At 75, Seminal US Composer Still Inspires

Steve Reich's unique, minimalist style celebrated

October 31, 2011

US composer Steve Reich, who turns 75 this year, continues to inspire a new generation of musicians.

American composer Steve Reich turned 75 this year. The so-called “minimalist” credits jazz, African drumming and Balinese gamelan as inspirations.

His music - from experimental tape loops to the Pulitzer prize-winning “Double Sextet” - has, in turn, inspired other composers.

In the early 1960s, when Reich was at the beginning of his career, the contemporary classical music scene was dominated by atonal music.

"It fell to my generation to basically say, 'Basta. Enough.' to music which you could not tap your foot to," Reich says, "to music to which you could not possibly walk out humming anything, and music which had no harmonic center."

Reich was studying composition at Mills College in California, a hotbed of avant-garde creativity. Experimenting with lengths of audio tape, he spliced them together to form a loop and put them on a tape player so they would continuously run over and over again.

Reich went to San Francisco’s Union Square and recorded a charismatic street preacher, whose sermon hovered between speech and song.

"As he said, 'It’s gonna rain,' a pigeon took off," Reich says. "So you had a pigeon drummer and this incredible voice and sort of low traffic in the background. Well, I thought, 'Oh, wouldn’t it be great if it were two loops, and they were going, ‘it’s gonna, it’s gonna, it’s gonna rain rain rain rain,’ and the pigeon would just be drumming away.”