Composer Steve Reich, an artist who has gained international renown over the course of a distinguished career, was born in New York in 1936. Reich graduated with honors in philosophy from Cornell University in 1957. He studied composition with Hal Overton, and at The Juilliard School with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti. Mr. Reich received his M.A. in Music from Mills College in 1963, where he worked with Darius Milhaud and Luciano Berio.

In 1966, convinced that composition and performance should be united, Reich founded the ensemble Steve Reich and Musicians for the performance of his own music. Since 1971 this ensemble has frequently toured the world. In June 1997, in celebration of Mr. Reich’s 60th birthday, Nonesuch released a 10-CD retrospective box set of his compositions. He won a Grammy Award in 1999 for Best Small Ensemble for his piece Music for 18 Musicians. A major retrospective of his work was presented by Lincoln Center in July 1999. Earlier, in 1988, the South Bank Centre in London mounted a similar series of retrospective concerts.

Reich’s 1988 piece, Different Trains, marked a new compositional method in which speech recordings generate the musical material for musical instruments. The New York Times hailed Different Trains as “a work of such astonishing originality that breakthrough seems the only possible description…” In 1990, Mr. Reich received a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Composition for Different Trains as recorded by the Kronos Quartet on the Nonesuch label. Different Trains was performed at MOR’s Holocaust Remembrance concert in April 2001, with Mr. Reich as sound engineer in the performance.

Over the years, Steve Reich has received commissions from the Holland Festival, San Francisco Symphony, the Rothko Chapel, flutist Ransom Wilson, the Brooklyn Academy of Music for guitarist Pat Metheny, West German Radio, Cologne, the Music Foundation for clarinetist Richard Stoltzman, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Betty Freeman for the Kronos Quartet, and Festival d’Automne, Paris, for the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution.

In 1994, Mr. 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. Steve Reich was named 2001 Composer of the Year by Musical America. He is a founding member of Music of Remembrance’s Advisory Board.