Judisk Kultur

Steve Reich i samtal med Hans Gefors

Steve Reich was recently called  "our greatest living composer" (The New York Times), "America’s greatest living composer." (The Village VOICE), “...the most original musical thinker of our time” (The NewYorker) and “...among the great composers of the century” (The New York Times)..

From his early taped speech pieces It's Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966) to his and video artist Beryl Korot’s digital video opera Three Tales (2002), Mr. Reich's path has embraced not only aspects of Western Classical music, but the structures, harmonies, and rhythms of non-Western and American vernacular music, particularly jazz. "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," states The Guardian (London).

Born in New York and raised there and in California, Mr. Reich graduated with honors in philosophy from Cornell University in 1957. For the next two years, he studied composition with Hall Overton, and from 1958 to 1961 he studied at the Juilliard School of Music with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti. Mr. Reich received his M.A. in Music from Mills College in 1963, where he worked with Luciano Berio and Darius Milhaud. 

Mr. Reich is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes among which are the Pulitzer prize in Music for his composition 'Double Sextet’ (2009) and the Swedish Polar Prize (2007). In 1994 Steve Reich was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, to the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1995, and, in 1999, awarded Commandeur de l’ordre des Arts et Lettres.

In 2015 Steve Reich was Judisk kultur i Sverige’s special guest in Sweden during the project Jewish Culture Season - Malmö & Stockholm.

Hans Gefors is a composer, professor in Composition and journalist.