Steve Reich turns 90: how his early tape pieces made human voices the music itself

Composer Steve Reich turned 90 this past weekend, prompting renewed attention to the early tape pieces he created in the mid-1960s, works that remain central to understanding his influence on contemporary music.

Two pieces in particular, "It's Gonna Rain" and "Come Out," grew out of Reich's discovery of what he called micro-canon: playing the same recorded material slightly out of sync with itself, a technique he stumbled upon when two tape machines drifted apart while playing the same recording.

"It's Gonna Rain" uses the voice of Brother Walter, a Pentecostal street preacher recorded in San Francisco in 1965 warning of apocalypse. Reich looped the recording against itself repeatedly, transforming the preacher's voice into a dense wall of sound. "Come Out," made in 1966, used the voice of Daniel Hamm, one of the Harlem Six, a group of Black men wrongly convicted of murder in New York; the piece was originally commissioned as background music for a benefit event raising money for their legal defense.

Reich has said these pieces do more than set words to music; in his own description, they "set human beings," treating vocal recordings as both musical material and a form of political and emotional expression. The techniques involved, including looping and canon, are inseparable from where and how the recordings were made, and whose voices they carry.

Reich's anniversary has become an occasion to revisit these questions, which form part of a broader discussion of whether so-called "pure music" exists, a discussion that also considers other musicians working with similarly human-centered approaches to composition and performance.