Why is steve reich famous

He got asked to join the Juilliard faculty in New York and I saw his shoulders sag. I think the academic career can be… Although who knows, maybe that will work for some of you. Anything can be turned into academic trash, no question about it. In my time it was composers. I suppose, if you went through your W9 forms, your tax return forms, every composer in America, somewhere between percent of them would be at universities.

I bugged the cab and I made a tape piece. I had a good time driving a cab. I could make music, take time off to play a show. It really fit me, and I was making more money than most assistant professors too. The sound of the streets and that street culture is very present in a recurring way throughout your career. So you think that street life was influential for you musically? I think all music comes from a time and place.

Bach comes from Eastern Germany. The composers we know and love I think give honest expression to that. Not by trying to write the great American piece. Forget that. You just are who you are. How well you do it will determine how long and how much interest there is in it. Gershwin, music is music. No, it was a fantastic thought. I understand you went to see him 50 times or more. Where did you see him and how deep was your connection to the music? Paint us a picture. Saw him in San Francisco at the Jazz Workshop.

Once saw him there with Eric Dolphy. Eric Dolphy was responsible for the bass clarinets in Music For 18 Musicians. I brought that in, we can talk about that briefly.

Anybody with a pair of ears should listen to Coltrane. Not necessarily the most famous, but for musicians in terms of an extreme form. I think there are French horns playing like elephants coming through the jungle. You know how jazz men talk about the changes? Sometimes these elephant glissandos going on, which are basically French horns playing glissandos, scored by Eric Dolphy, who was a great musician and one of the great alto sax players and a very schooled musician as well.

And two drummers, Elvin Jones being one of the most inventive jazz drummers who ever lived. And I think Rashied Ali was the other drummer. And they more than compensate for the harmonic consistency. We were hearing Ravi Shankar coming in from India; we were hearing Balinese music; we were hearing African drumming; we were hearing John Coltrane; we were hearing stuff coming in from Junior Walker and Motown. A little turn around on four and five and right back on one. And that incredible non-, but wonderful, voice that he has.

So there was this thing in the air coming in from various sources outside of the West, from jazz, from popular music, which was pointing in this direction.

Things come from a certain time and a certain place. What you guys are doing is basically now a kind of folk music, which, as I understand, has already been codified and is being studied and multiplied. But it spontaneously arose in the culture and now many, many people are developing it.

And when you look in the window of a music store, what do you see? So much of your music is based on the way you hear the environment around you. How did it sound? I used to walk around with ear-plugs. Shall I play some of City Life? And this piece Piano Phase came out, which eventually could be done by two pianos. Is it possible to improve or radically alter the way you listen through practice? Oh, absolutely. Can someone come up here and move… I have no idea what all this [equipment] is.

We were on track four and we need to go to track two. Can you do that? Now, how do you play that piece? Put notation on the side, one person starts, the other closes their eyes probably and gets in unison. The other player has got the easy part? I usually do the phasing, I have high metabolism. The hard part is staying put. And that's what you just heard too. Again, no casting aspersions on people making laptop music, everything has its place.

How difficult — or how interesting — did you find that transition between machine and musician? I could do it against tape, then a friend and I could do it together and then other people started doing it. I felt liberated, I felt exhilarated, I felt the door had opened. That led to Drumming. Never used it since. Because it is a weird technique. The percussionist will do it, but there are other ways of getting what is called… like, "Row, Row, Row Your Boat," a canon or a round.

So this is that principle. The way it is here is that people come in together and irrationally slide ahead. Because the idea came from a machine. Now, this is one of the things I want to get across. That to me is a kind of solution to anyone who looks at people who make electronic music as a whole bunch of robots.

Now, I think everybody within the culture is open to all music. This is something pretty much well understood by all of you. But for me, it was a big deal because this was not the case. Just a few people beginning to see that these are permeable divisions. This is a very, very clear example of that, just taking it right from the tape and putting it right into instruments.

I wanted to ask you something about Drumming. So they had to feel the music and learn it without seeing it.

What are the benefits of learning the music without seeing it? This is a big deal question. We can be sure about that. The greatest music scholar today in my book is Richard Taruskin, who just finished the six-volume Oxford History of Music in the West. Sometimes surprisingly at how old people are who are still doing that. Notation started somewhere around the 10th or 11th century, and it was quite different then than it is now.

There are lots of arguments. How many people here are involved in live music? So is this an experience that rings a bell for you? Then the idea of notation appears in certain cultures. I think in Indonesia there may be some isolated forms of notation, certainly not like ours. The imperial household had very high level, very beautiful harp music. Thank you. A friend of mine went there and he experienced Ghanaian drumming in the villages, essentially at these beach parties.

And I was just intrigued to know what you experienced in Ghana. Were you mostly just at the university or were you out and about as well? What did you hear? I went to Ghana in when it was quite different than it is today. And there are about five or six major tribes in Ghana and, demographically speaking, the Ghana Dance Ensemble had to represent them all.

The Ashanti have always ruled the roost. The way I experienced the music was that it was not party music at all — although I learned one tune, "Gahu" [ imitates sound with mouth ], is the basic rhythm in Gahu. There was a lot of that because if you have a large family there are a lot of people whose anniversary there is. But I did hang out with my teacher, Gideon, in his village and managed to get malaria.

I was wearing my sandals, tourista. Now, are you gonna stop doing that and straighten out? Quite beautiful stuff, stuff that would be impossible to reproduce onstage. Do they still play agbadza and gahu? Of course, time marches on, always. Of course, no one with any creative heart wants to replicate, but how do you deal with that problem of being inspired by something very locally specific and making it yours?

I brought back a set of metal gongons, iron bells, not steel. Double bells that are two through to six octaves, and I took these tokes, they kind of look like an enchilada.

I think I had about six of them, and I brought back a rattle, a beautiful rattle that I still have. Get a metal file and go [ makes filing noise ]? They were called ha-cha-cha pattern and everybody loved it, thought it was great.

And that was basically it. What have I learned that can travel? Think about a canon or a round. How does it sound? I have no idea how it sounds. It has nothing to with You can fill it with scotch, Coca-Cola, Red Bull — you name it. The Balinese tune very differently than we do.

I want to go to 48th St. And you have that history as well. Nevertheless, I suspect that tonight the Colin Currie group is going to do an absolutely dynamite job on Drumming. They heard it when they were 14, 15, 16, Does anybody wanna look at the score? What is the difference between the performance of a piece and the recording of a piece? What did you have to do get the recording you wanted?

A student of music and philosophy, he was taught by some of the most respected composers of the 20th century, including Luciano Berio and Darius Milhaud. His studies also encompassed a trip to Ghana to learn traditional African drumming and the study of Balinese gamelan instruments in Seattle. Together with Philip Glass, Steve Reich is the most well-known founder of what is now known as minimalist music: the repetition, over a sustained period of time, of specific notes or phrases, often to very hypnotic effect.

Before he earned enough money to make a living from composing music full-time, Steve Reich worked as a taxi driver and a social worker.

Since , Steve Reich and Musicians have frequently toured the world, and have the distinction of performing to sold-out houses at venues as diverse as Carnegie Hall and the Bottom Line Cabaret. Reich's piece, Different Trains, marked a new compositional method, rooted in It's Gonna Rain and Come Out, in which speech recordings generate the musical material for musical instruments.

The New York Times hailed Different Trains as "a work of such astonishing originality that breakthrough seems the only possible description In June , in celebration of Mr. Reich's 60th birthday, Nonesuch released a CD retrospective box set of Mr. Reich's compositions, featuring several newly-recorded and re-mastered works.

He won a second Grammy award in for his piece Music for 18 Musicians, also on the Nonesuch label. In July a major retrospective of Mr. Earlier, in , the South Bank Centre in London, mounted a similar series of retrospective concerts. The Cave, Steve Reich and Beryl Korot's music theater video piece exploring the Biblical story of Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Ishmael and Isaac, was hailed by Time Magazine as "a fascinating glimpse of what opera might be like in the 21st century.