41 Facts About Steve Reich

Stephen Michael Steve Reich is an American composer known for his contribution to the development of minimal music in the mid to late 1960s.

Steve Reich's work is marked by its use of repetitive figures, slow harmonic rhythm, and canons.

Steve Reich's innovations include using tape loops to create phasing patterns, as on the early compositions It's Gonna Rain and Come Out, and the use of simple, audible processes, as on Pendulum Music and Four Organs .

Steve Reich's work took on a darker character in the 1980s with the introduction of historical themes as well as themes from his Jewish heritage, notably Different Trains .

Steve Reich 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.

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Steve Reich studied drums with Roland Kohloff in order to play jazz.

At Mills, Steve Reich composed Melodica for melodica and tape, which appeared in 1986 on the three-LP release Music from Mills.

Steve Reich worked with the San Francisco Tape Music Center along with Pauline Oliveros, Ramon Sender, Morton Subotnick, Phil Lesh and Terry Riley.

Steve Reich was involved with the premiere of Riley's In C and suggested the use of the eighth note pulse, which is standard in performance of the piece.

Steve Reich composed film soundtracks for Plastic Haircut, Oh Dem Watermelons, and Thick Pucker, three films by Robert Nelson.

The music for Thick Pucker arose from street recordings Steve Reich made walking around San Francisco with Nelson, who filmed in black and white 16mm.

Steve Reich was influenced by fellow minimalist Terry Riley, whose work In C combines simple musical patterns, offset in time, to create a slowly shifting, cohesive whole.

Steve Reich adopted this approach to compose his first major work, It's Gonna Rain.

Steve Reich rerecorded the fragment "come out to show them" on two channels, which are initially played in unison.

Steve Reich took a simple melody, which he played on a melodica, then recorded it.

Melodica was the last piece Steve Reich composed solely for tape, and he considers it his transition from tape music to instrumental music.

Steve Reich tried to create the phasing effect in a piece "that would need no instrument beyond the human body".

Steve Reich found that the idea of phasing was inappropriate for the simple ways he was experimenting to make sound.

In contrast to Steve Reich's typical cyclical structure, Four Organs is unique among his work in using a linear structure—the superficially similar Phase Patterns, for four organs but without maracas, is a cyclical phase piece similar to others composed during the period.

In 1970, Steve Reich embarked on a five-week trip to study music in Ghana, during which he learned from the master drummer Gideon Alorwoyie.

Steve Reich studied Balinese gamelan in Seattle in 1973 and 1974.

Jones's Studies in African Music about the music of the Ewe people, Steve Reich drew inspiration for his 90-minute piece Drumming, which he composed shortly after his return.

Steve Reich investigated other musical processes such as augmentation .

Steve Reich remarked that this one work contained more harmonic movement in the first five minutes than any other work he had written.

Steve Reich explored these ideas further in his frequently recorded pieces Music for a Large Ensemble and Octet .

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In 1974 Steve Reich published the book Writings About Music, containing essays on his philosophy, aesthetics, and musical projects written between 1963 and 1974.

Steve Reich's work took on a darker character in the 1980s with the introduction of historical themes as well as themes from his Jewish heritage.

In 1993, Steve Reich collaborated with his wife, the video artist Beryl Korot, on an opera, The Cave, which explores the roots of Judaism, Christianity and Islam through the words of Israelis, Palestinians, and Americans, echoed musically by the ensemble.

Steve Reich used sampling techniques for pieces like Three Tales and City Life from 1994.

Steve Reich returned to composing purely instrumental works for the concert hall, starting with Triple Quartet in 1998 written for the Kronos Quartet that can either be performed by string quartet and tape, three string quartets or 36-piece string orchestra.

You Are looks back to the vocal writing of Tehillim and The Desert Music while the Daniel Variations, which Steve Reich called "much darker, not at all what I'm known for", are partly inspired by the death of Daniel Pearl.

In 2002 Steve Reich was invited by Walter Fink to the annual Komponistenportrat of the Rheingau Musik Festival, as the 12th composer featured.

Steve Reich spoke in a related BBC interview that once he composed a piece he would not alter it again himself; "When it's done, it's done, " he said.

Steve Reich was awarded with the Praemium Imperiale Award in Music in October 2006.

In May 2011 Steve Reich received an honorary doctorate from the New England Conservatory of Music.

In 2012, Steve Reich received the Gold Medal in Music by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In September 2014, Steve Reich was awarded the "Leone d'Oro" from the Venice Biennale.

In March 2016, Steve Reich was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the Royal College of Music in London.

In 1999 the album Steve Reich Remixed featured remixes of a number of Steve Reich's works by various electronic dance-music producers, such as DJ Spooky, Kurtis Mantronik, Ken Ishii, and Coldcut among others.

Jazz is a major part of the formation of Steve Reich's musical style, and two of the earliest influences on his work were vocalists Ella Fitzgerald and Alfred Deller, whose emphasis on the artistic capabilities of the voice alone with little vibrato or other alteration was an inspiration to his earliest works.

Steve Reich has stated that he admires the music of the band Radiohead, which led to his composition Radio Rewrite.