I found steve’s website and this is his bio
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 musicians and artists all over the world.
Double Sextet won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 and Different Trains, Music for 18 Musicians, and an album of his percussion works have all earned GRAMMY Awards. He received the Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo, the Polar Music Prize in Stockholm, the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge award in Madrid, the Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall, and the Gold Medal in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He 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, among others.
One of the most frequently choreographed composers, 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.
Reich’s documentary video opera works—The Cave and Three Tales, done in collaboration with video artist Beryl Korot—opened new directions for music theater and have been performed on four continents. His work Quartet, for percussionist Colin Currie, sold out two consecutive concerts at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London shortly after tens of thousands at the Glastonbury Festival heard Jonny Greenwood (of Radiohead) perform Electric Counterpoint, followed by the London Sinfonietta performing his Music for 18 Musicians. “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.
Steve seems like a really important figure within minimalism culture and music, I’m going to listen to a few of his works and read his essay “Music as a Gradual Process” and reflect on each piece. I want to learn more about his work and the ideas that he presents.
Come Out
This piece was based on a piece he was tasked to make for the Harlem Six who were six black youths arrested for murder. Reich was given 71 hours of content from tapes recorded during their arrest. He selected one four-second section where the youth says “I had to, like, open the bruise up, and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them”. Then the words “come out to show them” are looped at increasing speeds, two channels start on time and slowly go out of time and begin to phase. This piece reminds me of Jessica Ekomane’s work Figures / Ground where two bleeps come in and out of time until eventually, they are completely out of sync. Madlib uses this sample in the intro of his work on MADVILLIAN with the song America’s Most Blunted, this just adds to the creative genius that is Madlib knowing how he discovers all these samples and recontextualises them. I want to attempt a similar idea for both these pieces but with field recordings. Can I make field recordings come in and out of time and eventually start together? What does this mean when I use recordings from a specific area?
Steve also does this in his work It’s Gonna Rain, he creates two tape loops at slightly different speeds and allows them to phase to come in and out of time over a span of seventeen minutes. I really want to try this for myself. Perhaps in the context of other environmental sound artists and their uses of field recordings.
I also read Steve Reich’s essay Music as a Gradual Process
He makes interesting points towards the ideas of minimalism within music, that music shouldn’t be an instantaneous thing or at least he doesn’t enjoy that. The gradual process of composition or display can enhance the actual listening. As extended listening presents itself to more of an understanding and focus towards what is happening, and the gradual process of development means a lot more when you can anticipate its happenings. Here are some interesting quotes I’ve extracted from this.
I do not mean the process of composition, but rather pieces of music that are, literally, processes.
The distinctive thing about musical processes is that they determine all the note-to-note (sound-to-sound) details and the overall form simultaneously. (Think of a round or infinite canon.)
I am interested in perceptible processes. I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music.
by running this material through this process I completely control all that results, but also that Iaccept all that results without changes.
That area of every gradual (completely controlled) musical process, where one hears the details of the sound moving out away from intentions, occurring for their own acoustic reasons, is it.
I begin to perceive these minute details when I can sustain close attention and a gradual process invites my sustained attention. By “gradual” | mean extremely gradual; a process happening so slowly and gradually that listening to it resembles watching a minute hand on a watch you can perceive it moving after you stay with it
I’m going to create something based on this reflective research. Tape loops and gradual compositions?