Steve Reich

American contemporary avant-garde composer, one of the best-known exponents of minimalism in music. He graduated with honors from Cornell and drove a cab in New York while studying composition. His career as a composer began in San Francisco, 1963, when he scored the soundtracks for two underground films. A private, studious man, he progressed from being a cult figure in the lofts and galleries of Soho to the top echelon.

The son of an attorney and a singer, young Steve was raised with piano lessons but his growing interest in jazz made him switch to drums when he was 14. He entered Cornell in 1953 as a philosophy major. Exposed to an eclectic range of music, he made the decision to make music his career.

In 1957, Reich drove a taxicab while studying composition in New York. At Mills College in California he made a valiant effort to reconciler his personal taste with the atonal music in vogue at the time but his resistance was obvious and he soon moved into the creation of tonal music.

n 1963, he scored the soundtrack for several underground films, moving into experimental pieces. "It's Gonna Rain" was the first of Reich's so-called "phase pieces," created by a slow and gradual shift in the phasing of sound. The presentation of this piece in January 1965 marked the official beginning of Reich's performing career. He followed it with concerts and recordings, leading to a small but growing audience, consisting of university students, rebels against surrealism, and artists clustered around New York's Soho district. As his music became more in demand, he was able to get more financial support, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1978 and grants from the Martha Baird Rockefeller Foundation in 1975, 1979, 1980 and 1981. His career in the mid-'70s was an exploration of many timbres and textures.

Reich followed the call of a spiritual search in the 1970s, from yoga to Buddhism to Transcendental Meditation and back to Judaism in 1974.