Hans Peters for Anefo · CC0

Reich helped invent minimalism, building entire compositions from short repeating phrases that slowly drift out of sync with each other — a technique he discovered almost by accident while splicing tape loops for It's Gonna Rain in 1965. Works like Drumming and Music for 18 Musicians became landmarks that reshaped classical, rock, and electronic music alike. In the 1980s he turned to explicitly Jewish and historical material, most powerfully in Different Trains, which sets recorded speech against string quartet to juxtapose his own childhood train journeys with the trains of the Holocaust.