American minimalist composer Steve Reich was born on 3 Oct 1936 and he turns 75 today. He is one of America’s best known and most celebrated contemporary composers. He has received worldwide critical acclaim and won many awards including the Pulitzer prize for music and Grammy Awards for his works Different Trains and Piece for 18 musicians.
His musical interests are wide, and he has trained in African drumming and religious chant, as well as having a strong interest in jazz and a degree in philosophy.
Minimalist music often involves short, repeating melodic figures, a technique it shares with psychedelic rock, which Britannica describes as using ” repetitive structures and droning techniques to express the hallucinations of LSD and other drugs in a musical language”. Velvet Underground is often offered as an example. Reich achieves this same effect by using techniques such as tape loops that are slightly out of phase, sometimes using the spoken human voice as an instrument.
He is keen to abolish the divide between popular and classical music, which he sees as an artificial development and for which he points the finger at Schoenberg. According to critic Alex Ross (author of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century) he has succeeded:
“Reich’s influence is vast, reaching far outside classical composition to encompass jazz, rock, pop, electronic music, and hip-hop.
Brian Eno and David Bowie for example, are said to have been big fans of Piece for 18 musicians when it came out. Ross also suggests Piece for 18 musicians as one of five modern classical pieces for pop listeners so why not give it a try?
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- Listen to free online music from Naxos Music Library and the Source.
