Steve Reich
Biographical note paraphrased from Reich's website:
Steve Reich (b. 1936) as been called "America's greatest living composer" (The Village VOICE), "the most original musical thinker of our time" (The New Yorker), and "among the great composers of the century" (The New York Times), and The Guardian (London) observed that Reich is one of "just a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history." From his early taped speech pieces, It's Gonna Rain (1965) andCome Out (1966), to his collaboration with video artist Beryl Korol for the video opera Three Tales (2002), Mr. Reich's path has embraced not only aspects of Western Classical music, but the structures, harmonies and rhythms of non-Western music traditions, as well as jazz and other American vernacular idioms.