02.10.2026 | Artist
Steve Reich turns 90 on October 3, and celebratory events are taking place around the world, with premiere performances as well as reflections on the journey to date. Highlights include a birthday concert of Reich’s music at Carnegie Hall, and a multi-day focus at the Philharmonie de Paris. In New York, Toronto, London, Glasgow and Singapore his most renowned work, Music for 18 Musicians, will be played.
ECM’s release of Music for 18 Musicians in 1978 marked a breakthrough not only for Reich. The album’s popular success proved that new composition could reach an audience beyond ‘specialist’ or avant-garde circles, as listeners were drawn in to Reich’s world of interlocking sounds, mesmerized by its gradually changing pulse patterns, its layered counterpoint and its exultant energy. The record’s release concert took place at New York rock club The Bottom Line. The borders between the genres were dissolving.
The sources that had fired Steve Reich’s musical imagination were many. He studied with noted experimental composer Luciano Berio, but also admired medieval music, and Pérotin in particular. A jazz enthusiast (and a jazz drummer, too, in his early years), he loved the music of Miles Davis and, especially, John Coltrane.
A central figure in the musical movement that came to be known as Minimalism (a term Reich never cared for), he played in the 1964 San Francisco premiere of Terry Riley’s groundbreaking In C, and developed his own pieces such as It’s Gonna Rain (1965) with tape loops, phase shifting and spoken word fragments. Growing interest in African music led him to Ghana to study the intricacies of overlapping drum patterns. Later, there were studies of Indonesian gamelan, influencing the atmospheres and sonorities – as well as the rhythms – of his mid-1970s work, including Music for 18 Musicians.
A second ECM Reich album, produced by Manfred Eicher in New York and Ludwigsburg in February and March 1980, featured the newly-composed Music for a Large Ensemble and Octet as well as Violin Phase, a composition from 1967, dazzlingly revived by Shem Guibbory. Music for a Large Ensemble revealed a new sonic opulence and Octet was informed a sense of breath attesting to Reich’s research into Jewish cantillation. These were the studies that would lead him to Tehillim, and a fresh path inspired by old ways.
Tehillim was in part an archaeological quest, a search for roots as a Jewish musician. But it was also a creative adventure: if traditional approaches to Hebrew cantillation had vanished in the mists of time, Reich was free to invent his own melodies for prayer in this symphony of psalms, on what remains one of his most touching works. Tehillim was recorded in Ludwigsburg in September and October 1981, and again produced by Eicher.
These three albums – Music for 18 Musicians, Octet/Music for a Large Ensemble/Violin Phase and Tehillim – were reprised in the boxed set release Steve Reich: The ECM Recordings, and remain works of core importance in the composer’s discography.
Though much of his work has been with his own group, Steve Reich and Musicians, Reich has also collaborated with artists from Pat Metheny to Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood to painter Gerhard Richter, and his pieces have been played by major orchestras and ensembles throughout the world. He’s been cited as an influence by numerous figures in rock and pop and related genres, including Brian Eno, David Bowie, Björk, Sonic Youth, DJ Spooky and Coldcut.
Reich was also friends with the late Stephen Sondheim and his arrangement of the music theatre composer’s “Finishing The Hat” from Sunday in the Park appears on Anthony De Mare’s ECM New Series album Liaisons: Re-Imagining Sondheim from the Piano, released in 2015.
Sondheim also memorably paid tribute to Reich: “Steve Reich is both a startlingly original composer and a trailblazer. Some startlingly original composers are sui generis, isolated wonders. But the important ones cast long shadows… Steve’s work is more than influential. It is a constant delight, by turns dramatic and joyful, its energy infectious, its surprises exhilarating.”
