.

Steve Reich

Born in New York, Steve Reich graduated with honors  in philosophy from Cornell University in 1957. He subsequently studied composition with Hall Overton, and from 1958 to 1961 he studied at the Juilliard School of Music with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti.

At Mills College in 1963 he received his M.A. in Music and had the opportunity to work with Luciano Berio and Darius Milhaud. Steve Reich studied drumming at the Institute for African Studies at the University of Ghana in Accra, Balinese Gamelan Semar Pegulingan and Gamelan Gambang at the American Society for Eastern Arts in Seattle and Berkeley, California and he also 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 18 members or more.

Mr. Reich’s 1988 piece, Different Trains, marked a new compositional method, in which speech recordings generate the musical material for musical instruments.

Over the years, Steve Reich has received commissions from the Barbican Centre London, the Holland Festival; San Francisco Symphony; the Rothko Chapel; Vienna Festival, Hebbel Theater, Berlin, the Brooklyn Academy of Music for guitarist Pat Metheny; Spoleto Festival USA, West German Radio, Cologne; Settembre Musica, Torino, the Fromm Music Foundation for clarinetist Richard Stoltzman; the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra; Betty Freeman for the Kronos Quartet; and the Festival d’Automne, Paris, for the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution.

teve Reich’s music has been performed by major  orchestras and ensembles around the world.

In 1994 Steve Reich was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, to the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1995, and, in 1999, awarded Commandeur de l’ordre des Arts et Lettres. The year 2000 brought five additional honors: the Schuman Prize from Columbia University, the Montgomery Fellowship from Dartmouth College, the Regent’s Lectureship at the University of California at Berkeley, an honorary doctorate from the California Institute of the Arts and Musical America’s Composer of the Year.

Reprinted by kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes

Steve Reich's website can be seen at www.stevereich.com