Steve Reich

Born in New York on 3 October 1936, Steve Reich is an American composer whose discovery of tape phasing — the slow drift of two identical loops out of synchrony — shaped the course of both minimalism and twentieth-century art music. His earliest tape pieces, It's Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966), arose from accidentally asynchronous recorders; he then extended phasing to live performers in Piano Phase (1967). Major later works include Drumming (1971) and Music for 18 Musicians (1976). He studied philosophy at Cornell, composition at Juilliard, and earned a master's degree from Mills College under Darius Milhaud and Luciano Berio.