Fifty Years Of Steve Reich's 'It's Gonna Rain' — npr.org

Sometimes great things are born from happy accidents. Fifty years ago today in San Francisco, composer Steve Reich premiered It's Gonna Rain, his first official piece. The music, made by manipulating a recording of a Pentecostal preacher, opened a door to a new way of composing for Reich and helped launch his career. He says the creation of the work came about by chance as he was fiddling with two identical tape loops of the preacher that got out of synch with each other.

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