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Steve Reich (born Stephen Michael Reich, October 3, 1936) is an American composer. Reich is known as one of the pioneers of minimalism, although he sometimes deviates from a purely minimalist style. more...

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Ideas Reich has developed include using tape loops to create phasing patterns (such as in his first works, It's Gonna Rain, Come Out, Drumming); and using processes to create and explore musical concepts (Pendulum Music, Four Organs). These compositions, marked by their use of repetitive figures and phasing effects, have been a major influence in contemporary American music as well as contemporary music as a whole; The Guardian has described Reich as one of the few composers to have "altered the direction of musical history".

Early life and work

While Reich was born in New York, his childhood years were split between divorced parents in New York and California. He was given piano lessons as a child and describes growing up with the "middle-class favorites", having no exposure to music written before 1750 or after 1900. At the age of 14 he began to study music in earnest, after hearing music from the Baroque period and earlier as well as music of the 20th century, and began studying drums with Roland Koloff in order to play jazz. His college years were spent at Cornell, where he took some music courses but graduated (in 1957) with a B.A. in philosophy. (Reich's B.A. thesis was on Ludwig Wittgenstein; later he would set text by the philosopher to music in Proverb (1990) and You Are (variations) (2004).)

In the following year he studied composition privately with Hall Overton; he then moved on to Juilliard to study with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti (1958 to 1961). Subsequently he attended Mills College in Oakland where he studied with Luciano Berio (composing a student piece for string orchestra) and Darius Milhaud (1961–63) and earned a master's degree in composition.

Process music and Minimalism

Reich's early forays into composition involved experimentation with twelve-tone composition, but had found the rhythmic aspects of the twelve-tone series more an interest than the melodic aspects. Reich had also composed one film soundtrack for The Plastic Haircut and Oh Dem Watermelons, two films by Robert Nelson. The soundtrack for Oh Dem Watermelons, composed in 1965, involving basic tape work, using repeated phrasing together in a large five-part canon.

Later, Reich was influenced by fellow minimalist Terry Riley. Riley's loosely structured aleatoric work In C combines simple musical patterns, offset in time, to create a slowly shifting, cohesive whole. Reich adopted this approach to compose his first major work, It's Gonna Rain. Written in 1965, It's Gonna Rain is made up of recordings of a sermon about the end of the world given by the African American Pentecostal preacher Brother Walter. Reich built on his early tape work, transferring the sermon to multiple tape loops played in and out of phase, with segments of the sermon cut and rearranged.

Read more at Wikipedia.org