Steve Reich

Since 1965 · United States

Minimalism

Steve Reich, born in New York in 1936, built a new kind of music in the mid-1960s out of repetition… Their story

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Who they shaped

In front, left to right: Wire, Slint, Rhys Chatham, Brian Eno, Squid, American Football, Deerhunter.

The bigger the face, the stronger the proof: they said it themselvesreporteda critic, or widely accepted

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Music for 18 Musicians (1978)

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Music for 18 Musicians is an hour of pulsing that never stands still: a cycle of eleven chords, each stretched into a section of its own, played by pianos, marimbas, clarinets and wordless voices breathing in long phrases. "Music for 18 Musicians" opens on that cycle, the whole ensemble pulsing together before the patterns begin to shift. Nothing is sudden, yet everything is always changing, which is what makes it so hypnotic. It's the record that carried minimalism out of the concert hall and into the ears of rock and electronic musicians.

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Steve Reich

Music for 18 Musicians · 1978

Steve Reich, born in New York in 1936, built a new kind of music in the mid-1960s out of repetition: tape loops of a preacher's voice drifting out of sync in It's Gonna Rain (1965), then two pianists doing the same thing live in Piano Phase. The slow shifting of patterns against each other, phasing, became his signature.

His ensemble pieces of the 1970s, Drumming and Music for 18 Musicians above all, turned the idea into music that pulses and glows, and their pull reached far past classical music: Brian Eno built his studio method on it, and generations of rock, electronic and post-rock musicians followed.