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Steve Reich Biography
Steve Reich has been recognized internationally as one of the world's foremost living composers. From his early taped speech works It's Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966) to The Cave (1993) his collaboration with the video artist Beryl Korot, Mr. Reich's path has embraced not only aspects of Western classical music, but the structures, harmonies, and rhythms of non-Western and American vernacular music, particularly jazz. Mr. Reich's work has been hailed by the Washington Post as "absolutely spellbinding....so original in impulse and form that it challenges all past assumptions about the goals of the art....intensely visceral and frequently almost hallucinogenic in impact."
Born in New York (1936), and raised there and in California, Mr. 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 of Music with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti. Mr. Reich received his M.A. in Music from Mills College in 1963, where he worked with Darius Milhaud and Luciano Berio.
During the summer of 1970, with the help of a grant from the Institute for International Education, Mr. Reich studied drumming at the Institute for African Studies at the University of Ghana in Accra. In 1973 and 1974 he studied Balinese Semar Pegulingan and Gamelan Gambang at the American Society for Eastern Arts in Seattle and Berkeley, California. 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 eighteen 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.
Mr. 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." Mr. Reich has an exclusive recording contract with the Nonesuch label; in 1990 he received a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Composition for Different Trains as recorded by the Kronos Quartet on Nonesuch.
In 1997, Nonesuch released a ten-disc retrospective box set, Steve Reich Works: 1965-1995, comprising both previously released material and new recordings. In lengthy articles and reviews, critics have hailed the set as vital and compelling listening. Tim Page of The Washington Post called it "exhilarating...[Reich] has given us many masterpieces and has had a profound effect on the aesthetic of late-20th-century music."
The Cave, Steve Reich and Beryl Korot's theater piece exploring the Biblical story of Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Ishmael, and Isaac, was acclaimed by Time magazine as "a fascinating glimpse of what opera might be like in the 21st century." Epic in proportion, the original five-screen, eighteen-musician production consists of edited documentary
video footage timed with live and sampled music.
Commissioned by a consortium of presenters in Vienna, Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin, London, and New York, The Cave was premiered in Vienna on May 15, 1993, toured Europe, and opened the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival in October 1993. A recording of The Cave has been released on Nonesuch; in addition, a new touring version of The Cave was premiered in Chicago in April 1996.
Forthcoming from Reich and Korot is Three Tales, a full-evening music-theater piece on the topic of technology and its consequences. The first act, Hindenburg, premieres at the Spoleto USA Festival May 1998. The other two parts of the trilogy, Bikini and Dolly, examine atomic bomb testing and the cloning of an adult sheep respectively, and will premiere as part of the completed Three Tales in 2001.
Mr. Reich's most recent major concert works, City Life and Proverb, have met with widespread acclaim. City Life, which features such sampled sounds of the city as car horns, door slams, air brakes, subway chimes, pile drivers, car alarms, heart beats, boat horns, buoys, and fire and police sirens, was commissioned by the Ensemble Modern, the London Sinfonietta, and the Ensemble InterContemporain. It has since been heard throughout Europe and the U.S. Proverb, scored for six voices, two keyboards, and two percussion, is set to text by Ludwig Wittgenstein. It was commissioned by the BBC Proms for their 100th anniversary season and was performed as a work-in-progress at the Royal Albert Hall in September 1995. The completed Proverb was given its world premiere by Steve Reich and Musicians with Theater of Voices, Paul Hillier, director, at Lincoln Center in February 1996 and was toured by the ensemble during the 1996-97 season.
Over the years, Steve Reich has received commissions from the Holland Festival; San Francisco Symphony; the Rothko Chapel; flutist Ransom Wilson; the Brooklyn Academy of Music for guitarist Pat Metheny; West German Radio, Cologne; Fromm Music Foundation for clarinetist Richard Stoltzman; the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra; Betty Freeman for the Kronos Quartet; and Festival d'Automne, Paris for the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. His music has been performed by major orchestras around the world, including the New York Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, the St. Louis Symphony, the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the BBC Symphony, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Among conductors his champions include Zubin Mehta, Michael Tilson Thomas, Leonard Slatkin, Kent Nagano, and Peter Eötvös.
Several noted choreographers have created dances to Steve Reich's music, including Anne Theresa de Keersmacker, Jir’ Kyl’an, Jerome Robbins, and Laura Dean, who commissioned Sextet. That ballet, entitled Impact, was premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival, and earned Steve Reich and Laura Dean a Bessie Award in 1986. Other major choreographers using Mr. Reich's music include Eliot Feld, Alvin Ailey, Lar Lubovitch, Maurice Bejart, Lucinda Childs, Siobhan Davies, and Richard Alston.
In 1994 Steve Reich was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Reich Interview
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Biography
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Steve Reich
(photo: John Halpern)
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Supporting Materials
Biography
List of Works
List of Recordings
Links
Archive Home
Steve Reich's photo, biography, list of works, and discography courtesy of Boosey & Hawkes
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