Stephen Michael Reich (/raɪʃ/ RYSHE;[1][2] born October 3, 1936) is an American composer best known as a pioneer of minimal music in the mid to late 1960s.

[6] His innovations include using tape loops to create phasing patterns, as on the early compositions It's Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966), and the use of simple, audible processes, as on Pendulum Music (1968) and Four Organs (1970).

[14] For a year following graduation, Reich studied composition privately with Hall Overton before he enrolled at Juilliard[15] to work with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti (1958–1961).

Subsequently, he attended Mills College in Oakland, California, where he studied with Luciano Berio and Darius Milhaud (1961–1963) and earned a master's degree in composition.

[16] Reich worked with the San Francisco Tape Music Center along with Pauline Oliveros, Ramon Sender, Morton Subotnick, Phil Lesh and Terry Riley.

The music for Thick Pucker arose from street recordings Reich made walking around San Francisco with Nelson, who filmed in black and white 16mm.

A fourth film from 1965, about 25 minutes long and tentatively entitled "Thick Pucker II", was assembled by Nelson from outtakes of that shoot and more of the raw audio Reich had recorded.

Reich was influenced by fellow minimalist Terry Riley, whose work In C combines simple musical patterns, offset in time, to create a slowly shifting, cohesive whole.

[19] The 13-minute Come Out (1966) uses similarly manipulated sound collage recordings of a single spoken line given by Daniel Hamm, one of the falsely accused Harlem Six, who was severely injured by police.

It introduced the idea of slowing down a recorded sound until many times its original length without changing pitch or timbre, which Reich applied to Four Organs (1970), which deals specifically with augmentation.

In 1970, Reich embarked on a five-week trip to study music in Ghana, during which he learned from the master drummer Gideon Alorwoyie.

Steve Reich and Musicians was the sole ensemble to interpret his works for many years,[24] and they remain a "living laboratory" for his music.

“The reason lay in his antipathy to the functionality, which Reich thought inevitable, of the bass in determining and spelling out a tonal center and the relationships developed around this”.

A piece with rich tonal exploration about an hour’s length performance can only provide so much melodic opportunity, so repetitive rhythmic structure also plays a large role in this.

With Octet and his first orchestral piece Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards (also 1979), Reich's music showed the influence of Biblical cantillation, which he had studied in Israel since the summer of 1977.

The technique ... consists of taking pre-existing melodic patterns and stringing them together to form a longer melody in the service of a holy text.

The work is in four parts, and is scored for an ensemble of four women's voices (one high soprano, two lyric sopranos and one alto), piccolo, flute, oboe, English horn, two clarinets, six percussion (playing small tuned tambourines without jingles, clapping, maracas, marimba, vibraphone and crotales), two electronic organs, two violins, viola, cello and double bass, with amplified voices, strings, and winds.

The musicologist Ronit Seter described it as "one of a very few non-Israeli works where the setting of the Hebrew text feels natural", reflecting Reich's extensive research into modern Hebrew-Israeli speech, ancient Psalmic prosody and Jewish cantillation traditions.

[31] In 1993, Reich collaborated with his wife, the video artist Beryl Korot, on an opera, The Cave, which explores the roots of Judaism, Christianity and Islam through the words of Israelis, Palestinians, and Americans, echoed musically by the ensemble.

The work, for percussion, voices, and strings, is a musical documentary, named for the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron, where a mosque now stands and Abraham is said to have been buried.

In December 2010 Nonesuch Records and Indaba Music held a community remix contest in which over 250 submissions were received, and Steve Reich and Christian Carey judged the finals.

[44] On April 20, 2009, Reich was awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Music, recognizing Double Sextet, first performed in Richmond March 26, 2008.

The citation called it "a major work that displays an ability to channel an initial burst of energy into a large-scale musical event, built with masterful control and consistently intriguing to the ear".

[49] In September 2014, Reich was awarded the "Leone d'Oro" (Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Music) from the Venice Biennale.

[8] Reich's style of composition has influenced many other composers and musical groups, including John Adams, Michael Nyman, Aphex Twin, Björk, Sonic Youth, Stereolab, the progressive rock band King Crimson, the electronic music duos Autechre and Matmos, the new-age guitarist Michael Hedges, the art-pop and electronic musician Brian Eno, the experimental art/music group the Residents, the electronic group Underworld, the composers associated with the Bang on a Can festival (including David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe), and numerous indie rock musicians including songwriters Sufjan Stevens[53][54][55] and Matthew Healy of the 1975,[56] and instrumental ensembles Tortoise,[57][58][59] The Mercury Program,[60] and Godspeed You!

"[62] He has also influenced visual artists such as Bruce Nauman, and many notable choreographers have made dances to his music, Eliot Feld, Jiří Kylián, Douglas Lee and Jerome Robbins among others; he has expressed particular admiration of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's work set to his pieces.

In featuring a sample of Reich's Electric Counterpoint (1987) in the 1990 track Little Fluffy Clouds the British ambient techno act the Orb exposed a new generation of listeners to his music.

John Coltrane's style, which Reich has described as "playing a lot of notes to very few harmonies", also had an impact; of particular interest was the album Africa/Brass, which "was basically a half-an-hour in E".

[67] Reich's influence from jazz includes its roots, also, from the West African music he studied in his readings and visit to Ghana.

Other important influences are Kenny Clarke and Miles Davis, and visual artist friends such as Sol LeWitt and Richard Serra.