walking upstream…
Steve Reich
Steve Reich trained as a philosopher at Cornell before turning to composition at Juilliard and Mills College, where he studied under Luciano Berio and Darius Milhaud. His mid-1960s tape pieces 'It's Gonna Rain' and 'Come Out' stumbled onto phasing almost by accident — two identical loops drifting slowly out of sync — and he spent the next decade translating that discovery into music for live ensembles. A five-week 1970 trip to Ghana to study Ewe drumming with master drummer Gideon Alorwoyie, and later study of Balinese gamelan, fed directly into 'Drumming' (1971) and the ecstatic, bell-bright 'Music for 18 Musicians' (1976), the two works that made him minimalism's most influential composer. 'Different Trains' (1988), built from recorded speech turned into melody, later won a Grammy.
the sound in question
1976
Music for 18 MusiciansSteve Reich
walk the tributaries ↓
Ewe Drumming Tradition (Ghana)West African percussion / Traditional music
In June 1970 Reich traveled to Ghana and spent five weeks studying polyrhythmic Ewe drumming with master drummer Gideon Alorwoyie at the University of Ghana's Institute of African Studies, drawing on A.M. Jones's field research beforehand. The interlocking, additive rhythmic cells he encountered there — built from small repeating patterns layered and gradually shifted rather than a single fixed meter — became the direct structural basis of 'Drumming' (1970–71), his longest and most explicitly Africa-indebted work.
listen: upstream & here
Gahu (traditional Ewe drumming)Ewe Drumming Tradition (Ghana)
1971
Drumming: Pt. ISteve Reich
listen forSet a traditional Ewe 'Gahu' drum performance beside 'Drumming' — both build a dense, shifting groove out of short interlocking rhythmic cells played on tuned percussion, with no single part carrying a melody so much as everyone's parts combining into one.
John Coltrane1960s · Jazz / Modal jazz / Spiritual jazz
Reich has named John Coltrane, whom he heard live in the early 1960s, as a formative influence, prizing his approach of 'playing a lot of notes to very few harmonies' — long modal vamps sustained over a static harmonic field rather than moving through chord changes. That same idea of holding a single chord in place while everything else churns around it became a governing principle of Reich's own static-harmony pieces.
listen: upstream & here
1961
AfricaJohn Coltrane
1970
Four OrgansSteve Reich
listen forPlay 'Africa' next to 'Four Organs' — both stretch a single harmonic field far past where a conventional arrangement would resolve it, trusting internal motion and gradually shifting emphasis to keep a static chord interesting.
Johann Sebastian Bach1720s · Baroque / Classical
Reich counts Bach among the composers he cites as formative, drawn to the strict canon — identical melodic lines started at a fixed time offset, as in the interlocking string parts of the Brandenburg Concertos. Reich's phase pieces do essentially the same thing but let the offset drift continuously, treating the canon as a process instead of a fixed structure.
listen: upstream & here
1721
Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G major, BWV 1048Johann Sebastian Bach
1967
Piano PhaseSteve Reich
listen forCompare the interlocking violin and viola lines of the 'Brandenburg Concerto No. 3' with 'Piano Phase' — both build a dense, moving texture out of independent voices playing the same or closely related material slightly out of alignment with one another.