Mills College graduate wins Pulitzer for music

Steve Reich—who received his master's in composition from Mills College—was a one-time collaborator with Grateful Dead’s bass player and has been hailed as “America’s greatest living composer."

Among the recipients of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize announced Monday was Steve Reich. The 72-year-old New Yorker won in the music category for a piece titled “Double Sextet,” which premiered March 26, 2008, in Richmond, Virginia.

In the early 1960s, the recent Julliard School graduate came out West, where he decided to obtain his master’s in composition at Mills College in Oakland. Then, as now, Mills College is known for its tradition of nurturing musicians who want to experiment and search for new sounds and musical forms.

As we reported on our website in February, over the past 80 years, some of the top names in contemporary music have studied or taught at Mills College: Darius Milhaud, Dave Brubeck, and members of today’s indie-rock group Deerhoof. Even Berkeley’s internationally renowned composer, John Adams, while not studying or teaching at Mills, hung out with Mills students as an aspiring young musician and composer newly arrived in the Bay Area in the early 1970s.

Now add Steve Reich to that list.

New Yorker writer Alex Ross, in a 2006 article “Fascinating Rhythm,” says the greatness of Steve Reich “is a given. …

“His reputation as a prime originator in contemporary music is more or less etched in stone. In the 1960s and ’70s, he found a rigorous solution to a pressing challenge: how to restore, after a long period of experimentation, the primal pleasures of stable harmony and a steady pulse. Reich did this in a way that was unblinkingly modern, not at all nostalgic or neo-Romantic. … Reich’s influence is vast, reaching far outside classical composition to encompass jazz, rock, pop, electronic music, and hip-hop. On some days, as familiar shimmering patterns echo on the soundtracks of commercials and from the loudspeakers of dance clubs, it seems as though we are living in a world scored by Reich.”

Regarding Reich’s time at Mills, Alex Ross adds that was hoping to escape the East Coast music establishment. In the Bay Area and at Mills, he studied with Italian avant-gardist Luciano Berio, then a visiting professor. Under the guidance of Mills faculty, Reich toyed with everything, including Schoenberg’s 12-tone method. He also studied African drumming, “dabbled in San Francisco’s nascent psychedelic culture,” and collaborated with one of his fellow students, Phil Lesh, later the bass player of The Grateful Dead, “on far-out happenings and prankster spectacles," Ross writes. Reich received his master’s from Mills in 1963.

You can hear some of Reich’s work or videos of his performances or profiles at him at his website, stevereich.com.
 

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