At 90, Steve Reich is still setting the industry's metronome

A quiet coronation

Steve Reich turns 90 on 3 October, and the arts establishment has, characteristically, got there early. Last month the Edinburgh festival hosted the world premiere of his new work for large ensemble, In All Your Ways, followed by a late-night slot at the BBC Proms, the kind of double booking that tends to arrive only once an artist has moved from “influential” to “institutional”. Reich himself, in a new interview with the Guardian, is having none of the fuss. Asked how it feels to be nearly 90, he demurs: “I haven’t quite got there yet. I don’t want to dot the i before I even get there.”

That reticence is worth noting, because the surrounding noise rather contradicts it. The New Yorker has called him “the most original musical thinker of our time”; David Bowie counted himself among the admirers. Reich, born in New York in 1936, has spent six decades building a body of work, phasing tape loops, pulsing ensembles, the slow accumulation of small differences, that reshaped what concert music, and a good deal of pop and electronic music besides, sounds like.

The economics behind the accolades

What’s checkable here is modest but real: a premiere at a major festival, a Proms programming slot, a milestone birthday. What’s harder to verify, and worth treating with some scepticism, is the scale of Reich’s broader cultural footprint. “Changed the soundtrack of modern living” is a big claim to hang on a composer whose own concerts remain a specialist, late-night-slot affair rather than a stadium draw. Minimalism’s commercial afterlife runs largely through other people’s royalties, film scores, ambient production, sample culture, rather than through Reich’s own box office. That’s not a knock on the music; it’s simply how influence in contemporary classical composition tends to get monetised, if at all. The composer gets the critical superlatives and the festival premieres; the money, more often, flows to the artists downstream who absorbed his techniques into more commercially viable forms.

There’s also the quieter, unglamorous question of who actually funds this kind of milestone programming. Edinburgh and the Proms are precisely the sort of prestige, publicly-adjacent platforms where a living composer’s 90th can be marked without needing to sell out on ticket revenue alone, a reminder that the space for ambitious new ensemble work, even by a figure of Reich’s stature, still depends heavily on festival and broadcaster commissioning rather than the open market.

The line worth remembering

Reich’s own verdict on the state of music, quoted in the piece, is characteristically blunt: “Good music is good music, and most music is not!” It’s a line that resists both the hagiography built up around him and the temptation to treat a birthday as an unambiguous cultural event. He resolved to become a composer at 14, after hearing Stravinsky; sixty-odd years on, the premieres keep coming and the superlatives keep arriving, but the man himself won’t even confirm the number until it’s official.

The takeaway

A genuine composer’s milestone, marked by real performances at real festivals, not just birthday tribute puffery. The critical acclaim is long-standing and well-documented; the claim that Reich single-handedly “changed the soundtrack of modern living” is the kind of framing that deserves a raised eyebrow rather than automatic assent. Worth marking, worth listening to, not worth overstating.