On 3 October 2026, the American composer Steve Reich, best known as a pioneer of minimal music, turns 90! Birthday celebrations are well underway for a composer whose looping patterns and insistent pulses transformed much of the musical landscape of the second half of the 20th century.
One of the most original thinkers of our time, Andrew Clements writes in The Guardian that “there’s just a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of music history, and Steve Reich is one of them.”
Steve Reich
Essentially, Reich freed tonal and modal chords from any conventional harmonic function and put his musical innovations to work in communicating political and cultural messages. He dealt with the Holocaust in Different Trains, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in The Cave, the murder of a journalist in the Daniel Variations, and the attack on the World Trade Centre in WTC 9/11.
Steve Reich: WTC 9/11
The importance of Steve Reich’s contribution can be gauged by the number of festivities held worldwide. These celebrations encompass both the pathbreaking compositions of the 1960s and 1970s, and works from his last decade.
Steve Reich is still composing, and In All Your Ways, scored for large ensemble and lasting about 18 minutes, premiered at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall on 28 August 2026. Written specifically for the Colin Currie Group, the title comes from Proverbs 3:6, “In all your ways know Him, and He will straighten your paths.”
Reich told Boosey & Hawkes that the piece is less rigidly sectional than some of his earlier works. Instead of organising sections primarily through tempo changes, he works with changing note values to create the sensation of acceleration and deceleration. In addition, the rhythmic figure that opens Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony recurs throughout the piece, mostly in the fast sections but sometimes in the slow sections as well. (Cheung, Boosey & Hawkes, 2026)
Steve Reich: Clapping Music
After premiering at the Edinburgh International Festival, In All Your Ways now tours major halls in Amsterdam, New York, London, Paris, and beyond. In London, celebrations have already begun, and the Southbank Centre’s opening celebration brought together music from all periods of Reich’s career.
A programme brought together by the London Sinfonietta and Jonny Greenwood probed the connection between Reich and rock/pop musicians as one of the anniversary’s recurring themes.
Steve Reich © Jennifer Taylor
Reich’s influence extends far beyond the contemporary-classical world, and a recent review in The Financial Times found notable connections to artists including Björk, Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, and Radiohead.
Steve Reich: Electric Counterpoint
The Barbican in London has designed a programme that essentially links his minimalist vocabulary with his later, more harmonically expansive music. On 11 November, a one-hour introduction to Reich’s music with the LSO is paired with a concert featuring Susanna Mälkki and the LSO on 12 November. Additional dedicated programmes run through the first week of December.
Carnegie Hall in New York will host another major anniversary event, with a programme spanning five decades of Reich’s music, from Electric Counterpoint to In All Your Ways. As you might recall, Reich’s early Four Organs became notorious, and you can read a conversation between Reich and the late Michael Tilson Thomas revisiting this famous performance. (MTT & SR on Four Organs)
Paris will participate with a four-day portrait titled “Clapping for Steve Reich.” The first two days focus on Reich’s earliest and most radical works, but they are experienced through contemporary dance rather than a conventional concert. The Grande salle Pierre Boulez will host the celebration’s major orchestral event, and the Colin Currie Group with Bryce Dessner will tie together Reich’s oeuvre.
Steve Reich: Music for 18 Musicians
On 3 October 2026, Steve Reich’s actual 90th birthday, the Austrian city of Graz becomes a performance space. Organisers describe 24 hours, 25 locations, and 27 programme points involving 90 musicians, as the city’s streets, churches, railway station, courthouse and the university become performance venues.
Steve Reich
The idea comes from Raphael and Günter Meinhard of STUDIO PERCUSSION. The original idea imagined a 24-hour chain of repeating patterns extending through the city and across the day.
The resulting programme chronologically takes listeners through Reich’s career and inspired improvisations, releasing Reich’s ideas on pulse, repetition, and phasing into an entire city. Above all, Steve Reich is celebrated as a living composer, and his In All Your Ways is not a summation of his musical journey but just another step on his creative path.
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