Rethinking Reich

Abstract Although the composer Steve Reich (b. 1936) has been described as “the most original musical thinker of our time,” who has received innumerable accolades in a career spanning more than fifty years, his music remains nevertheless underresearched. However, during the past ten years, renewed interest has been shown in the music of this seminal figure, partly generated through the acquisition of the Steve Reich Collection at the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland. Rethinking Reich is the first edited volume on a musical figure considered by many to be America’s greatest living composer. With contributions by academics known for their expert knowledge on various aspects of Reich’s work—ranging from analytical, aesthetic, and archival studies to sociocultural, philosophical, and ethnomusicological reflections—the book provides a much-needed intellectual platform for new understandings relating to this important composer, including those enabled by access to the Paul Sacher archive. Given the hegemony of Reich’s own very articulate and convincing discourses on his music, as found in his Writings on Music, perhaps “rethinking Reich” is precisely the task that now needs to be undertaken. While recognizing the achievements of a composer who, in critic Andrew Clements’s words, belongs to “a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history,” the present volume provides a series of timely, serious, thought-provoking, and critically minded contributions and reappraisals, where the notion of rethinking this important composer’s contribution to the music of the twentieth century remains an abiding concern throughout.