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Steve Reich is an American composer born on October 3, 1936, in New York City. He studied composition privately with Hall Overton before attending the Juilliard School, where he learned from William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti from 1958 to 1961. He continued his education at Mills College in Oakland, studying under Luciano Berio and Darius Milhaud from 1961 to 1963, and earned a master's degree in composition. Reich was early on influenced by fellow minimalist Terry Riley's loosely-structured aleatoric works, which combine simple musical patterns offset in time to create a slowly-shifting, cohesive whole. This approach inspired Reich to compose his first major work, "It's Gonna Rain...", in 1965. He later moved beyond the "phase shifting" technique he had pioneered to explore more elaborate compositions and other musical processes, such as augmentation, which involves the temporal lengthening of phrases and melodic fragments. Reich's mother is a Broadway singer and lyricist.

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