On October 3, influential American composer Steve Reich turned 80, and celebrations of that milestone seem certain to continue for the next 11 months. Reich is one of the key architects of minimalism, along with Terry Riley, La Monte Young, and Philip Glass, and he’s enjoyed perhaps the most successful and rewarding career, consistently finding new ways to approach the deceptively simple constructs at the root of his music. Tonight the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s MusicNow series at the Harris Theater presents three Reich pieces composed between 1988 and 2007. The concert is cohosted by Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music, which awarded Reich the Nemmers Prize in Music Composition earlier this year and will host a couple of residencies by him in 2017.
Reich made three classic albums for ECM in the late 70s and early 80s, which have been reissued in a single package called The ECM Recordings. The first of those was the 1978 release of Music for 18 Musicians, one of his masterpieces—and with more than 100,000 copies sold in its first year, a commercial success, something that was already increasingly rare in classical music. The work is built around 11 chords, each with its own dedicated movement; Reich uses them to convey a wide range of emotion, shifting between major and minor as well as precisely varying the relentlessly pulsing rhythmic patterns.
