Steve Reich doesn't want for accolades.

Consider this gem from the Guardian of London: "There's just a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history, and Steve Reich is one of them."

Ardent fans of Reich — the iconic patriarch of minimalist music — would never argue that point.

But when Reich surfaced in the 1960s, the mainstream of contemporary music — particularly in the hallowed halls of conservatory academia — didn't warm to his ideas. With its strong tonality, scant harmonic development and insistent repetitive patterns, Reich's work seemed at loggerheads with most 20th-century music, steeped in dissonance and dense ideas. In fact, had it not been for a new generation of fans who embraced jazz, rhythm and blues, world beat and DJ-driven hip-hop, Reich might have wound up as little more than a footnote in musical history.

Ojai Music Festival artistic director Thomas Morris, a passionate supporter of Reich's work, could not agree more with the Guardian's take. But Morris also gets that Reich's music isn't for everyone.

"It's the kind of music that inspires in audiences a strong reaction and strong engagement, and the reaction can be positive and negative," Morris said recently by phone from his home in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

@TO-1-Text Subhed:Return to Ojai

Reich is the featured composer at this year's 62nd annual Ojai festival, marking a return for the New York-based artist after he appeared in 1973. To Morris, that long absence seemed odd, considering Reich's stature. In bringing him back, Morris and festival music director David Robertson chose a broad sampling of Reich's works.

The festival opens June 5 with an all-Reich program at Libbey Bowl, where the contemporary ensemble Signal will perform "Eight Lines" (1983), "Nagoya Marimbas" (1994), "Four Organs" (1970) and "Daniel Variations" (2006).

On the morning of June 8 at the bowl, Reich — joined by the Nexus percussion ensemble and So Percussion — will perform "Clapping Music" (1972) and "Drumming" (1970-71). Reich will also be interviewed during a symposium at 2:15 p.m. June 6 at Ojai Presbyterian Church. During the weekend's final show June 8 at Libbey Bowl, the festival orchestra, with members of So, Nexus, soprano Dawn Upshaw and mezzo soprano Kate Lindsey, will perform Reich's "Tehillim."

The June 5 performance of "Four Organs" will celebrate the 35th anniversary of its original performance in Ojai. Typical of Reich's earliest works, "Four Organs" puts one chord under a microscope and invites the audience to hear it evolve at a glacial pace. Some blissfully lose themselves in the layers of sound. Others liken it to watching grass grow.

Morris calls it a "very severe piece" that challenges audiences to listen in a way that no other composer offered at that time.

"You have to completely surrender yourself to a 25-minute piece of music that is exactly the same chord and quite loud and very gradually changing," Morris said. "It plays tricks on your mind."

The piece is scored for four Farfisa organs (baby boomer pop trivia: think Question Mark and the Mysterians' hit single "96 Tears") and a sole percussionist playing maracas. Morris fondly recalled an early performance at Carnegie Hall where a woman got up from her seat and ran to the stage, screaming, "OK. I'll confess."

"You know, that's one of those apocryphal stories," Reich said recently during a phone interview from his home in Westchester County, N.Y. "It might have happened. It might have been a complete fabrication. I have no idea."

Reich can honestly claim ignorance of the situation. As one of the performers, he was riveted to keeping his place in the music (the last bars involve counting up to 256 beats each). Still, he knew early on that his music stirred up powerful emotions. When a radio station played "Come Out" (1966) — an early work of tape loops repeating a single vocal phrase — listeners immediately reacted, Reich recalled.

"As soon as they put it on, the switchboard lit up, and people started calling, saying, Your transmitter's broken. The record's stuck in a groove. Would you please fix it?'" he said.

@TO-1-Text Subhed:Repetitive strains

At that time, the contemporary music world seemed split into two camps. On one side sat composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez and Luciano Berio, who wrote music according to so-called "serial" formulas, or "rows." On the other side were John Cage and his minions, who gave performers free rein with "chance decisions" to create a piece as they went along, based on loosely sketched road maps.

In either case, Reich said, the results were the same: highly dissonant music with no clear pulse.

"When I went to school, there was one way to write music, and that was the way of Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio and Cage," Reich said. "No harmony, no melody, no tap-your-foot rhythm. And if you did those things, you were laughed at. You were a fool. You were a joke.

"That's why so many of my concerts in the late '60s and early '70s were at art galleries and museums because those were the people that were responding, not the academic music people at all," he added. "They were the last to get on board. But now we're living in an entirely different world, and everything goes."

While living in San Francisco in the 1960s, Reich participated in the first performance of Terry Riley's "In C," often cited as the seminal work of minimalism. In that piece, musicians repeat individual cells of music over and over to create a droning, trancelike effect.

By embracing repetition, Reich recaptured an element of classical music that died shortly before World War II, Robertson said.

"The notion of repetition in music — which stayed approximately the same in most folk music and western classical music for centuries — met Steve Reich head on," Robertson said recently by phone from New York City. "The two of them had an interesting conversation, and music hasn't been the same since."

Despite the early antipathy to his work, Reich slowly discovered that he'd developed a sturdy following in the most unusual circles — the world of pop, rock and jazz musicians. Rocker David Bowie and ambient music guru Brian Eno surfaced at performances, seeking input and later reflecting Reich's influence in their work.

Guitarist Pat Metheny also turned out to be a fan, adopting repetitive patterns in several pieces (for example, the clapping introduction to Metheny's "First Circle").

In 1992, Reich learned that the Orb, a British band at the forefront of "ambient house" music, had sampled 30 seconds of 1987's "Electric Counterpoint" (originally written for Metheny) in its song "Little Fluffy Clouds."

"I began to become aware that there was a whole new generation of musicians after Brian Eno and David Bowie who were into sampling and remixing, and I was one of the targets," Reich said. "I didn't sue them, so I got a good rap in the DJ world. Maybe it was stupid, but later on, it actually worked out."

It did, indeed, work out. In 1999, "Reich Remixed" (Nonesuch) featured remixes by the likes of DJ Spooky, Tranquility Bass and Howie B.

"And I got all the royalties from that," Reich said.

@TO-1-Text Subhed:Jazz lessons

Other composers have traveled down the road of minimalism, notably Philip Glass and John Adams.

But Reich's influence seems ubiquitous, his canon endless. He formed Steve Reich and Musicians in 1971, sensing that it was the only way to get his pieces heard. Early works favored small groups, such as "Music for 18 Musicians" (1974-76), hailed by many as his masterpiece. But in the ensuing years, his canon expanded to orchestral and vocal ensembles and a 1993 opera, "The Cave" (a collaboration with his wife, video artist Beryl Korot).

By the 1980s, Reich was exploring more thematic ideas — some involving his Jewish background — such as "Different Trains" (1988), a tone poem on the Holocaust for string quartet and tape; "Proverb" (1995), for voices and ensemble with text by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein; and "Tehillim" (1981), set to Hebrew texts.

"Daniel Variations," co-commissioned by the Daniel Pearl Foundation, is a rich meditation on the world after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Its four movements alternate between text from the Book of Daniel and the last words of Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was beheaded by Islamic extremists.

Reich's earliest ensemble works, such as "Drumming," favored percussion instruments, a nod to his roots as a jazz drummer at 14 and study of West African and Indonesian gamelan music.

But Reich also credits his compositional style to hearing trumpeter Miles Davis and saxophonist John Coltrane in San Francisco nightclubs. At the time, Reich was studying "serial" composition with Berio at Mills College in Oakland (following studies at Juilliard), but couldn't abide by its strict rules.

"I was going to study with Luciano Berio during the day and then listening to John Coltrane at night," Reich said. "Now that's two different kinds of musical lessons, and eventually the Coltrane lesson was the more persuasive."

Contact Charles Levin at wmlevin@gmail.com.

On the Net: http://www.stevereich.com