Steve Reich
Stephen Michael Reich (born October 3, 1936) is an American composer. He is a pioneer of minimalism, although his music has increasingly deviated from a purely minimalist style. Reich's innovations include using tape loops to create phasing patterns (examples are his early compositions, It's Gonna Rain and Come Out), and the use of simple, audible processes to explore musical concepts (for instance, Pendulum Music and Four Organs). These compositions, marked by their use of repetitive figures, slow harmonic rhythm and canons, have significantly influenced contemporary music, especially in America. The Guardian has described Reich as one of the few composers to have "altered the direction of musical history."
Stephen Michael Reich (born October 3, 1936) is an American composer. He is a pioneer of minimalism, although his music has increasingly deviated from a purely minimalist style. Reich's innovations include using tape loops to create phasing patterns (examples are his early compositions, It's Gonna Rain and Come Out), and the use of simple, audible processes to explore musical concepts (for instance, Pendulum Music and Four Organs). These compositions, marked by their use of repetitive figures, slow harmonic rhythm and canons, have significantly influenced contemporary music, especially in America. The Guardian has described Reich as one of the few composers to have "altered the direction of musical history."
Berkeley University Museum - November 7, 1970
Available again! Modern Silence delivers a landmark release in the history of minimalism with a live performance documented from one of the genre's key figures: Steve Reich. Recorded live at Berkeley University in the 1970s (home also to key minimalism figures Terry Riley and La Monte Young), this performance sees Reich deliver some of his now legendary compositions, such as the shifting tape-loop experimentation of "My Name Is", whereby vocals are cut-up, looped, and played at different speeds …
Four Organs/Phase Patterns
** 2022 Repress ** Steve Reich remains one of the most important figures in 20th century music. Though he studied at the prestigious arts institutions Julliard and Mills College, by the mid-1960s Reich set about dismantling the very orthodoxy that he had been trained in. Forming a new musical language based on repetitive processes, Reich became established as part of the so-called "Big Four" of New York minimalists (along with La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Philip Glass). Reich's influence can …
Sextet & Double Sextet
*Limited Edition of 500 copies. 2022 stock.* "This release couples two of Reich’s “sextets” for the first time: the Sextet of 1984 and the Pulitzer Prize winning Double Sextet of 2007. A striking difference between the two pieces is that the rhythmic world of Sextet mostly consists of a single-meter grooving, while Double Sextet works in the angular, off-kilter shifting meters reminiscent of Reich’s Tehillim (also of Stravinsky). Ekkozone impart a uniquely chamber music feel and color to these w…
Phase Patterns / Pendulum Music / Piano Phase / Four Organs
*2022 stock* "What I'm interested in is a compositional process and a sounding music that are one and the same thing" (Steve Reich, 1968). Minimal music, which numbers Steve Reich among its founders and as one of its most significant representatives, existed for hardly more than ten years. The Ensemble Avantgarde presents a wonderful survey of Reich's minimal music-compositions. The conceptional concentration in the musical work on the structurally simple means of its creation is seen especially…
Four Organs / Phase Patterns / Pendulum Music
Three early compositions (1968-1970) by Steve Reich, one of the most prolific exponents of minimal music, in stunning interpretations by the critically acclaimed Ensemble Avantgarde. Available on vinyl (180gr, gatefold sleeve incl. download code) for the first time ever!
Writings on Music (Book)
In the mid-1960s, Steve Reich radically renewed the musical landscape with a back-to-basics sound that came to be called Minimalism. These early works, characterized by a relentless pulse and static harmony, focused single-mindedly on the process of gradual rhythmic change. Throughout his career, Reich has continued to reinvigorate the music world, drawing from a wide array of classical, popular, sacred, and non-western idioms. His works reflect the steady evolution of an original musical mind.W…
Rethinking Reich (Book)
Described by music critic Alex Ross as "the most original musical thinker of our time" and having received innumerable accolades in a career spanning over fifty years, composer Steve Reich is considered by many to be America's greatest contemporary composer. His music, however, remains largely underresearched. Rethinking Reich redresses this imbalance, providing a space for prominent and emerging scholars to reassess the composer's contribution to music in the twentieth century. Featuring fourte…
Sextet | Clapping Music | Music For Pieces Of Wood
* 2021 Stock * LSO Live explore the music of America’s most influential living composer with performances of three of his most iconic works: Sextet, Clapping Music and Music for Pieces of Wood. Employing Steve Reich’s universally recognisable sound-world, Sextet uses hypnotic repetitions of a sequence of harmonies, which gradually overlap and interweave, resulting in a complex yet utterly compelling musical landscape. Introducing more dissonance and aggressive rhythms than previous compositions…
Music For 18 Musicians
* 2021 stock * Steve Reich's landmark Music for 18 Musicians is perhaps Steve Reich’s most popular, if not most important, piece of music. Defining characteristics of Music for 18 Musicians piece include an ethereal, trance vibe, pulsating bass clarinets, a consistent beat, and slowly developing chord progressions unfolding over the length of approximately one hour. Steve Reich’s genre-defining minimalist compositional tool, phasing, is demonstrated in full force here. We will dive deeper into …
Octet • Music For A Large Ensemble • Violin Phase
*Includes 24-page booklet with photos and liner notes* Steve Reich's commercial success had ballooned after his prior release on ECM, Music for 18 Musicians, and this collection of three compositions, two new and one from 1967, was the follow-up. Music for a Large Ensemble is very much of a piece with the prior work, using extended melodic lines, a larger palette of sound colors, and key changes every several minutes. It's charming and pleasantly busy in an industrious way but really covers litt…
Desert Plants
**Essential reading!** Walter Zimmermann interviews Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, John Cage, Philip Corner, Jim Burton, Phil Glass, Steve Reich, Robert Ashley, Alvin Lucier, Joan La Barbara, Pauline Oliveros, David Rosenboom, Richard Teitelbaum, Larry Austin, James Tenney, J. B. Floyd (about Conlon Nancarrow), La Monte Young, Charlemagne Palestine, Charles Morrow, Garrett List, John Mc Guire and Ben Johnston (about Harry Partch).
Live / Electric Music
A Landmark in Minimalism and Process Music. 180 gram audiophile vinyl, remastered. The influence Steve Reich had on contemporary music can hardly be put into words. As one of the great innovators, he started playing around with tape loops and created rhythmic and tonal effects while recording the sounds of rain, it formed the basis of his ambitious project called " It's Gonna Rain". The great depth and complexity make this an outstanding song in his repertoire - an incredible tape loop piece tha…
Different Train
Nonesuch Records' 1989 recording of Steve Reich's Different Trains, the Grammy Award winner for Best Contemporary Composition that year, and Electric Counterpoint has returned on vinyl for the first time in more than twenty-five years. The album features the first recordings of the two pieces, performed by Kronos Quartet and Pat Metheny, respectively. The vinyl edition—mastered by Robert C. Ludwig at Gateway Mastering in Portland, Maine, with lacquers cut by Bernie Grundman, and pressed on 140-g…
Drumming
Steve Reich's Drumming is regarded as one of the most important musical works of the last century. Distilled through his studies of African percussion in Ghana during 1970 and Balinese gamelan music, Reich revolutionized our understanding of polyrhythms, sculpting a new sonic territory to illuminate the radical potential of Minimalism.Divided into four sections, performed without pause, Drumming is written for eight small tuned drums, three marimbas, three glockenspiels, piccolo and voice. The s…
Music For 18 Musicians: Tokyo Opera City, Tokyo, Japan, May 21st
A stunning version of Steve Reich's masterpiece of musical minimalism Music For 18 Musicians (1974-1976), performed live at Tokyo Opera House in 2008 by Ensemble Modern and Synergy Vocals, featuring the composer as guest performer. LP housed in a deluxe die cut jacket with printed insert. In the 1960s, with Terry Riley and Philip Glass, Reich gave pulse back to experimental music. He discovered the tape-based techniques of looping and phasing, using recordings of fragments of speech, and then mo…
Six Pianos / Keyboard Study #1
After the widely noticed performance at the "Acht Brücken Festival 2016" at Cologne's Philharmonic Hall, Gregor Schwellenbach, Hauschka, Erol Sarp (of Grandbrothers), Daniel Brandt and Paul Frick (both of Brandt Brauer Frick) and John Kameel Farah release their interpretation of Steve Reich's "Six Pianos" as a studio recording via FILM. The re-recording of this piece is an interpretation of Reich's composition but still far more than just that - it is a modern approach to his idea behind it. The…
Wtc 9/11
Steve Reich composed WTC 9/11 in 2010 in homage to the victims of the attack on the World Trade Center, September 11th, 2001. First performed on March 19, 2011 at Duke University in North Carolina by the Kronos Quartet, WTC 9/11 would be played for the first time in New York, at Carnegie Hall, in late April of the same year. WTC 9/11 is written for a string quartet playing live, on which are juxtaposed pre-recorded voices and two string quartets. With a playing time of 16 minutes, the work is in…
Music as Gradual Process
Minimalism´s father Steve Reich explains his composition method in this short essay which was first published in his book " Writings about music 1965-2002" ."I am interested in perceptible processes. I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music."
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Phases
Goodness me this is a little bit special - a dangerously low priced boxed set of all the major work of one of the 20th century's most important composers Steve Reich. Containing five full cds and a booklet (with loads of useful info to read while you're listening) this has everything a Reich beginner could possibly need: 'Music for 18 Musicians' (probably Reich's greatest achievement and spanning the entire first disc), 'Different Trains', 'Tehllim', 'Eight Lines', the Counterpoint series…
The ECM Recording
Marking the occasion of Steve Reich’s 80th birthday (hup, big man!), The ECM Recordings compiles three CDs of the venerable minimalist composer’s major works, which were consecutively released in 1978, 1980 and 1982, and continue to influence and inspire myriad forms of modern music. Named “our greatest living composer” (The New York Times), “America’s greatest living composer” (The Village Voice), and “…the most original musical thinker of our time” (The New Yorker), Reich’s ardent, incisive wo…