A birthday measured in new music
Steve Reich turns 90 on Saturday with the unusual perspective of a composer whose experiments moved from the edges of New York’s music scene into concert halls around the world. The anniversary arrives not as a closing statement but alongside a recent composition, “In All Your Ways,” which received its premiere at the Edinburgh International Festival.
That continuing work matters to understanding Reich’s place in music. He is widely associated with repetition, pulse and gradual change, but those labels can make an active practice sound like a fixed technique. His career has instead been a long sequence of revisions: acoustic instruments replacing tape loops, voices entering formal patterns, harmony widening and subject matter reaching from documentary testimony to scripture.
A New York musical language
Born in New York in 1936, Reich became one of the central figures in American minimalism, alongside composers including Philip Glass. Early works explored how identical recorded phrases fall out of alignment and create shifting rhythmic relationships. Later pieces transferred that process to live performers, demanding intense concentration and precision while allowing listeners to hear structure unfold in real time.
The sound became influential far beyond contemporary classical music. Rock, electronic music, film scoring and popular production absorbed elements of steady pulse, layered patterns and slow transformation. Reich’s connection to New York was practical as well as symbolic: ensembles, lofts, galleries and downtown performance spaces gave experimental music places to develop before large institutions embraced it.
The new piece
“In All Your Ways” takes its title and inspiration from a verse in Proverbs. Reich told Reuters that the piece changed after he believed it was already complete: he added a slow movement, something he said he had not done in that way before. The decision suggests a composer still willing to disrupt his own plan when the music requires a different balance.
That mixture of system and intuition has always been part of Reich’s method. Rhythmic values, instrumental combinations and repeated figures create clear architecture, but revision depends on listening. A process can generate material; it cannot by itself decide when a passage has emotional weight, when contrast is needed or when a work has reached its final shape.
Technology without surrender
Reich has used technology throughout his career, from magnetic tape and microphones to later digital tools. Yet he remains skeptical that computer systems can substitute for the judgment at the center of composing. In his Reuters interview, he questioned the musical authenticity of artificial intelligence even while acknowledging that new tools may have practical uses.
That position is less a rejection of machines than a distinction between assistance and authorship. Reich’s own history shows how technology can reveal artistic possibilities. The question is who makes the consequential choices: which accident is worth keeping, which pattern needs interruption and which sound carries meaning beyond novelty.
Why the milestone matters
Anniversaries often turn artists into monuments, smoothing away the uncertainty that made their work possible. Reich’s 90th birthday offers another view. His influence is secure, but his current practice still involves doubt, adjustment and surprise. The slow movement added to a supposedly finished score is a modest detail with a larger lesson: longevity in art depends on remaining open to revision.
For New York audiences, Reich’s career also records a transformation in the city’s cultural institutions. Music once treated as a downtown experiment became part of the international repertory, while the boundaries between concert music and popular sound grew more permeable. That history belongs not only to one composer but to the performers, small venues and listeners who made sustained experimentation possible.
At 90, Reich is neither chasing fashion nor repeating a greatest-hits formula. He continues to work inside the musical questions that have occupied him for decades—pulse, speech, belief, memory and the tension between structure and instinct. The newest answers sound different because the search is not over.
Sources: Reuters interview with Steve Reich; Steve Reich official 90th-birthday program; Edinburgh International Festival program information. Reporting reviewed October 3, 2026.