Today is the 90th birthday of my favorite composer: Steve Reich. I want to say a little about what he as a composer means to me.
I was 13 years old when I first discovered Steve Reich’s piece Music for 18 Musicians on a late night past my bedtime. Little did I know, that piece would stick with me, and set in motion a series of events and discoveries that allowed me to begin finding my own voice as a composer.
I never explored any more of Steve Reich’s music until years later, with his piece Electric Counterpoint. Electric Counterpoint was another experience that truly changed me. To me, that piece doesn’t just illuminate the compositional process of Steve Reich — his famous idea of music of process, or the process becoming the music — but the piece itself is literally a map of the discovery of the elements of music themselves. The piece literally builds music, one element at a time.
Electric Counterpoint begins strictly with harmony. Then Reich drops the harmony and adds in a melody. Just a single melody, by itself, played by one guitar. Then another guitar comes in with another melody. All of a sudden we have two melodies interacting with each other. He expands this until it sounds like over ten melodies all playing over each other in this sea of motion. Then, he brings back the harmony underneath all of it, and in that moment — like some chemical reaction — he created a new universe.
Then I heard Piano Phase, a piece that, to me, expanded upon the treatment of melody and motif in a manner so progressive and revolutionary; something that hadn’t been done since the likes of Bach. This was the kind of piece I couldn’t even fathom existing before discovering it. It was something that — much like all of Reich’s works — changed what music could be for me.
And finally we arrive at the present, where just this past year I listened to Steve Reich’s Octet Eight Lines for the first time. I listened to it while reading the score in the library on campus, with surrounding people unaware of the profound emotional and cathartic experience I was having in that moment. It was then that I heard music that felt more like “music” than anything I’d ever heard before.
So today is Steve Reich’s 90th birthday. If you have a little free time and a little curiosity, listen to some Steve Reich.