Reich turns 90 on 3 October 2026, and the world is throwing the party before he gets there. The Edinburgh festival premiered In All Your Ways for large ensemble last month. A late-night BBC Proms concert followed. The composer himself is recovering from a fall — broken rib, damaged wrist — and is frustrated that he can only sit at the piano for a minute or two before the pain stops him. He has 'a few little sketches' for something new. Of course he does. The biographical arc is by now familiar but still astonishing. Born New York, 1936. Life-changed at 14 by Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Postgrad studies with Luciano Berio, who looked over Reich's one 12-tone experiment and suggested, in a thick accent Reich still gleefully mimics, 'If you want to write tonal music, why don't you write tonal music?' He took the advice. He bought two Wollensak tape recorders, looped recorded speech, and built It's Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966) out of the seams where repetition becomes hallucination. Phasing — the discovery that two identical loops drifting imperceptibly out of sync create an entirely new rhythmic texture — came next, and Piano Phase (1967) demonstrated it in front of audiences. But Reich's own account of the discovery is worth sitting with: he played against a tape recorder because 'I could count on the tape recorder to stay put.' The human element, the pianist who has to move deliberately against the machine, turns out to be 'like an organic force.' The technology didn't eliminate the human; it revealed what was irreducibly human about it. Drumming (1971) and Music for 18 Musicians (1976) consolidated the language. Reich recently went back to listen to the 1974 Drumming recording and reports being 'completely knocked out' — 'we were young, we were intense.' Music for 18 Musicians still excites him enough that he demonstrates it over video call: the constant mallet 'grid' against clarinet lines functioning 'like waves washing over' it. David Bowie called it 'a tonetrack into the future.' Fifty years later, that hasn't aged. The influence is genuinely hard to overstate without sounding like a press release, which is exactly the problem. His music has been sampled by Bowie and The Orb. Jonny Greenwood recorded Electric Counterpoint. BBC Radio 1 ran a Reich remix competition for his 70th birthday. The New Yorker called him 'the most original musical thinker of our time' — a claim that is either hyperbole or accurate description depending on whether you're being generous about modernism's other architects. He dislikes the minimalist label but defines the movement generously: 'an intuitive movement towards what we wanted to hear. We loved Stravinsky and Bartók and jazz.' At 89, Reich is not delivering a valediction. He calls the interviewer 'kid,' mocks them gently for not recognizing Béla Bartók's name, and recommends John Cage's early In a Landscape — 'you hear it and you say, is this a minimalist and we don't know his name?' He speaks admiringly of Pierre Boulez ('he actually helped me indirectly'), Nico Muhly, and Caroline Shaw. He recites William Carlos Williams from memory. The memory for names is slipping — 'approaching 90 means your memory is almost vanished' — but the ideas trip out in unbroken paragraphs. Scottish percussionist Colin Currie, who heads this year's Reich at 90 celebrations, met the composer when his newly formed group played Drumming twenty years ago. Reich's response: 'I hate you because you're better than my ensemble and I don't want to be upstaged.' Then, turning serious: 'But that's exactly how it should be.' That is the closest thing to a legacy statement you'll find in this conversation — not an artist worried about his catalog, but one who spent sixty years building a musical language precise enough that someone else can play it better than he did, and who is genuinely glad about it.
