OXFORD, United Kingdom – The University of Oxford is marking pioneering American composer Steve Reich’s 90th birthday with an immersive spatial audio experience that will place audiences inside some of modern classical music’s most influential works.
Steve Reich: Phase | Pattern | Pulse will run from September 25 through October 11 at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Center for the Humanities as part of Steve Reich in Focus, a wider celebration of the composer, who turns 90 on October 3.
Created by spatial audio designers Loss><Gain in collaboration with the British percussion ensemble Colin Currie Group, the installation will use the Schwarzman Center’s advanced immersive audio technology to break Reich’s compositions into individual musical elements distributed around the audience.
Rather than simply listening to a conventional stereo or concert-hall performance, visitors will experience the music from within a 360-degree sound environment.
The project will feature three separate programs built around some of Reich’s best-known compositions: Music for 18 Musicians; Drumming; and a program combining Sextet, Six Marimbas and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Double Sextet.
Organizers say the spatial treatment will expose musical relationships, rhythmic structures and repeating patterns that can be difficult to isolate in conventional performances.
Colin Currie described hearing the project for the first time as a revelation.
“It’s just the most remarkable thing, which I didn’t realize was going to be quite so fascinating, and so groundbreaking, and so new,” Currie said. “I honestly found it to be a revelation.”
Lighting designer Ed Warren, whose credits include work with Four Tet, Interpol, Nia Archives and Michael Kiwanuka, will provide the visual component of the experience.
Inside The Music
Phase | Pattern | Pulse will premiere in its new format inside the Schwarzman Center’s Black Box, a flexible performance and research space designed to accommodate experimental productions.
The venue’s immersive sound infrastructure can position as many as 128 individual “sound objects” within the listening environment.
The technology allows organizers to place different instruments, rhythms, and musical fragments at specific points around the audience, providing what they describe as an “exploded” view of Reich’s compositions.
The installation follows the Black Box’s presentation of Sigur Rós’ sold-out ÁRA immersive experience and continues Oxford’s collaboration with Loss><Gain.
The spatial audio company has previously developed listening experiences with artists including Max Richter, Jon Hopkins, Anna Meredith, Hannah Peel and Public Service Broadcasting.
For the Reich project, it is working with an ensemble particularly closely associated with the composer’s music.
Colin Currie Group was formed in 2006 for a BBC Proms performance of Reich’s Drumming celebrating his 70th birthday.
Over the past two decades, the ensemble has performed Reich’s music internationally and expanded its repertoire to include Music for 18 Musicians, Sextet, Tehillim, Six Marimbas and Double Sextet.
Reich has also composed works specifically for the group, including Quartet (2014) and Traveler’s Prayer (2021).
A Pioneer Of Minimalism
Born in New York City on October 3, 1936, Reich emerged during the 1960s as one of the central figures in the development of musical minimalism.
His experiments with repetition, pulse, phasing, and gradually shifting rhythmic patterns challenged many postwar classical conventions.
Works including It’s Gonna Rain, Drumming, Music for 18 Musicians, Tehillim and Different Trains helped establish a musical language that would influence composers well beyond the classical world.
His influence has been cited across electronic music, rock, experimental music, and contemporary art, with artists including Brian Eno, Laurie Anderson, Björk, Aphex Twin, and Richie Hawtin among those associated with Reich’s broader musical legacy.
Reich received the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2009 for Double Sextet. Recordings of Different Trains, Music for 18 Musicians and his percussion music have received Grammy Awards.
His other honors include the Polar Music Prize, Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, and Japan’s Praemium Imperiale.
Reich’s Jewish Musical Legacy
Jewish history, identity and religious tradition have also played significant roles in Reich’s work.
Tehillim, composed in 1981, sets Hebrew texts from the Book of Psalms and represents an important development in Reich’s exploration of his Jewish heritage.
His 1988 work Different Trains juxtaposed his childhood train journeys across the United States during the Second World War with the trains carrying European Jews to Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust.
Recorded testimony from Holocaust survivors became part of the composition itself, with instruments mirroring the melodic contours of their spoken voices.
The work received the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition.
Celebrating 90 Years
The Oxford installation forms part of a broader series of British events surrounding Reich’s 90th birthday.
The Schwarzman Center’s Steve Reich in Focus program will also include a performance by the Ligeti Quartet of Different Trains at the Sohmen Concert Hall on October 6.
Following its Oxford run, Phase | Pattern | Pulse is scheduled to travel to The Glasshouse International Center for Music in Gateshead as part of its Steve Reich at 90 festival.
In Oxford, the project also offers an opportunity to showcase the technological capabilities of its newly opened Schwarzman Center for the Humanities.
The center opened its public cultural program in April 2026 and combines Oxford humanities faculties and research institutes with public performance spaces, including the 500-seat Sohmen Concert Hall, a 250-seat theatre, galleries and the experimental Black Box.
For Reich’s 90th birthday, that technology will be turned toward the compositional ideas he has spent more than six decades developing.
Steve Reich: Phase | Pattern | Pulse runs September 25 through October 11 at the Schwarzman Center for the Humanities, University of Oxford.
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