Music for 18 Musicians

work by Reich

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July 19, 2026

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Music for 18 Musicians is a well-known composition by American composer Steve Reich, a leading figure in Minimalism. This style is characterized by the repetition and slow variation of simple musical ideas. Composed in 1976, Music for 18 Musicians is structured around a cycle of 11 pulsing chords. Reich's work often draws inspiration from various musical traditions, including jazz, African drumming, and Balinese gamelan music. His compositions reject the complexity of mid-20th-century classical music, instead building large-scale works from minimal materials.1

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Steve Reich
…and in 1976 he completed Music for 18 Musicians, a piece structured around a cycle of 11 vibrantly pulsing chords that is perhaps his best-known composition. Tehillim (1981) marked Reich’s first setting of a text—the Psalms, sung in Hebrew—and he followed it with The Desert Music (1984), a setting of…
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…and in 1976 he completed Music for 18 Musicians, a piece structured around a cycle of 11 vibrantly pulsing chords that is perhaps his best-known composition. Tehillim (1981) marked Reich’s first setting of a text—the Psalms, sung in Hebrew—and he followed it with The Desert Music (1984), a setting of…
Read More