Steve Reich (October 3, 1936, New-York City, USA) is a composer. He studied composition privately with Hall Overton, then moved on to Juilliard School in New-York to study with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti (1958 to 1961). Subsequently he attended Mills College in Oakland where he was taught by Luciano Berio and Darius Milhaud (1961-63) and earned a master's degree in composition.

Early on, Reich was influenced by fellow minimalist Terry Riley's loosely-structured aleatoric works which combines simple musical patterns, offset in time, to create a slowly-shifting, cohesive whole. Reich adopted this approach to compose his first major work written in 1965: It's Gonna Rain... Reich moved on from the "phase shifting" technique he had pioneered to more elaborate pieces. He investigated other musical processes such as augmentation (the temporal lengthening of phrases and melodic fragments).