In conversation with Ólafur Arnalds, the pioneer of minimal music Steve Reich talks through the music that left a mark on his life and work.
Perhaps the most influential living composer, Steve Reich's legacy represents one of the most seismic influential shifts in what we hear as modern music.
Beyond redefining contemporary classical music, Reich's pulsing, layered sound shared a space with the repetitive, climactic structures of 1970s dance music and his tape-loop techniques directly inspired the likes of Eno, Bowie and Radiohead. He was a pivotal figure for early electronic pioneers such as Richie Hawtin and The Orb, and has been sampled by the likes of Madlib and JPEGMAFIA.
Celebrating his 90th birthday this October, a series of Steve Reich at 90 events are taking place across the world, with the Glasshouse in Gateshead putting on a festival weekend to celebrate, bringing some of his most iconic and influential works to the North East.
From Friday 2 to Sunday 4 October 2026, headline concerts, installations and talks will offer a chance to experience Reich’s music in bold and immersive ways. The Royal Northern Sinfonia, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Bryce Dessner and Colin Currie - widely regarded as one of the leading interpreters of Reich’s music – are all taking part, with Currie curating the programme and performing throughout the festival.
To mark the milestone, Iceland composer Ólafur Arnalds – himself a key figure in this century's fusion of classical, ambient, and electronic music – spent some time talking with Reich about the pieces that left a profound impact on his life and art.
The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky
ÓLAFUR ARNALDS: I don't expect you to remember, but we've actually done a similar thing to this before – we were actually both being interviewed once for one of those quite forceful ‘young versus old’ concepts for a German radio station. They had put on some of your pieces in the concert hall and then had me playing a club. It was strange and very German.
STEVE REICH: When I first went to Germany – like in the early ‘70s, they were still rooted in, you know, Boulez, Stockhausen, and Barrios… very strict surrealism and all that. And so I think that they probably thought I was an American lunatic.
It was quite strange; they were quite forcefully trying to turn that on its head by trying to present you as the establishment and me as the lunatic. They just can't get out of that loop!
Yes, we don't need politics, we just need good music!
I remember feeling quite awkward about it. But anyway, this year, you're celebrating 90 years with a series of concerts around the world.
Yes, lots of places, I'm not going anywhere [but] it will be in Japan. It will be all over Europe. It will be in New York and San Francisco and Los Angeles and lots of other smaller places.
Well, that's a good opportunity to go through some of these pieces that you have selected as influences on you. Shall we just dive right in and talk about Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring? Vivaldi obviously experienced quite a different spring from Stravinsky... but I know this piece wasn't well received or understood when it came out, and people came to it a bit later. Is that correct?
Yes, so far as I know, I think the premiere was in 1913 and it caused a riot, which was very famous, but if you look now there are many, many recordings of the piece and it’s played relatively frequently, it's a staple.
My personal experience is that I was 14 years old, it was 1950 and I had a friend who said to me, ‘I’ve got to play you this piece, it’s really different.’ And I kept saying to him yeah yeah, because my understanding at that time of classical music was Beethoven through to Wagner. That was all that I was familiar with, and was around me in the world, but I was not in a particularly musical family.
So I finally went over to his house, and I listened to the recording, and I thought what on earth is this!? Harmonies unlike anything I'd ever heard before! Unbelievable rhythms, changing meters! I’d never heard any of this before and it made a huge impression.
Really, that's when I decided this is the most wonderful thing in the world and I had to learn a whole lot more about it. And then it led actually to Bach, believe it or not, and then Bebop and lots of other things. But that initial listen to The Rite of Spring was a pivotal moment in my life.
Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 by Bach
STEVE REICH: So I wanted to hear more of Stravinsky, and then the same friend who played me The Rite of Spring said, ‘I want you to hear something else’ and said, ‘I have this Brandenburg Concerto No. 5!’, and I put it on and again I said, this is incredible! I've never heard anything like this!
I'd never heard really any music before 1750, just a little bit of Mozart, a little bit of Haydn and I began to realise this. This has lucidity, you know? It's not orchestral, it's a rather large chamber ensemble, there is clarity. You can hear all the details, the rhythmic energy.
It made a huge impression, in a very different way than The Rite of Spring. But what it began to suggest to me, and what became increasingly clear over the years, was that my love of “classical music” really begins with Gregorian chant and runs up through Bach. And then I'm not as involved from 1750 to, let's say, Debussy… and then I become very, very involved with the music, you know: Debussy, Ravel, and ancient Stravinsky, and onwards through my generation and beyond.
One of the marks of especially romantic music is that it loses the steady pulse, the ictus, the regular beat. In the same period of time I also heard Bebop with Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. Stravinsky, Bach and Bebop: and that really, in a sense, delineated the direction of my life, starting in 1950 onwards.
I had taken piano lessons when I was about 7, 8, 9, and I played these simplified, watered-down versions of classical and I wasn't very drawn to it, so I just stopped. And at the age of 14, I heard the Stravinsky, the Bach, the Bebop and my friend and I were listening together and we said: ‘we’ve got to start a band’. And he said, ‘I'll be the pianist,’ and I said, ‘I'm going to be the drummer.’
I started studying with Roland Kohloff who – eventually became the timpanist with the New York Philharmonic – but in those days was a good drummer, and I started studying basic snare drum techniques with him.
And so that period – at the age of 14, in 1950 – was really a pivotal beginning, which really set me on the path that I basically stayed broadly on for the rest of my life.
ÓLAFUR ARNALDS: This feels like a common pattern. I also studied piano when I was around 6, 7, 8 and started playing these simplified versions of classical pieces, and very quickly, I just got very bored of it and lost all interest. But again, at the age of 14 and 15, I'm discovering… well it was punk music at that time, and that ironically brings me back to the piano, because I want to do some of that on a piano!
Viderunt omnes by Pérotin, (Recording: The Hilliard Ensemble)
ÓLAFUR ARNALDS: I was not familiar with this, but I listened to it today, and it's gorgeous. And I can hear people such as Arvo Pärt and so many other people being influenced by this?
STEVE REICH: Well, people know about Gregorian chant, and Pérotin later composed it, and Léonin was his predecessor.
But this was in about 1954, and I was a student at Cornell University. I was studying music with William Austin, and he was playing a history of Western music. He started with Gregorian chant, and then he played this incredible piece by Pérotin, which, by the way, translates into “all have seen”. And I ran to the music library, and I looked at the score in a book, and I thought, This is amazing! This is unheard of, this is as radical as Stravinsky!
I guess what really had a tremendous influence on me specifically is the elongation. Basically “Viderunt omnes” is the first four-part organum. First, it was two-part, then three-part but Pérotin does the first four-part organum in Western history, and I was influenced by the extreme elongation of this one.
It was the idea of a drone and very pronounced rhythmic patterns – extreme rhythmic patterns and extreme continuity at the same time. It isn't measured in the sense of our music, but it was obviously organically measured by the performance at the time and by people who sing it nowadays.
I had a piece from 1970 called “Four Organs”, and it was right out of Pérotin – basically it was one dominant eleventh squared with the dominant in the bottom and the tonic on top. And at first, it's short, and each individual note begins to get longer and longer, like a bar graph in time, until it's like 256 measures long over the same chord. And that was basically a study in augmentation, a study coming right out of Pérotin, right from the 12th century to me in 1954, so that's what you call a long-lasting influence.
I studied some Gregorian chants at music school, I've studied some counterpoint, but I found it all extremely boring. I don't think they ever played anything so beautiful like this, or maybe I was just not in a place to appreciate it at the time.
String Quartet No. 4 by Bartók (Recording: Juilliard String Quartet)
ÓLAFUR ARNALDS: This is another piece I was also made to study at music school. I never managed to enjoy it too much, so I'm curious to hear your thoughts on it.
STEVE REICH: I had gone from Cornell to Juilliard School of Music in New York City in about 1959, they used to have noontime concerts at the school and I heard the Juilliard Quartet play all the Bartók String Quartets. They recorded them and they were big champions of that music.
What really stuck with me at the time – I was taken in by the sound – but what was the lasting effect of it was the way it's organised formally. Most symphonies are, you know, fast movement, and then slow movement, and scherzo in three and then back to another fast movement.
Here it was totally different, more sort of geometric - A-B-C-B-A - which was, in this particular piece, probably a fast movement at the beginning, a fast movement at the end… the B sections were a little bit slower, but one of them played all pizzicato, and the other one played all dampened notes, all muted notes, and the slow movement in the middle. So it was a way of organising music based on tempo and symmetrical organisation that really appealed to me.
I would also say that in terms of Bartók… after Cornell and before Juilliard I briefly studied with a musician called Hall Overton who was a composer and a graduate of Juilliard. He became a teacher there, but he was also a good friend and arranger for a Thelonius Monk, believe it or not, and I was studying with him, and he said: “Look, I know you're playing drums, and I want you to get back to the piano and I want you to play these pieces.”
He gave me Bartók, Mikrokosmos Volume One and Two. And I went back and I was completely knocked out, you know? Canon at the fifth…! Dorian mode…! Phrygian! I learned about canons in the mode from Bartók. I mean, I knew about them, but I really could see them in detail, playing these first two books of his children's piano pieces right after Cornell in around 1957.
They’re very simple melodies or based on folk tunes, which is a big part of his life – so the formal organisation, that arch-form organisation - A-B-C-B-A – that's what stuck with me, and it pops up in a lot of my pieces.
Balinese Gamelan (Recording: Music from the Morning of the World)
ÓLAFUR ARNALDS: I'm excited to move on to talk about this one because Bali is in my territory. My wife was born in Indonesia, she grew up there and we go there every year. So I've spent countless hours sitting in on the local Gamelan orchestra whenever I hear them… like on a Wednesday evening, we're sitting in our house there, and if I hear Gamelan in the distance, I will just go out and find it. I have friends there who used to host Ryuichi Sakamoto and David Bowie back in the early ‘80s. They were spending a lot of time there and they wrote the music for the 1980 Olympics in Bali, at my friend's house. I went to visit, and she showed me a lot of pictures of their time there. How did you come to Gamelan and Balinese music?
STEVE REICH: Well, let's see… in about 1961 I moved to the west coast and started studying with Luciano Berio at Mills College. I got a job in the college music library to get some money, and I noticed they had a lot of these old 12 inch, 78 RPM records that had Balinese music. And I put them on, and I thought, wow, this is incredible! So then I started trying to dig in a little bit and I began looking at books and whatnot.
And then in 1974 I was back in Berkeley to study Balinese Gamelan with Balinese teachers at what was called the American Society for Eastern Arts. And they asked me if I would come out to form my own group and teach the students how to play my music and play with them, and at the same time become a student of the Balinese ensemble and play in that ensemble too. I did it two years in a row, for about a month or two months at a time. And it was a wonderful experience, working with [people such as] Pak Cokro and Subandi.
So did you just study the Gamelan percussion, or did you sink yourself into the lullabies and the singing as well?
No, I just studied playing the percussion instruments.
The singing is also fascinating; I actually sing a Balinese lullaby to my baby every night.
Well, your wife is Indonesian, so that's half of the baby's birthright!
He will be playing the gong before I know it! Did you ever go over there?
No, well what happened is earlier on I was interested in African drumming, particularly in Ghana. And I met a Ghanaian drummer at Columbia University in New York. I ended up going to Ghana and while I was there I got malaria, and it really spooked me, you know?
Fortunately when I came back to New York, this was the period when a lot of G.I.s were getting malaria too and they developed this drug Primaquine which didn't just relieve the symptoms, it knocked the disease out… because a lot of people spent their life with malaria and once in a while, it comes back.
So fortunately, I was in the generation that began to get this permanent cure because of what had been hitting American troops that were in the area. But it still spooked me and when it crossed my mind to go to Bali, I was just gun shy after the experience in Africa.
“So What” by Miles Davis
ÓLAFUR ARNALDS: So the next three pieces you chose are all jazz, right?
STEVE REICH: Well, again to go back in time to 1950 – the pivotal year – after hearing the Stravinsky, and the Brandenburg by Bach, another friend of mine played me Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. And I thought, wow, this is incredible. And that’s when we started a band, and that’s when I started studying with Roland Kohloff to get my snare drum chops together, and I stayed with that for about three years.
And I guess later in the 1950s I started going down to Birdland to hear Miles Davis live. I heard the recording of “So What” - which was made in 1959 – just after it was released. And here was something… instead of a series of chord changes, which is as you know very well is what jazz was based on, this was basically two modal scales, one a half step up from the other – basically Dorian mode – and playing that, that song form transfer to modes rather than actual chords.
So this was a kind of quiet revolution and had an enormous effect on jazz. And one of the people on “So What” is John Coltrane.
If you listen to “So What” and you listen to “Africa/Brass”, it doesn't move very far harmonically, it stays very close to home. In “Africa/Brass” it never leaves the low E in the bass. So this was something that was in the air musically, an interest in non-western music – not just you, not just me – and Miles responding to that on some level, who knows what, but nevertheless, producing something that vastly simplified and changed jazz improvisation. And then Coltrane picking on that and saying: All right, two chords? How about just one?!
“Africa/Brass” by John Coltrane
STEVE REICH: I must have heard Coltrane all the time I was studying with Luciano Berio in San Francisco. I was going to the jazz workshop in San Francisco to hear John Coltrane at night. So it was Stockhausen and Boulez during the day, and Berio and Coltrane at night. And you know where I ended up!
“Africa/Brass” which I guess was around 1961 - lasts about 20 minutes – there's a low E in the bass, and it goes on non-stop. Nevertheless, over it, you can play the Phrygian mode on E; you can play A natural minor with the E as a dominant pedal. You can scream, which he sometimes does, through the instrument. So the idea of staying put harmonically was, as I said, in the air in the 1950s in the jazz world. And eventually it came in concert music through what is now called minimalism.
So I think all genuine, genuine musical movements, they're not so much the brainstorm of some individual as a small group of people… I mean just look at what's called Impressionism in France: Satie is sort of off in the clubs; and Debussy is in the concert hall, a virtuoso; Ravel has this incredible talent… and they quite independently gravitate in the same direction because it's in the air at that time in Paris.
I think in the western world at large - influenced by the non-western world, because Balinese music doesn't have key changes, and nor does Africa – the movements from one drone to another are all within the same modal scale.
So the idea of harmonic simplification, harmonic focus, is in the air [and] all over the place – whether you're going back to the 12th century, whether you're going out around the world, to Bali or to Africa, or whether you're listening to Miles Davis and John Coltrane…there's this similar thread. And a lot of people picked up on it… La Monte Young, Terry Riley, myself, Phil Glass…
“Shotgun” by Jr. Walker & The All Stars
STEVE REICH: I don't know exactly when, but I think it was in 1964 when it came out… Jr. Walker & The All Stars. I’d never heard of them, I must have been in a car listening to popular music or whatever I was listening to... and here comes this tune: [sings] “bum…da-na-na-na-na-bum…I'm never to change”... it’s not A-B-A, it’s just A!
And it produces this incredible energy, because if you listen to the guy, he's singing and he's playing the alto saxophone, and it never changes focus. The intensity builds as a result of that in a way that you don't get if you have a normal bridge, you have a release… and that produces another psychological state of intensity provided you're really doing something worthwhile, because there's a lot of “minimal junk” that's for sure. But Jr Walker’s “Shotgun” is an amazing pop tune - or however you want to call it – coming out of Detroit at the time, and the whole Motown thing was happening.
In a sense, the Miles Davis, the John Coltrane and this Jr. Walker piece all sort of point in the same direction of harmonic stasis.
ÓLAFUR ARNALDS: It sounds like you are attracted to music that kind of closes the walls in on you a little bit. You need to be creatively more bold in order to do something interesting when harmonically, the walls are closing in on you like that, right?
Well you’re voluntarily [and] extremely enthusiastically, limiting yourself to get the energy that's only available by doing that. You work in a smaller area, but the details become more and more pronounced and become extremely interesting… and there is a great deal of variety, because you know variety is necessary, but you know exactly on what scale and in what parameters there is a big difference. Being locked in prison is one thing, you know? But deciding I just love to do this is a completely different one.
I often find that if I have all the choices in the world – if there's no limits to what I'm doing musically – then my music becomes a little bit directionless. So often, if I'm stuck, I might set myself these boundaries. It might not be just staying on C the whole time, but you set some boundaries, and there I can find creativity. There I can find new ideas.
Exactly. Good musicians always have structures. I don't care what society they're in or what period of history we're talking about. We're actually a very disciplined group of people. Don't tell anyone!
“Everything in Its Right Place” by Radiohead
ÓLAFUR ARNALDS: The final piece on your list is one of my favourite pieces of music, and I actually almost managed to ruin it for myself. At the time when phones started to have ringtones where you could upload the wav file to your phone – and it was new and exciting – I had some Nokia phone and decided I should make this my alarm clock. A week later, I realised this is probably the worst decision ever – this is going to ruin this song. Thankfully, I deleted it from the phone, and it's back to being one of my favourite pieces. That whole record really opened my eyes when I was 12 or 13 when it came out.
STEVE REICH: I remember I was invited to go to perform in a music festival in Krakow in Poland, and Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead was performing his own version of my piece “Electric Counterpoint” which I had not heard and I had never met him.
I went there to perform with my ensemble and to listen to this and it was a great performance, and we hit it off. And I found his background as a violist and a composer of film music really interesting. I went home and I listened to “Everything in Its Right Place” and it really struck me.
And I guess you know better than I do – there are four chords, F, C, D flat and E flat. It seems like it's really simple, but it's really very cloudy and it’s in F minor, but it ends up in F major, so it's a marvellously simple but constantly ambiguous kind of progression. As a result of my interest in that, I wrote “Radio Rewrite” based on that tune and “Jigsaw Falling into Place”, using the chords loosely as the basis for my piece.
My relationship with Jonny Greenwood has gone on, and we did a book of conversations, and one of the conversations is with him - a marvellous guy and a very, very, very interesting human being. I noticed he was just nominated for an Academy Award for music for the latest film that he did.
His film scores are marvellous, actually… and I've loved seeing him play this on the Martenot as well. Have you seen him play that?
Oh yes, isn't it incredible? A rock group playing on a Martenot? That doesn’t happen, come one! What drug are you on?
Well, this has been really informative, and so beautiful to see such a strong thread to all of these very different pieces you've chosen.
Yes, well you might ask what does the Brandenburg Concerto have to do with Radiohead? And the answer is: cool it you know, you'll see!
The Glasshouse's Steve Reich at 90 event runs from 2-4 October 2026; Ólafur Arnalds and Memorial release "Dawn" today via Arnalds OPIA Community label.
Sign up to Best Fit's Substack for regular dispatches from the world of pop culture