Hugely influential, but largely unknown to all but musical cognoscenti, Steve Reich has been hailed as America's greatest living composer. Here’s some key facts you should probably know about the minimalist composer interspersed with some nuggets from his lecture to the Red Bull Music Academy this week.
Steve won the Pulitzer Prize For Music in 2009 for his Double Sextet piece. Other notable musicians who’ve won in the past include Ornette Coleman, Aaron Copland and Wynton Marsalis, unofficial winners include John Coltrane and Duke Ellington.
Highly influential, Reich has inspired Brian Eno, John Adams, David Bowie and King Crimson, among others. He’s also cited as a key influence of Sufjan Stevens and chorus/melody-fearing Montreal collective Godspeed You Black Emperor even named a song after him. Reich’s music has been sampled by the likes of Tortoise, Madvillian and Unkle, although the most high profile use of his Electric Counterpoint was on The Orb’s Little Fluffy Clouds. This key work has also been reinterpreted by Pat Metheny and Kronos Quartet. Reich has his own band, which he formed in 1966. The members fluctuate between three and 18.
Reich himself says he is influenced in turn by JS Bach, Pérotin, Debussy, Stravinksy, Ella Fitzgerald and Miles Davis. He has also studied African drum music in Ghana. Subjects for a Steve Reich composition are wild and varied. They include the shared roots of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (The Cave), the Holocaust (Different Trains) and the civil rights movement (Come Out) while Three Tales tackled nuclear testing, the Hindenburg Disaster and cloning. That’s when they have a subject: other works are written for percussion instruments, the human voice and feedback (Pendulum Music).
In 2006, an international celebration of Reich’s 70th birthday, saw special performances of Reich’s music stage all over the world. In New York, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Carnegie Hall, and Lincoln Center joined forces to present complementary programmes of his music, and in London, the Barbican mounted a major retrospective. There were also concerts in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Budapest, Cologne, Dublin, Paris, Vienna and many more. Nonesuch Records released its second box set of Steve Reich’s works, Phases: A Nonesuch Retrospective, in September 2006. The five-CD collection comprises 14 of the composer’s best-known pieces, spanning the 20 years of his time on the label.
When they were both students at Juilliard School of Music, Reich and fellow composer Philip Glass ran their own removal firm to make ends meet. Reich also used to drive a cab in San Francisco and taught piano from childhood.
Visit Steve Reich's offical site and listen to his fireside chat on Red Bull Music Academy Radio.There’s lots of ways to keep up with this year's Red Bull Music Academy: you can download the Daily Note, tune in to Red Bull Music Academy Radio or follow the Academy blog, the Twitter feed or connect via Facebook.
You can watch highlights from the Red Bull Music Academy lectures on the YouTube channel
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