Blog April 2016

In 1964, Steve Reich recorded a street preacher’s speech, took a razor to the tape, looped samples on two machines — and changed music forever. The classical composer describes himself… Read More

Steve Reich’s compositions dropped on unsuspecting audiences like bomb shells. A Berlin concert prompted an audience member to pound the stage with her umbrella saying, “We surrender.” The Pulitzer Prize… Read More

Steve Reich, 80 this October, is perhaps the world’s most important living composer, a creative personality who almost singlehandedly brought music back from the brink of obscurantism that threatened to… Read More

Most Minimalists don’t carry membership cards anymore. But they do know something about guilt by association. Just ask Russell Hartenberger. Picture yourself in SoHo, New York, in the summer of… Read More

New Music used to be the Buckley’s cough medicine of the classical world – it tasted awful, but it was good for you. There was a hint of the church… Read More

Then: My first experience of meeting the renowned American composer Steve Reich was in a master class he gave for composition students at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music…. Read More