Steve Reich

Once referred to as "the greatest living composer of our time" by the New York Times, Steve Reich was a Pulitzer Prize-winning modern classical composer who also scored big budget Hollywood films. With a career that stretched as far back to the early 1960s, it was Reich, along with friends and peers Philip Glass, La Monte Young, and Terry Riley, who in the mid-1960s pioneered the experimental style of music known as minimal music. Reich composed several highly-praised works over the next several decades, most notably "Clapping Music" (1972), "Different Trains" (1988), and "Double Sextet" (2007) (which earned him the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Music) and "WTC 9/11" (2011), an intensely personal piece informed by the panic he and his family felt in lower Manhattan on that terrible day. In addition to his numerous classical compositions, Reich was also a noted film composer, contributing music to the effects-driven blockbuster "The Hunger Games" (2012) as well as scoring several smaller-scale projects. His classical compositions may not be recognized by the masses, but his ability to capture the attention of a mainstream movie audience with his work in Hollywood is just one reason why Steve Reich is one of the most versatile composers of his generation.