Rethinking Reich

Described by music critic Alex Ross as "the most original musical thinker of our time" and having received innumerable accolades in a career spanning over fifty years, composer Steve Reich is considered by many to be America's greatest contemporary composer. His music, however, remains largely underresearched. Rethinking Reich redresses this imbalance, providing a space for prominent and emerging scholars to reassess the composer's contribution to music in the twentieth century. Featuring fourteen tightly focused and multifarious essays on various aspects of Reich's work--ranging from analytical, aesthetic, and archival studies to sociocultural, philosophical, and ethnomusicological reflections--this edited volume reveals new insights, including those enabled by access to the growing Steve Reich Collection at the Paul Sacher Foundation archive, the premier institution for primary research on twentieth-century and contemporary classical music. This volume takes on the timely task of challenging the hegemony of Reich's own articulate and convincing discourses on his music, as found in his Writings on Music (OUP, 2002), and breaks new ground in the broader field of minimalism studies. - Sumanth Gopinath is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. He is the author of The Ringtone Dialectic: Economy and Cultural Form (2013), co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, vols. 1 and 2 (2014) with Jason Stanyek, and has published work on Steve Reich, minimalism, new media, Marxism, country music, and other topics. Pwyll ap Siôn is Professor of Music at Bangor University, Wales. He studied music at Oxford University. Ap Siôn has published books and articles in the areas of minimalist and postminimalist music, quotation and intertextuality in music and minimalist music in film and media. He has contributed record reviews and articles for Gramophone music magazine since 2007

Rethinking Reich brings together new perspectives on one of America's greatest contemporary composers. Offering a critical engagement with Steve Reich's prominence in the numerous, overlapping, and contentious worlds of contemporary classical music, these tightly focused and multifarious essays reassess the composer's contribution to music in the twentieth century.