Steve Reich has been called “the most original musical thinker of our time” (The New Yorker) and “among the great composers of the century” (The New York Times). Starting in the 1960s, his pieces It’s Gonna Rain, Drumming, Music for 18 Musicians, Tehillim, Different Trains, and many others helped shift the aesthetic center of musical composition worldwide away from extreme complexity and towards rethinking pulsation and tonal attraction in new ways. He continues to influence younger generations of composers and mainstream artists all over the world.
Born in New York and raised there and in California, Reich graduated with honors in philosophy from Cornell University in 1957. For the next two years, he studied composition with Hall Overton, and from 1958 to 1961, he studied at The Juilliard School with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti. Reich received his master’s degree in music from Mills College in 1963, where he worked with Luciano Berio and Darius Milhaud. His studies have also included Balinese gamelan, African drumming (at the University of Ghana), and traditional forms of chanting of the Hebrew scriptures.
His ensemble Steve Reich and Musicians toured the world many times, and his music is performed internationally by major ensembles and orchestras, including the New York and Los Angeles philharmonics; London, Sydney, San Francisco, and BBC symphony orchestras; London Sinfonietta; Kronos Quartet; Ensemble intercontemporain; Colin Currie Group; Ensemble Modern; and Bang on a Can All-Stars. Reich’s documentary video operas, The Cave and Three Tales—created in collaboration with video artist Beryl Korot—have pushed the boundaries of the operatic medium and have been presented on four continents. Several noted choreographers have created dances to his music, including Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Jirí Kylián, Jerome Robbins, Justin Peck, Wayne McGregor, Benjamin Millepied, and Christopher Wheeldon.
Double Sextet won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009, and Different Trains, Music for 18 Musicians, and an album of his percussion works performed by Third Coast Percussion have all earned Grammy Awards. Reich received the Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo, Polar Music Prize in Stockholm, Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Madrid, and Gold Medal in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is also a previous holder of the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall. Reich has been named Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France, and awarded honorary doctorates by the Royal College of Music in London, The Juilliard School in New York, and the Liszt Academy in Budapest.
Nonesuch Records has recorded every new piece of music by Reich since 1985, resulting in 22 albums and two box sets. Recent releases include the world premiere recordings of Reich/Richter, Runner, and Music for Ensemble and Orchestra. The label will put out a collection of his complete works in 2023.
In 2022, Reich published a new book Conversations (Hanover Square Press / Harper Collins), which reflects on the composer’s career and music through a series of conversations with some of the world’s greatest artists, including Stephen Sondheim, Michael Tilson Thomas, Brian Eno, Richard Serra, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Jonny Greenwood, and Colin Currie.
“There’s just a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history and Steve Reich is one of them” (The Guardian).
Tehillim (pronounced “teh-hill-leem”) is the original Hebrew word for “Psalms.” Literally translated, it means “praises,” and it derives from the three-letter Hebrew root hey, lamed, lamed (hll), which is also the root of halleluyah. Tehillim is a setting of Psalms 19:2–5 (19:1–4 in Christian translations), 34:13–15 (34:12–14 in Christian translations), 18:26–27 (18:25–26 in Christian translations), and 150:4–6.
The chamber version is scored for four women’s voices (one high soprano, two lyric sopranos, and one alto), piccolo, flute, oboe, cor anglais, two clarinets, six percussion (playing small tuned tambourines with no jingles, clapping, maracas, marimba, vibraphone, and crotales), two electric organs, two violins, viola, cello, and bass. The voices, winds, and strings are amplified in performance. In the orchestral version, there are full strings and winds with amplification for voices only.
The first text begins as a solo with drum and clapping accompaniment only. It is repeated with clarinet doubling the voice and with a second drum and clap in canon with the first. It then appears in two-voice canon, and at last the strings enter with long-held harmonies. At this point all four voices—supported by a single maraca, doubled by two electric organs, and harmonized by the strings—sing four, four-part canons on each of the four verses of the first text. When these are competed, the solo voice restates the original complete melody with all drums and full string harmonization.
The second text begins immediately after a short drum transition. Here, the three verses of text are presented in two- or three-voice harmony in a homophonic texture. Sometimes the voices are replaced by the cor anglais and clarinet or by the drums and clapping. Soon the melodic lines begin augmenting (or lengthening) and then adding melismas. The effect is of a melodic line growing longer and more ornate.
After a pause, the third text begins in a slower tempo and with the percussion changed to a marimba and vibraphone. The text is presented as a duet first between two and then all four voices.
The fourth and final text resumes the original tempo and key signature, and combines techniques used in the preceding three movements. It is, in effect, a recapitulation of the entire piece which then, in a coda based solely on the word halleluyah, extends the music to its largest instrumental forces and its harmonic conclusion. This last movement affirms the key of D major as the basic tonal center of the work after considerable harmonic ambiguity.
The tambourines without jingles are perhaps similar to the small drum called “tof” in Hebrew in Psalm 150 and several other places in the Biblical text. Hand clapping as well as rattles were also commonly used throughout the Middle East in the Biblical period, as were small, pitched cymbals. Beyond this there is no musicological content to Tehillim. No Jewish themes were used for any of the melodic materials. One of the reasons I chose to set Psalms as opposed to parts of the Torah or Prophets is that the oral tradition among Jews in the West for singing Psalms has been lost. (It has been maintained by Yemenite Jews.) This meant that I was free to compose the melodies for Tehillim without a living oral tradition to either imitate or ignore.
In contrast to most of my earlier work, Tehillim is not composed of short repeating patterns. Though an entire melody may be repeated either as the subject of a canon or variation, this is actually closer to what one finds throughout the history of Western music. While the four-part canons in the first and last movements may well remind some listeners of my early tape pieces It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out, which are composed of short spoken phrases repeated over and over again in close canon, Tehillim will probably strike most listeners as quite different from my earlier works. There is no fixed meter or metric pattern in Tehillim as there is in my earlier music.
The rhythm of the music here comes directly from the rhythm of the Hebrew text and is consequently in flexible changing meters. This is the first time I have set a text to music since my student days, and the result is a piece based on melody in the basic sense of that word. The use of extended melodies, imitative counterpoint, functional harmony, and full orchestration may well suggest renewed interest in Classical or, more accurately, Baroque and earlier Western musical practice. The non-vibrato, non-operatic vocal production will also remind listeners of Western music prior to 1750. However, the overall sound of Tehillim—and in particular the intricately interlocking percussion writing that, together with the text, forms the basis of the entire work—marks this music as unique by introducing a basic musical element that one does not find in earlier Western practice including the music of this century. Tehillim may thus be heard as traditional and new at the same time.
—Steve Reich
Traveler’s Prayer was composed starting before and ending during the pandemic of 2020. The virus shifted the gravity of the words I was setting, which were three short excerpts from Genesis, Exodus, and Psalms. These excerpts are usually added to the full Traveler’s Prayer found in Hebrew prayer books. The first and last appeared earlier at the end of my WTC 9/11.
While these verses can certainly apply to travels by air, car, or boat, they can also be applied to travel from this world to the next.
The first melody is from Biblical Hebrew chant in America and parts of Europe, while the second is a more ornate style from Italy. I want to thank Cantor Philip Sherman for showing me how these two melodies, derived from the Biblical accents in the text, actually sound. The third melody I composed, since (outside of Yemen) there is no existing tradition for chanting Psalms.
As to structure, there are extremely free canons throughout. The rhythm of the two voices is never the same, and the second voice is often a retrograde, inversion, or retrograde inversion of the first. Though I’ve known about these procedures since I was a student, this is the first time I’ve consciously applied them. It was a way, within an overall tonal constancy, to get subtly varying intervallic harmony. As singer Micaela Haslam, observed, “The music sort of hovers and you lose yourself in the long vocal and string lines, until the very low piano quietly spells out where we are.”
—Steve Reich
The first sketches for Music for 18 Musicians were made in May 1974 and it was completed in March 1976. Although its steady pulse and rhythmic energy related to many of my earlier works, its instrumentation, harmony, and structure are new.
As to instrumentation, Music for 18 Musicians is new in the number and distribution of instruments: violin, cello, two clarinets doubling bass clarinet, four women’s voices, four pianos, three marimbas, two xylophones, and vibraphone (with no motor). All instruments are acoustic. The use of electronics is limited to microphones for the voices and some of the instruments.
There is more harmonic movement in the first five minutes of Music for 18 Musicians than in any other work of mine prior to 1976. The movement from chord to chord is often a re-voicing, inversion, or relative minor or major of a previous chord—staying within the key signatures of three or four sharps throughout. Nevertheless, within these limits, harmonic movement plays a more important role in this 1976 piece than in any earlier work of mine. It opened the door to further harmonic development in the more than 45 years since.
Rhythmically, there are basically two different kinds of time occurring simultaneously in Music for 18 Musicians. The first is that of a regular rhythmic pulse in the pianos and mallet instruments that continues throughout the piece. The second is the rhythm of the human breath in the voices and wind instruments. The entire opening and closing sections, plus part of all the sections in between, contain pulses by the voices and winds. They take a full breath and sing or play pulses of particular notes for as long as their breath will comfortably sustain them. The breath is the measure of the duration of their pulsing. This combination of one breath after another, gradually washing up like waves against the constant rhythm of the pianos and mallet instruments, is something I have not heard before and would like to investigate further.
The structure of Music for 18 Musicians is based on a cycle of 11 chords played at the very beginning of the piece and repeated at the end. All the instruments and voices play or sing pulsing notes within each chord. Instruments (like the strings) that do not have to breathe nevertheless follow the rise and fall of the breath by following the breath patterns of the bass clarinet. Each chord is held for the duration of two breaths, and the next chord is gradually introduced, and so on, until all 11 are played and the ensemble returns to the first chord. This first pulsing chord is then maintained by two pianos and two marimbas. While this pulsing chord is held for about five minutes, a small piece is constructed on it. When this piece is completed, there is a sudden change to the second chord, and a second small piece or section is constructed. This means that each chord that might have taken 15 or 20 seconds to play in the opening section is then stretched out as the basic pulsing harmony for a five-minute piece—very much as a single note in a cantus firmus, or chant melody of 12th-century organum by Pérotin, might be stretched out for several minutes as the harmonic center for a section of the organum. The opening 11-chord cycle of Music for 18 Musicians is a kind of pulsing cantus for the entire piece.
On each pulsing chord, one (or, on the third chord, two) small pieces are built. These pieces or sections are basically either in the form of an arch (A-B-C-D-C-B-A), or in the form of a musical process (like that of substituting beats for rests), working itself out from beginning to end. Elements appearing in one section will appear in another but surrounded by different harmony and instrumentation. For instance, the pulse in pianos and marimbas in sections I and II changes to marimbas and xylophone in section IIIA, and to xylophones and maracas in sections VI and VII. The low piano pulsing harmonies of section IIIA reappear in section VI, supporting a different melody played by different instruments. The process of building up a canon, or phase relation, between two xylophones and two pianos—which first occurs in section II—occurs again in section IX but building up to another overall pattern in different harmonic context. The relationship between the different sections is thus best understood in terms of resemblances between members of a family. Certain characteristics will be shared but others will be unique.
One of the basic means of change or development in many sections of this piece is to be found in the rhythmic relationship of harmony to melody. Specifically, a melodic pattern may be repeated over and over again, but by introducing a two- or four-chord cadence underneath it—first beginning on one beat of the pattern, and then beginning on a different beat—a sense of changing accent in the melody will be heard. This play of changing harmonic rhythm against constant melodic pattern is one of the basic techniques of this piece, and one I have never used before. Its effect, by change of accent, is to vary that which is in fact unchanging.
Changes from one section to the next, as well as changes within each section, are cued by the vibraphone, whose patterns are played once only to call for movements to the next bar—much as in a Balinese gamelan, a drummer will audibly call for changes of pattern, or as the master drummer will call for changes of pattern in West African music. This is in contrast to the visual nods of the head used in earlier pieces of mine to call for changes and in contrast also to the general Western practice of having a non-performing conductor for large ensembles. Audible cues become part of the music and allow the musicians to keep listening.
—Steve Reich