Artist

Steve Reich

American composer, born October 3, 1936, in New York City. He studied composition privately with Hall Overton, then moved on to Juilliard School in New-York to study with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti (1958 to 1961). Subsequently he attended Mills College in Oakland where he was taught by Luciano Berio and Darius Milhaud (1961-63) and earned a master's degree in composition. Early on, he was influenced by fellow minimalist Terry Riley's loosely-structured aleatoric works which combines simple musical patterns, offset in time, to create a slowly-shifting, cohesive whole. Reich adopted this approach to compose his first major work written in 1965: "It's Gonna Rain...". He moved on from the "phase shifting" technique he had pioneered to more elaborate pieces. He investigated other musical processes such as augmentation (the temporal lengthening of phrases and melodic fragments). Reich's mother is the Broadway singer and lyricist June Carroll.