Steve Reich reflects on his most significant works

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. Today he joins Shad to discuss his decades-long career and music's capacity to document history. Reich's style of looping audio samples laid the groundwork for hip-hop, dub and electronic music.

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[gregrice]

Thank you Tom for creating this documentary dialog with Steve Reich. As jarring or disruptive as the music and performances and compositions of Mr. Reich, Reilly, Glass, Adams and others may seem to most people - under influence of pacifying repetitions and "minimalist" variation on infantile lullabies and adolescent melodies and dance tunes - these relatively few, masters of music and composition and performance present wonderful examples of continued tradition of serious, competent, trained, practicing, experimenting, compositions, with more insights and more ways to express the thoughts and feelings of people to our fellows, to our neighbors.

Music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass opened my mind, after touching me for inexplicable reasons. There is so much less information accompanying music during the era that audio cassettes and Compact Discs (CDs) helped bring this music to the world. As I discovered the lives and urban environments of both Reich and Glass, I could hear the sounds of their city lives - overhead trains, "subway" trains, urban homes and workplaces carved into the man made massive structures like mountains with electric roots and vines and metallic pipes for water, coming and going, and rising and receding of the sounds of life and the shouts of joy, anger, sorrow, glee, surging and reclining, and seeking rest in cycles less simple and less regular than those governed by our earth and sun and moon. There is no melodrama or "shock value" or "attention grabbing" techniques involved with the true music of these few folks. Their music is wonderful, reasonable, unexpected, and can resonate and harmonize with people.

[FCarraro]

that host should be doing every interview in the world. Such a competent, nice polite guy!