Steve Reich (b. 1936)
“I’m not really a morning person,” the American composer said recently. “I would say, if you look at everything I’ve ever written, ninety-five percent of it would have been written between noon and twelve midnight.” Reich uses the hours before noon to exercise, pray, eat breakfast, and make business phone calls to London, where his European agent is based. Then, once he settles down in front of the piano or the computer, he’ll aim for a few good chunks of concentrated work over the next twelve hours. “If I can get in a couple hours of work, then I just have to have a cup of tea, or I have to run an errand to get a little bit of a break,” he says. “And then I come back. But those can be very fruitful pauses, especially if there’s a little problem that comes up. The best thing to do is to just leave it and put your mind somewhere else, and not always but often the solution to that problem will bubble up spontaneously. Or at least a possible solution, which will either prove to be true or false.” Reich doesn’t believe in waiting for inspiration to strike, but he does believe that certain pieces are more inspired than others–and that, with continual work, you can look forward to hitting these patches of inspiration from time to time. “There are no rules,” he says. “one has to be open to the reality–and it’s a very wonderful reality–that the next piece is going to hold some surprises for you.”
* Source: Daily Rituals by Mason Currey