Steve Reich at 90

This month, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Steve Reich celebrates his 90th birthday. A pioneer of the minimalist movement in the 1960s, his influence can be felt across genres, from contemporary classical music to electronic dance music and film scores. His creative voice is so singular, The New Yorker dubbed him “The most original music thinker of our time.” Read on to learn why and to hear a sampling of his most important works in the Spotify playlist below.

Steve Reich was born October 3, 1936, in New York, New York. Although he studied piano as a child, he didn't take music seriously until his teenage years, when he began taking drum lessons with Roland Kohloff, principal timpanist of the New York Philharmonic. He matriculated at Cornell University, where he majored in philosophy and took some music courses on the side. 

After university, he returned to New York City and devoted his energies to composition. He studied privately at first, then with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti at Juilliard. In 1961, he moved to Oakland, California, to attend graduate school at Mills College, where he studied with Luciano Berio and Darius Milhaud. While there, he became involved in the Bay Area’s experimental music scene and befriended fellow composer Terry Riley. In 1964, Reich collaborated on Riley’s landmark minimalist piece, In C, suggesting they add a steady pulse to help keep the musicians together. Thus, the minimalist movement was born.

The following year, inspired by Riley’s use of tape looping and delay systems, Reich composed his seminal work, It’s Gonna Rain. The sole material for the piece is a recording Reich made of a Pentecostal preacher named Brother Walter, who was railing about the end of the world in a public park in San Francisco. The recording is played on two separate tape machines, which, given the imperfect nature of analog technology at the time, gradually fall out of sync, then eventually line up again. 

This technique, called “phasing,” became a hallmark of Reich’s style. He eventually extended this technique beyond recorded speech to live instruments in Piano Phase and Violin Phase (1967). The ever-shifting rhythmic and melodic patterns that emerge from these phased instruments account for the inherent vitality in Reich’s work.

In addition to the works of his fellow experimental composers, Reich counts Pérotin, JS Bach, Stravinsky, and Bartók as his biggest inspirations. In fact, he said that hearing Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring for the first time at age 14 was “completely life changing” and made him want to become a composer. Alongside these classical influences, he has found inspiration in jazz, particularly the music of Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and John Coltrane. His broad musical taste does not mean he is not discerning; as he told The Guardian recently, “Good music is good music, and most music is not!”

But it was an interest in African drumming that spurred his interest in harmonic stasis and short, repeating patterns. His next landmark piece, Drumming (1971), resulted from a five-week course in West African drumming at the University of Ghana. Clocking in at 90 minutes and scored for nine percussionists, two female voices, and piccolo, Drumming marked his first major statement as a composer. 

The piece that put him and the minimalist movement on the map was Music for 18 Musicians (1976). Considered Reich’s masterwork, it is scored for three marimbas, two xylophones, vibraphone, maracas, violin, cello, two clarinets doubling on bass clarinets, four women’s voices, and four pianos. (However, given the need for musicians to play multiple instruments throughout, it is often performed by more than 18 people.)

While keeping the same framework of Reich’s earlier “phased” works, Music for 18 Musicians marks a departure in its faster harmonic movement and increased contrapuntal inventions. As Paul Griffiths explains in his article on Reich for Grove Music, “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 became Reich’s hallmark compositional technique from this point onward. 

“The work also defined his essential texture,” Griffiths continues, “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.”

Thanks to a 1978 recording, Music for 18 Musicians gained Reich critical and public acclaim. It appealed to people across genre lines, including singer David Bowie, who called it “a tonetrack into the future.” Reich started allowing his works to be published so that ensembles besides his own could perform them. He also began accepting commissions from larger ensembles. 

In the 1980s, Reich began exploring his Jewish heritage through his music—something he continues to do to this day. He studied Hebrew, the Torah, and the practice of cantillation, traveling to Israel to hear singers from different eastern Sephardic communities. The result of this trip was Tehillim (1981), a setting of psalm verses. Although many of Reich’s previous works had included voices, Tehillim was the first since his tape-recording days to include text.

In 1988, Reich continued to reflect on his Jewish heritage as well as his own childhood with Different Trains. A child of divorce, Reich would travel by train between his parents’ houses in New York and California in the 1940s. These cross-country journeys caused him to ponder the children who, at the very same time, were taken on trains to their deaths during the Holocaust. 

The work combines recordings of train sounds and spoken testimony from his governess, a train porter, and Holocaust survivors. He notates short spoken excerpts as melodies to be played by a live string quartet. The recorded speech and musical elements are integrated organically, with the instruments often introducing the melodies first before the voices emerge with the snippets of text. 

The Kronos Quartet’s recording of Different Trains won a Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition in 1990. In 1999, his ensemble, Steve Reich and Musicians, won a Grammy for their recording of Music for 18 Musicians, and in 2009, he earned a Pulitzer Prize for Double Sextet (2007). 

Just like the steady pulse that characterizes his music, Reich’s creative output has never flagged. He has continued to compose, even as he approaches his tenth decade. Later this month, Carnegie Hall is celebrating Reich’s 90th birthday with a special concert featuring the US premieres of three recent works—Two Pianos (2020), Jacob’s Ladder (2025), and In All Your Ways (2026)—alongside Double Sextet and Electric Counterpoint (1987).