1960s Reich's early forays into composition involved experimentation with
twelve-tone composition, but he found the rhythmic aspects of the number twelve more interesting than the pitch aspects. Reich also composed film soundtracks for
Plastic Haircut (1963),
Oh Dem Watermelons (1965), and
Thick Pucker (1965), three films by
Robert Nelson. The soundtrack of
Plastic Haircut, composed in 1963, was a short tape collage, possibly Reich's first. The
Watermelons soundtrack used two 19th-century
minstrel tunes as its basis, and used repeated phrasing together in a large five-part
canon. The music for
Thick Pucker arose from street recordings Reich made walking around San Francisco with Nelson, who filmed in black and white 16mm. This film no longer survives. A fourth film from 1965, about 25 minutes long and tentatively entitled "Thick Pucker II", was assembled by Nelson from outtakes of that shoot and more of the raw audio Reich had recorded. Nelson was not happy with the resulting film and never showed it. 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. Reich adopted this approach to compose his first major work, ''It's Gonna Rain''. Composed in 1965, the piece used a fragment of a
sermon about the end of the world given by a Black
Pentecostal street-preacher known as Brother Walter. Reich built on his early tape work, transferring the last three words of the fragment, "it's gonna rain!", to multiple tape loops that gradually move
out of phase with one another. The 13-minute
Come Out (1966) uses similarly manipulated
sound collage recordings of a single spoken line given by Daniel Hamm, one of the falsely accused
Harlem Six, who was severely injured by police. The survivor, who had been beaten, punctured a bruise on his own body to convince police to allow him to receive medical aid for his injury from the police beating. Out of Hamm's spoken line "I had to, like, open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them," Reich rerecorded the fragment "come out to show them" on two channels, which are initially played in unison. They quickly slip out of sync; gradually the discrepancy widens and becomes a reverberation. The two voices then split into four, looped continuously, then eight, and continues splitting until the actual words are unintelligible, leaving the listener with only the speech's rhythmic and tonal patterns. In
Melodica (1966), Reich applies the phase looping approach of his previous works to a musical instrument. He started by playing and recording a simple melody on a
melodica. He then places the recording on two separate channels, and by slowly moving them out of phase creates an intricate interlocking melody. This piece is very similar to
Come Out in rhythmic structure, and is an example of how one rhythmic process can be realized in different sounds to create two different pieces of music. Reich was inspired to compose this piece from a dream he had on May 22, 1966, and put the piece together in one day.
Melodica was the last piece Reich composed solely for tape, and he considers it his transition from tape music to instrumental music. Reich's first attempt at translating this phasing technique from recorded tape to live performance was the 1967
Piano Phase, for two pianos. In
Piano Phase the performers repeat a rapid twelve-note
melodic figure, initially in unison. As one player keeps tempo with robotic precision, the other speeds up very slightly until the two parts line up again, but one sixteenth note apart. The second player then resumes the previous tempo. This cycle of speeding up and then locking in continues throughout the piece; the cycle comes full circle three times, the second and third cycles using shorter versions of the initial figure.
Violin Phase, also written in 1967, is built on these same lines.
Piano Phase and
Violin Phase both premiered in a series of concerts given in New York art galleries. A similar, lesser known example of this so-called
process music is
Pendulum Music (1968), which consists of the sound of several microphones swinging over the loudspeakers to which they are attached, producing
feedback as they do so. "Pendulum Music" has never been recorded by Reich himself, but was introduced to rock audiences by
Sonic Youth in the late 1990s. Reich also tried to create the phasing effect in a piece "that would need no instrument beyond the human body". He found that the idea of phasing was inappropriate for the simple ways he was experimenting to make sound. Instead, he composed
Clapping Music (1972), in which the players do not phase in and out with each other, but instead one performer keeps one line of a 12-eighth-note-long (12-quaver-long) phrase and the other performer shifts by one
eighth note beat every 12 bars, until both performers are back in unison 144 bars later. The 1967 prototype piece
Slow Motion Sound was not performed although
Chris Hughes performed it 27 years later as
Slow Motion Blackbird on his Reich-influenced 1994 album
Shift. It introduced the idea of slowing down a recorded sound until many times its original length without changing pitch or timbre, which Reich applied to
Four Organs (1970), which deals specifically with augmentation. The piece has
maracas playing a fast
eighth note pulse, while the four organs stress certain eighth notes using an 11th chord. This work therefore dealt with
repetition and subtle rhythmic change. In contrast to Reich's typical cyclical structure,
Four Organs is unique among his work in using a linear structure—the superficially similar
Phase Patterns, also for four organs but without maracas, is (as the name suggests) a cyclical phase piece similar to others composed during the period.
Four Organs was performed as part of a
Boston Symphony Orchestra program, and was Reich's first composition to be performed in a large traditional setting.
1970s In June 1970, Reich travelled to the
University of Ghana to study
polyrhythmic music for five weeks with the
Ewe master drummer Gideon Alorwoyie. From this experience, as well as
A. M. Jones's
Studies in African Music about the
music of the Ewe people, Reich drew inspiration for his extensive piece
Drumming (1970–1971), which he started to compose shortly after his return. Composed for a nine-piece percussion ensemble with female voices and
piccolo,
Drumming marked the beginning of a new stage in his career, for around this time he formed his ensemble,
Steve Reich and Musicians, and increasingly concentrated on composition and performance with them. Steve Reich and Musicians was the sole ensemble to interpret his works for many years, and they remain a "living laboratory" for his music. The ensemble still remains active with many of its original members. After
Drumming, Reich moved on from the "phase shifting" technique that he had pioneered, and began writing more elaborate pieces. He started investigating other musical processes such as
augmentation (the temporal lengthening of phrases and melodic fragments). In the summers of 1973 and 1974, he studied
Balinese gamelan
semar pegulingan and
gambang This experience influenced the composition of
Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ (1973). Another work from this period is
Six Pianos (1973). In 1974, Reich began writing
Music for 18 Musicians. This piece involved many new ideas, although it also recalls earlier pieces. It is based on a
cycle of
eleven chords introduced at the beginning (called "Pulses"), followed by a small section of music based on each
chord ("Sections I-XI"), and finally a return to the original cycle ("Pulses II"). This was Reich's first attempt at writing for larger
ensembles. The increased number of performers resulted in more scope for psychoacoustic effects, which fascinated Reich, and he noted that he would like to "explore this idea further". Reich remarked that this one work contained more harmonic movement in the first five minutes than any other work he had written. Steve Reich and Musicians made the
premier recording of this work on
ECM Records. One of Reich’s characteristic compositional strategies for his minimalist work is his omission of bass notes to avoid tonal structure. “The reason lay in his antipathy to the functionality, which Reich thought inevitable, of the bass in determining and spelling out a tonal center and the relationships developed around this”. "Music for 18 Musicians” maintains his minimalist feel through these “phases” and harmonic shifts. A piece with rich tonal exploration about an hour’s length performance can only provide so much melodic opportunity, so repetitive rhythmic structure also plays a large role in this. Reich explored these ideas further in his frequently recorded pieces
Music for a Large Ensemble (1978) and
Octet (1979). In these two works, Reich experimented with "the human breath as the measure of musical duration ... the chords played by the trumpets are written to take one comfortable breath to perform". Human voices are part of the musical palette in
Music for a Large Ensemble but the wordless vocal parts simply form part of the texture (as they do in
Drumming). With
Octet and his first orchestral piece
Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards (also 1979), Reich's music showed the influence of Biblical
cantillation, which he had studied in Israel since the summer of 1977. After this, the human voice singing a text would play an increasingly important role in Reich's music. In 1974 Reich published the book
Writings About Music, containing essays on his philosophy, aesthetics, and musical projects written between 1963 and 1974. An updated and much more extensive collection,
Writings On Music (1965–2000), was published in 2002.
1980s 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.
Tehillim (1981),
Hebrew for
psalms, is the first of Reich's works to draw explicitly on his Jewish background. The work is in four parts, and is scored for an ensemble of four women's voices (one high
soprano, two lyric sopranos and one
alto),
piccolo, flute,
oboe,
English horn, two
clarinets, six percussion (playing small tuned
tambourines without jingles, clapping,
maracas,
marimba,
vibraphone and
crotales), two
electronic organs, two violins,
viola, cello and double bass, with amplified voices, strings, and winds. A setting of texts from Psalms 19:2–5 (19:1–4 in Christian translations), 34:13–15 (34:12–14), 18:26–27 (18:25–26), and 150:4–6,
Tehillim is a departure from Reich's other work in its formal structure; the setting of texts several lines long rather than the fragments used in previous works makes melody a substantive element. Use of formal
counterpoint and functional
harmony also contrasts with the loosely structured minimalist works written previously. The musicologist Ronit Seter described it as "one of a very few non-Israeli works where the setting of the Hebrew text feels natural", reflecting Reich's extensive research into modern Hebrew-Israeli speech, ancient Psalmic prosody and Jewish cantillation traditions.
Different Trains (1988), for
string quartet and tape, uses recorded speech, as in his earlier works, but this time as a melodic rather than a rhythmic element. In
Different Trains, Reich compares and contrasts his childhood memories of his train journeys between New York and California in 1939–1941 with the very different trains being used to transport contemporaneous European children to their deaths under
Nazi rule. The
Kronos Quartet recording of
Different Trains was awarded the
Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition in 1990. The composition was described by
Richard Taruskin as "the only adequate musical response—one of the few adequate artistic responses in any medium—to
the Holocaust", and he credited the piece with earning Reich a place among the great composers of the 20th century.
1990s In 1993, 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. The work, for percussion, voices, and strings, is a musical documentary, named for the
Cave of Machpelah in
Hebron, where a mosque now stands and
Abraham is said to have been buried. According to musicologist Ronit Seter, the work "share[s] the confrontational, yet peaceful message" conveyed by contemporaneous Israeli composers.
2000s The instrumental series for the concert hall continued with
Dance Patterns (2002),
Cello Counterpoint (2003), and multiple works centered around variations:
You Are (Variations) (2004),
Variations for Vibes, Pianos, and Strings (2005), and the
Daniel Variations (2006).
You Are looks back to the vocal writing of
Tehillim and
The Desert Music while the
Daniel Variations, which Reich called "much darker, not at all what I'm known for", are partly inspired by the death of
Daniel Pearl. In 2002 Reich was invited by
Walter Fink to the annual
Komponistenporträt of the
Rheingau Musik Festival, as the 12th composer featured. In December 2010
Nonesuch Records and
Indaba Music held a community remix contest in which over 250 submissions were received, and Steve Reich and Christian Carey judged the finals. 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. On the other hand, he acknowledged that remixes have an old tradition e.g. famous religious music pieces where melodies were further developed into new songs.
2010s Reich premiered a piece,
WTC 9/11, written for String Quartet and Tape (a similar instrumentation to that of
Different Trains) in March 2011. This was a response to the
September 11 attacks and used recordings from emergency services and from family members who were in New York during the attacks. It was premiered by the
Kronos Quartet, at
Duke University, North Carolina, US. On March 5, 2013, the London Sinfonietta, conducted by Brad Lubman, at the
Royal Festival Hall in London gave the world premiere of
Radio Rewrite, Reich's work inspired by the band
Radiohead. The programme also included
Double Sextet,
Clapping Music, featuring Reich himself alongside percussionist
Colin Currie,
Electric Counterpoint, with electric guitar by
Mats Bergström as well as two of Reich's ensemble pieces. In September 2014 for the 50th anniversary of Nonesuch Records, Reich reunited with Philip Glass at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Music for Ensemble and Orchestra was premiered on November 4, 2018 by the
Los Angeles Philharmonic under
Susanna Mälkki at
Walt Disney Concert Hall, marking Reich's return to writing for orchestra after an interval of more than thirty years. Reich has lived with his wife Beryl Korot in a home in
upstate New York since 2006. ==Awards==