video opera Three Tales (2002), Reich's work has embraced not only aspects of western classical music, but the structures, harmonies, and rhythms of non-Western and American vernacular music, particularly jazz. " There's just a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history and Steve Reich is one of them," states The Guardian. Born in New York and raised there and in California, Reich graduated with honors in philosophy from Cornell University in 1957. For the next two years, he studied composition with Hall Overton, and from 1958 to 1961 he studied at The Juilliard School with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti. Reich received his M.A. in Music from Mills College in 1963, where he worked with Luciano Berio and Darius Milhaud. During the summer of 1970, with the help of a grant from the Institute for International Education, Reich studied drumming at the Institute for African Studies at the University of Ghana in Accra. In 1973 and 1974, he studied Balinese Gamelan Semar Pegulingan and Gamelan Gambang at the American Society for Eastern Arts in Seattle and Berkeley. From 1976 to 1977 he studied the traditional forms of cantillation (chanting) of the Hebrew scriptures in New York and Jerusalem. In 1966, Steve Reich founded his own ensemble of three musicians, which rapidly grew to 18 members or more. Since 1971, Steve Reich and Musicians have frequently toured the world, and have the distinction of performing to sold-out houses at venues as diverse as Carnegie Hall and the Bottom Line Cabaret.

In June 1997, in celebration of Reich's 60th birthday, Nonesuch released a ten CD retrospective box set of Reich's compositions, featuring several newly recorded and re-mastered works. He also won a Grammy award in 1999 for Best Small Ensemble for his piece Music for 18 Musicians, also on the Nonesuch label. In July 1999, a major retrospective of Reich's work was presented by the Lincoln Center Festival. Earlier, in 1988, the South Bank Centre in London, mounted a similar series of retrospective concerts. In 2000, he was awarded the Schuman Prize  from Columbia University, the Montgomery Fellowship from Dartmouth College, the Regent's Lectureship at the University of California at Berkeley, an honorary doctorate from the California Institute of the Arts, and was named Composer of the Year by Musical America magazine. Reich's 1988 piece, Different Trains, marked a new compositional method, rooted in It's Gonna Rain and Come Out, in which speech recordings generate the musical material for musical instruments. The New York Times hailed Different Trains as "a work of such astonishing originality that breakthrough seems the only possible description...possesses an absolutely harrowing emotional impact." In 1990, Reich received a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Composition for Different Trains as recorded by the Kronos Quartet on Nonesuch. The Cave, Steve Reich and Beryl Korot's music theater video piece exploring the Biblical story of Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Ishmael, and Isaac was hailed by Time Magazine as "a fascinating glimpse of what opera might be like in the 21st century." Of the Chicago premiere, John von Rhein of the Chicago Tribune wrote, "The techniques embraced by this work have the potential to enrich opera as living art a thousandfold... The Cave impresses, ultimately, as a powerful and imaginative work of high-tech music theater that brings the troubled present into resonant dialogue with the ancient past, and invites all of us to consider anew our shared cultural heritage." Over the years, Steve Reich has received commissions from the Barbican Centre London, the Holland Festival; San Francisco Symphony; the Rothko Chapel; Vienna Festival; Hebbel Theater, Berlin; BAM (for guitarist Pat Metheny); Spoleto Festival USA; West German Radio, Köln; Settembre Musica, Torino; the Fromm Music Foundation for clarinetist Richard Stoltzman; St. Louis Symphony Orchestra; Betty Freeman for the Kronos Quartet; and the Festival d'Automne, Paris, for the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. In 1994, Reich was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, to the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1995, and, in 1999, was awarded Commandeur de l'ordre des Arts et Lettres.

Rain — 2003 Next Wave Festival

Three Tales — 2002 Next Wave Festival

Drumming — 2001 Next Wave Festival

Hindenburg/Music for 18 Musicians — 1998 Next Wave Festival

The Cave — 1993 Next Wave Festival

Three Movements/Electric Counterpoint — 1987 Next Wave Festival

The Desert Music — 1984 Next Wave Festival

Tehillim/Drumming/Music for 18 Musicians and More — 1992 Next Wave/New Masters series