Reich: Collected Works (Limited Edition Box Set)

Nonesuch Records releases Steve Reich Collected Works, a 27-disc box set (26CD's + DVD) featuring music recorded during his 40 years on the label. The collection represents six decades of Reich's compositions, ranging from It's Gonna Rain (1965) to first recordings of his two latest works: Jacob's Ladder (2023) and Traveler's Prayer (2020).

Two extensive booklets contain new essays by longtime Nonesuch President Robert Hurwitz, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, Steve Reich and Musicians percussionist Russell Hartenberger, producer Judith Sherman, and composer Nico Muhly, as well as a comprehensive listener's guide by pianist and composer Timo Andres.

"There's just a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history," says the Guardian, "and Steve Reich is one of them."

Nonesuch made its first record with Steve Reich in 1985. He was signed exclusively to the label that year, and since then the company has released twenty-two all-Reich albums, two retrospectives, and two remix releases. Among his many honors, two of Reich's Nonesuch records, Different Trains and Music for 18 Musicians, won Grammy Awards and his Double Sextet recording for the label won a Pulitzer Prize.

Reich also has become a significant mentor of the younger generation of American composers. "This music is as part of my artistic ecosystem as air is to my respiratory system, and I can't imagine saying anything about it which wouldn't somehow get its importance wrong," composer Nico Muhly says in his liner note. "Steve once told me that the trick is to 'find your band,' the group of instruments that form the core of your musical language, and this is advice I pass on to all younger composers who cross my path."

Composer and pianist Timo Andres adds, "It is Steve Reich, perhaps more than any other musician, who prefigured our ideas of a twenty-first-century composer ... For audiences, too, Reich has proven that contemporary music can thrive outside the insular world of its own practitioners.

"On initial approach, Reich's music appears both friendly and a little forbidding, its surfaces immaculate, polished, yet also playful and viscerally beautiful ... It exudes a specific kind of energy in live performance as well," he continues. "Watching an ensemble play Music for 18 Musicians, for example, one has the sense of observing a utopian society in miniature, a mass of people working towards a common goal with no apparent leader."

Steve Reich has been called "the most original musical thinker of our time" (New Yorker) and "among the great composers of the century" (New York Times). Starting in the 1960s, his pieces It's Gonna Rain, Drumming, Music for 18 Musicians, Tehillim, Different Trains, and many others helped shift the aesthetic center of musical composition worldwide away from extreme complexity and towards rethinking pulsation and tonal attraction in new ways. He continues to influence younger generations of composers and mainstream musicians and artists all over the world.

While Nonesuch recordings comprise 24 of the 27 discs in Collected Works, the set also includes recordings licensed from other labels: Mahan Esfahani's recording of Piano Phase (Deutsche Grammophon); Ensemble Avantgarde's recording of Pendulum Music (Wergo); Art Murphy, Jon Gibson, Steve Chambers, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich's recording of Four Organs and Murphy, Gibson, Chambers, and Reich's recording of Phase Patterns (Shandar); Andreas Hartmann and Waltraut Wächter's recording of Duet with MDR-Sinfonieorchester led by Kristjan Järvi (Sony 2 Classical); Steve Reich and Musicians' recordings of Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ and Six Pianos (Deutsche Grammophon); San Francisco Symphony and conductor Edo de Waart's recording of Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards (Philips); Ransom Wilson's recording of Vermont Counterpoint (Angel); and Ensemble Signal's recording of Music for 18 Musicians (Harmonia Mundi)