Reich, Steve [Stephen] (Michael)

Paul Griffiths

https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.23091
Published in print: 20 January 2001
Published online: 2001

Updated in this version

updated works list, 26 November 2003

(b New York, Oct 3, 1936). American composer. One of the first masters of the repetitive music that
emerged in New York in the mid-1960s and was soon branded ‘minimalism’, he has consistently
broadened and developed his musical world without compromising the streamlined efficiency and
precision of his technique. Repetitive, pulse-driven figures have remained a characteristic, but so have
the slips and leaps of a lively mind.

1. To ‘Drumming’.

Following the divorce of his parents, Reich's childhood was divided between New York and California,
involving him in long rail journeys which he recalled much later in Different Trains. Boyhood piano
lessons left little impression; his musical life took off when, at the age of 14, he began studying
drumming with Roland Kohloff. At Cornell University (1953–7) his principal study was philosophy, but
he also attended William Austin's music course, where he found a congenial view of the subject that
jumped from Bach to the 20th century. On returning to New York he devoted himself to composition
studies, first privately with Hall Overton (1957–8) and then at the Juilliard School with Bergsma and
Persichetti (1958–61). From there he went to Mills College, California, to study for the master's degree
in composition with Berio (1961–3).

He remained in San Francisco, where he made the simple discovery that led to his first acknowledged
piece, It's Gonna Rain (1965), and provided the seed from which his music would grow: that two
machines playing identical loops of recorded speech would slowly move out of synchrony with each
other. Performing with Terry Riley in In C – as well as listening to recordings of John Coltrane and
African drumming (which he had also studied in A.M. Jones's book) – had quickened his interest in
harmonic stasis and short repeating patterns; he based It's Gonna Rain partly on chopping and
rearranging elements in a sequence of speech but much more on the new technique of ‘phasing’, as he
called it (because identical elements move in and out of phase; see ex.1 below). Following a definitive
return to New York, he composed another tape piece, Come Out (1966), based entirely on phasing.

From there he could have gone in any of a number of directions. The two tape pieces show how words
can be at once intensified and dislocated by exception from context, disruption of order, repetition and
phased superimposition. The pieces also achieve increasing complexity and confusion as layers of
recordings (and tape noise) are added. They could, equally, have led to an interest in the effect of room
acoustics on the playback of repetitive material, or to a music of political commitment, since the
speakers – a preacher and a murder suspect – are both black. But Reich's immediate concerns were
otherwise: to test whether phasing could be done with instruments, to integrate himself into existing

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traditions of music-making (he has repeatedly expressed his respect for a group of masters that always
includes Perotinus, J.S. Bach and Stravinsky) and to create audible processes of gradual change
(though not without surprises). These concerns led him on to Piano Phase for pianos and Violin Phase
for violins, both written in 1967 and both performed in the concerts he began giving in New York art
galleries in the late 1960s, in a thriving milieu where other minimalists – film makers and visual artists
as well as musicians – were active. He and his ensemble, Steve Reich and Musicians, also began
making records during this period, starting with Violin Phase in 1969. Ex.1, a bar from Violin Phase,
shows how the phasing process works. Here the phase shifting has reached a point where the second
violin is two crotchet beats ahead of the first, and the third violin two beats ahead of the second
(therefore two behind the first), while the fourth picks out a resulting pattern. However, from the
combination of all four violins the listener may deduce other patterns. These – real and imaginary,
blooming and going as the phasing process continues – are responsible for some of the liveliness in
Reich's music. Also important, throughout his output, is the metrical ambiguity – often, as here, within
a 12/8 frame. If ex.1 is heard as one 12/8 bar, and not as three bars in 4/8, where is the first beat? At
other points the uncertainty will also be between three- and fourfold divisions of the bar.

Ex.1 Violin Phase

Similar processes of phasing and pattern enhancement are involved in Phase Patterns for four electric
organs (1970), while in another work for the same combination, written earlier the same year and
called simply Four Organs, a different sort of process is allowed to run its course: a nine-note chord,
jabbed by the organs, has its notes extended one at a time, so that melodic motifs emerge and are then
obscured again as the sustained notes grow to fill all the available time. These pieces were included in
a concert Reich gave of his music at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in the spring of 1970, after
which he left to study drumming for five weeks at the University of Ghana in Accra. On his return to
New York he began Drumming (1970–71), a synthesis of the processes of the pieces for four organs and
also his first big public statement, both in its 90-minute duration (reduced to an hour at revivals from
the late 1980s onwards, when the players found themselves taking fewer repeats) and in its scoring for
nine percussionists, playing small tuned drums, marimbas and glockenspiels, with two female voices
(singing resultant melodies but with the effect of a backing group) and piccolo. Drumming was a
summation, and at the same time marked a move to music of breadth and sensuousness, perhaps
reflecting the success the composer had come to enjoy. In 1971, while composing it, he had gained his
first performance in a large concert venue, when Four Organs had been included in a Boston SO
programme, and he and his ensemble had made their first European tour. They included it on their

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second tour the next year, and in 1974 they recorded it for Deutsche Grammophon. Drumming also
provided Reich with the sound world, of rippling multiple keyed percussion, that was to become his
home.

2. Orchestras and other ensembles, 1972–87.

For the exigencies of touring, Reich created a piece that could be rehearsed in a hotel room and used
sounds he was increasingly hearing: Clapping Music for two pairs of hands (1972). But his main swerve
was, on the contrary, towards larger and richer ensembles, and to developing not so much the
dynamism and attack of Drumming as its chiming sonorities: hence Six Pianos (later made a little more
practicable, and gentler, as Six Marimbas) and Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ (both
1973). These works are based on a technique of repeating a figure and then building up a duplicate,
beat by beat, out of phase with the repetitions. The second score, seductively combining warm notes
held by the female vocalists and the organ with lustrous rising melodic patterns on marimbas and
glockenspiels, has the psychedelic colour of the period while relating also to the gamelan music of Bali.
Characteristically, Reich again went to the source, and studied with Balinese teachers in Seattle later
in 1973 and in Berkeley the next year.

But Music for Mallet Instruments turned out to be only another moment to pass through. Reich's next
project was again on the scale of Drumming, and it restored his music's keen edge without losing its
new-found lustre: Music for 18 Musicians (1974–6). The ensemble is rather similar to that of Music for
Mallet Instruments but a little larger, comprising percussion, female voices and sustaining instruments
(pairs of strings and clarinets). The music, though, is sharper in its attacks and more harmonically
driven. Emerging out of pulsations – which are regular but constantly feature new notes and colours
coming forward, and which continue throughout – the piece moves smoothly through several sections
in which repeating patterns are joined by duplications and counterpoints, but in more complex textures
and against the background not only of the pulsations but of grand harmonic progressions. A cycle of
11 chords, played slowly in the opening section, is played even more slowly in those that follow,
providing the scaffolding for less glacial harmonic movements as well as for the contrapuntal
inventions that had gradually ousted Reich's simple phasing process while keeping its repetitive frame.
Typically these inventions start with a repeating figure, to which other figures are added one by one,
each figure, including the first, subject to gradual alteration, so that within a context of constant
recycling there is constant change. This was to be Reich's essential technique from then on. The work
also defined his essential texture, combining up to three tempos: the allegro molto of the restless
pulsation, the slower feel of the repeating patterns moving to that pulse, and adagio waves of notes and
harmonies defined by the length of a breath. What results is a radiant wash of sound around
fascinating activity. The first recording, which appeared in 1978, found a large audience.

Hitherto Reich had not been eager to have his music played by other ensembles, though he did
eventually publish his early ensemble pieces with Universal Edition in the mid-1970s. After Music for
18 Musicians, however, the opportunities of commissions became irresistible, and he acquired a new
publisher in Boosey & Hawkes. The commissions allowed him to write a new piece – Eight Lines
(originally Octet, 1979), for Radio Frankfurt – for an ensemble of the size he was used to but reversing
the balance between sustaining instruments and percussion; they also gave him chances to compose
for bigger forces in Music for a Large Ensemble (1978), for the Holland Festival, and Variations for
Winds, Strings and Keyboards (1979), for the San Francisco SO.

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These works develop the discoveries of Music for 18 Musicians, especially in the layering of tempos,
the repetitive but changing figuration and the independent handling of melody and harmony, but they
also suggest something waiting to happen. Reich's work with Ghanaian and Balinese musicians had
caused him to think about what tradition he belonged to, and the result was a period of study in 1976–
7 of Hebrew, of the Torah and of cantillation, for which he went to Israel to hear singers from different
eastern Sephardi communities. Out of this finally came Tehillim (1981), a setting of psalm verses – his
first work since the early tape pieces to incorporate words. What he had heard in Israel went into the
background, against which he wrote melodies that give his characteristic regular pulses, ambivalent
metres and repetitions a quite original freshness and bounce. Generally the three rhythmic layers
comprise a quick one of percussive pulsation and a slow one of wind-string harmony, with an
intermediate level of vocal activity, sprung against the pulse and the harmony. To the original version,
for four women's voices and ensemble, Reich soon added an alternative, with fuller strings.

Next came his first small-scale piece since Clapping Music a decade before: Vermont Counterpoint for
flute and tape (1982), in which the richer textures of his subsequent music are adapted to solo
instrumental performance; this was followed by his largest-scale work to date, The Desert Music
(1982–4), for which he took lines from William Carlos Williams, and in which, as in Tehillim, rather few
words, through abundant repetition, support extended stretches of music: playing for three-quarters of
an hour, The Desert Music was his longest work between Music for 18 Musicians and The Cave, which
fills an evening. There are connections with Tehillim, especially in the triple-layered tempos and the
use of wide intervals and high registers that help give the vocal parts an instrumental feel, but the
choral writing is more homophonic and the harmony darker. The work moves from fast to moderately
paced to slow and back again, the central slow movement being much the longest. Here the piece
changes its nature, from ebullient cantata on music to solemn warning about the dangers of
technological advance. At the opening of the finale, K. Robert Schwarz observed,

the sustained chords are voiced so as to create an immense six-octave span from double-bass
to piccolo. As the bustling counterpoint intertwines within these chords, the visual image that
arises is of a solitary human running across a vast desolate plain – a desert at once
intimidating and exhilarating.

After this massive undertaking, Reich went back to his roots in works exploiting a small percussion
ensemble (Sextet, 1984) and recorded superimpositions (New York Counterpoint, 1985). Both pieces
continue the darkening of harmony and the introduction of more chromatic modes to create a
sombreness far removed from the joy of Music for 18 Musicians and Tehillim. The imitative and
polymetrical texture, however, is similar, and the relative simplicity of New York Counterpoint, for
clarinet and recorded clarinets, permits a compact illustration (ex.2). Here, close to the start of the
three linked short movements, not only is the live clarinet doubling one of the recorded voices at the
10th (or 3rd) below, but the other two taped parts are in canon with the first – rather as in the early
phasing pieces, except that the displacements are now harmonic as well as rhythmic. One motif in the
recorded parts stays the same (G–C–F), while the other emphasizes a different note on each line, so
that there is an ambiguity about whether the tonic is A♭, B♭ or E♭, just as there is about whether the
main downbeat comes on the first, sixth or ninth quaver. The positioning of these downbeats also
makes it uncertain whether the quavers are grouped in fours (lines 1 and 3) or threes (lines 2 and 3).
The repeating frame is springy with different tensions, balances and points of repose.

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Ex.2 from New York Counterpoint (1985)

New York Counterpoint was soon joined by a third such virtuoso sonata, Electric Counterpoint, for
electric guitar and tape (1987). These two pieces perhaps gave the composer some relief at a time
when he was committed to orchestral projects, for after The Desert Music were soon to come Three
Movements (1986) and The Four Sections (1987), in both of which (and, in the latter, as implied in the
title) a characteristic ensemble of marimbas, metallophones (vibraphones with motors off) and
keyboard instruments has equal status with the other orchestral departments. The Four Sections
makes this equivalence its story. After a string-led Adagio, the percussion group dramatically enters to
quicken the pace. Then comes a wind-centred invention in the manner of New York Counterpoint,
followed by a tutti movement in which, nevertheless, the different sections are still on their own
trajectories, the strings slow and the others faster. However exuberant the rhythmic activity, the effect
is of grim inexorability, and there is a melancholy feel, too, in the modality of the opening movement.

3. Speech melody.

The darkening of Reich's music through the 1980s has many possible associations – on the material
level with his recovery of modes typical of Jewish song and worship, and expressively with his
awareness of some of the decade's principal problems: pollution, AIDS, political cynicism and the
Israeli–Arab conflict. Another theme emerged in Different Trains (1988), though only as a result of a
musical formal idea which he had rejected for The Desert Music and which was to prove immensely
fruitful: that of using recorded speech, as he had two decades before, but now as a source of melody.
The theme was to be the rail journeys he had made as a child, and the different trains that were taking
other Jewish children at the time to their deaths in Nazi-occupied Europe. Accordingly, Reich collected
recordings of train sounds (rattlings of wheels and carriages, whistling) and spoken testimony from his
governess, a retired porter and holocaust survivors. Short excerpts he notated as melodies, to be
played by live and recorded string quartets. Often the melodies are introduced by the instruments, so
that the taped voices seem to be prompted by the instrumental music, rather than the other way
around. Near the start, for instance, a motif is introduced by a recorded cello, then repeated by the live
viola, being joined by the governess's voice just on the second repetition (ex.3). One nice feature of the
piece is how the train metaphor fits elements long present in Reich's music, sustained chords now
doubling recorded train whistles and ostinatos the regular mechanical movement. It is also possible for
lines to go off on their own rhythmic tracks, as here, where the ‘from Chicago’ motif is in 7/8 alongside
the prevailing 2/4.

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Ex.3 from Different Trains (1988)

Expanding the speech-music technique of Different Trains, Reich moved on to his biggest undertaking
so far, The Cave (1990–93), for which he chose not to return to the orchestra but to go back further, to
the sort of compact ensemble of percussion with voices and sustaining instruments (string quartet in
this case) that had been characteristic of his music through the decade from Drumming to Tehillim.
This was his world, and in it he created a kind of cave of listening, where the words of interview
subjects – Israelis, Palestinians and Americans – echo among the instruments and voices. Again he had
found an apt metaphor, for The Cave is a cave about a cave: the cave at Hebron that is by tradition the
burial place of Abraham (Ibrahim for the Muslims) and Sarah (Sarai). The work, which he created in
collaboration with his wife, the video maker Beryl Korot, is a documentary, but one in which the music
is at all levels part of the topic.

After The Cave Reich and Korot went on to a similar project, Three Tales (begun 1997), a set of
technological fables based on the crash of the airship Hindenburg, atomic bomb testing in the Pacific
and animal cloning. But Reich also took the opportunities of commissions to work on more purely
musical problems in smaller pieces. Proverb (1995), intended for the Proms and the Utrecht Early
Music Festival, profits from the experience he had working on The Cave with Paul Hillier and with
singers who had formed their style in medieval polyphony: based on one melodic thought, it is music of
drones and rhythmically insistent counterpoint, close to Perotinus. Nagoya Marimbas (1994) is a
further study for bouncing lines of one colour – this time short and playful, and again skimming a
foreign modal system, that of Japanese music, having been written for the opening of a new hall at the
Nagoya Conservatory. City Life (1994), commissioned by three leading new-music ensembles in
Europe, is a portrait of the composer's home, formed around seeds of actuality in the manner of
Different Trains and, from much further back, Livelihood, which he had based on fragments of speech
and noises picked up in the cab he was driving. This time he used spoken phrases along with the noises

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of slammed car doors, steam hissing in the street, a pile-driver, a foghorn and a fire emergency,
avoiding problems of ensemble-tape synchronization by having the recordings played on sampling
keyboards. Triple Quartet (1999) is more fully in the world of Different Trains, but uses only
interlocking harmonies, metres and tempos, along with canonic imitation, to keep the music on track.
It also shows, in its modality, the continuing importance to the composer of his Jewish heritage.

Works

first performances by Steve Reich and Musicians unless otherwise stated

withdrawn

Ubu roi (incid music, A. Jarry), 1963

The Plastic Haircut, tape for film, 1963

Pitch Charts, insts, 1963

Livelihood, tape, 1964

Music for 3 or More Pianos, pfs/(pf, tape), 1964

Oh dem Watermelons, film score, 1965

It's Gonna Rain, tape, 1965

San Francisco Tape Music Center, Jan 1965

Come Out, tape, 1966

New York, Town Hall, April 1966

Melodica, tape, 1966

New York, Park Place Gallery, June 1966

Reed Phase, s sax, tape, 1966

New York, Park Place Gallery, March 1967

Piano Phase, 2 pf, 1967

New York, Park Place Gallery, March 1967

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 Slow Motion Sound, text score for tape, 1967

My Name Is, text score for 3 or more tape machines, 1967

Violin Phase, 4 vn/(vn, tape), 1967

New York, Fall Gallery, aut. 1968

Pendulum Music, elec, 1968

Boulder, U. of Colorado, sum. 1968

Pulse Music, elec, 1969

New York, Whitney Museum, May 1969

Four Log Drums, 1969

New York, Whitney Museum, May 1969

Four Organs, 4 elec org, maracas, 1970, New York, Guggenheim Museum; May 1970

Phase Patterns, 4 elec org, 1970, New York, Guggenheim Museum; May 1970

Drumming, 9 perc, 2 female vv, pic, 1970–71

New York, Museum of Modern Art, 3 Dec 1971

Clapping Music, 2 pfmrs, 1972

Six Pianos, 6 pf, 1973

New York, John Weber Gallery, 16 May 1973

arr. as Six Marimbas, 6 mar, 1986, New York, Alice Tully Hall, 20 April 1987

Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ, 7 perc, 3 female vv, elec org, 1973

New York, John Weber Gallery, 16 May 1973

Music for Pieces of Wood, 5 pairs of claves, 1973

Music for 18 Musicians, perc, 4 female vv, vn, vc, 2 cl + b cl, 1974–6

New York, Town Hall, 24 April 1976

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 Music for a Large Ensemble, 9 wind, 7 perc, 2 pf (4 players), 2 female vv, 8 str, 1978

Amsterdam, Netherlands Wind Ensemble, cond. R. de Leeuw, June 1979

Eight Lines, 2 str qt, 2 pic + fl, 2 cl + b cl, 2 pf, 1979 [as Octet], rev. 1983

Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards, 12 wind, 2 pf, 3 elec org, str, 1979, rev.
1980

New York, Carnegie Hall, 19 Feb 1980

version with fuller str, San Francisco, War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco SO,
cond. E. de Waart, 14 May 1980

Tehillim (Psalms in Heb.), 3 S, A, 4 ww, 6 perc, 2 elec org, str qnt, 1981

Cologne, cond. G. Manahan, 20 Sept 1981

version with fuller str, New York, Avery Fisher Hall, New York PO, cond. Z. Mehta, 16
Sept 1982

Vermont Counterpoint, fl, tape, 1982

New York, Brooklyn Academy of Music, R. Wilson, 1 Oct 1982

live version, 11 fl, New York, 92nd Street Y, 10 Dec 1983

The Desert Music (W.C. Williams), chorus, orch, 1982–4

Cologne, WDR Chorus and SO, cond. P. Eötvös, 17 March 1984

chbr version, 10 vv, 4 fl, 9 perc, 4 kbd, 13 str, Richmond, VA, cond. G. Manahan, 10
Jan 1986

Sextet, 4 perc, 2 pf + synth, 1984, rev. 1985

Paris, Centre Pompidou, Nexus, 19 Dec 1984

New York Counterpoint, cl, tape, 1985

New York, Avery Fisher Hall, R. Stoltzman, 1986

live version, 11 cl, Tallahassee, Florida State U. School of Music, cond. J. Croft, 21
June 1987

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 Three Movements, orch, 1986

St Louis, St Louis SO, cond. L. Slatkin, 3 April 1986

The Four Sections, orch, 1987

San Francisco, Davies Hall, San Francisco SO, cond. M.T. Thomas, 7 Oct 1987

Electric Counterpoint, elec gui, tape, 1987

New York, Brooklyn Academy of Music, P. Metheny, 1987

live version, 13 elec gui, U. of Southern California Contemporary Music Ensemble,

cond. D. Crockett, 24 Feb 1990

Different Trains (interviews), str qt, tape, 1988

London, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Kronos Quartet, 2 Nov 1988

The Cave (Jewish and Islamic sacred texts, interviews), 2 S, T, Bar, 4 perc, 3 kbd, str
qt, 2 wind, videotape, 1990–93

Vienna, Messe Palast, cond. P. Hillier, 16 May 1993

Duet, 2 vn, str, 1994

Gstaad, cond. Y. Menuhin, 8 Aug 1995

Nagoya Marimbas, 2 mar, 1994

Nagoya, Shirakawa Hall, Y. Kurihari, M. Kurihari, 21 Dec 1994

City Life, 18 insts, 1994

Metz, Arsenal, Ensemble InterContemporain, cond. D. Robertson, 7 March 1995

Proverb (L. Wittgenstein), 3 S, 2 T, 2 vib, 2 elec kbd, 1995

New York, Alice Tully Hall, Theatre of Voices, cond. Hillier, 10 Feb 1996

Three Tales (documentary materials), 2 S, 3 T, 4 perc, 2 kbd, str qt, videotape, 1997–
2001, collab. B. Korot: 1 Hindenburg, 2 Bikini, 3 Dolly; Vienna, Museumquartier,
Ensemble Modern, Synergy, cond. B. Lubman, 12 May 2002

Triple Quartet, str qt, tape, 1999

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 Washington, Kennedy Center, Kronos Quartet, 22 May 1999

live version, 3 str qt, New York, Juilliard Theater, New Juilliard Ensemble, cond. J.
Sachs, 28 Jan 2000

Know what is above you, 4 female vv (2 + perc), 1999

Brooklyn, NY, St Anne's Church, Anonymous 4, 19 Nov 1999

Electric Guitar Phase, elec gui, tape, 2000 [arr. of Violin Phase by D. Frasca]

Cello Counterpoint, (vc, tape)/8 vc, 2003

Urbana-Champaign, IL, Krannert Center, M. Baiser, 18 Oct 2003

Bibliography
S. Reich: Writings about Music (Halifax, NS, 1974), expanded as Writings on Music 1965–2000,
ed. P. Hillier (Oxford, forthcoming)

W. Zimmermann: Desert Plants: Interviews with 25 American Composers (Vancouver, 1977)

K.R. Schwarz: ‘Steve Reich: Music as a Gradual Process’, PNM, 19 (1980–81), 373–92; xx (1981–
2), 225–86

W. Mertens: American Minimal Music (London, 1983)

R. Dufallo: Trackings: Composers Speak (New York, 1989)

E. Strickland: American Composers: Dialogues on Contemporary Music (Bloomington, IN, 1991)

E. Strickland: Minimalism: Origins (Bloomington, IN, 1993)

W. Duckworth: Talking Music (New York, 1995)

K.R. Schwarz: Minimalists (London, 1996)

K. Potter: Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass
(Cambridge, 2000)

See also

Canon (i), §6: After 1900

Set, §5: Other types of set

Minimalism

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