This week we're celebrating Beethoven's birthday.

Steve Reich once told me: “The musicians who can play my music with the right rhythmical feel are being born now…” Practicing the classical music repertoire is not enough to prepare you for playing his music.

I first met Steve Reich in January 1995. Bang on a Can had started a chamber orchestra for which I was the conductor. Our first concert that January featured Reich's Eight Lines.  After that concert, Michael Gordon introduced me to Reich.

I love the way radio brings music directly to the listener. Gigantic symphonies can become an intimate experience; a full opera is staged in the imagination of each listener; great performers play for you as you sit comfortably at home or in your car. It's a beautiful way to experience music, but it's not a substitute for attending a live performance. The experience of the living, breathing moment music is made, in the presence of the musicians and other listeners, adds another dimension altogether.

There is a disturbing new trend on Broadway--and I’m not talking about turning movies into shows or juke box musicals.

Writing about Steve Reich’s music feels like writing about a family member or a childhood friend: There are too many stories and too many strange intimacies to really create a coherent narrative. I first discovered Reich as a teenager; I’m pretty sure Music for 18 Musicians was the first album I bought, and then I got deep into it very quickly.

I'm not a first -- or even second -- generation Reichian: I was still in grade school in the late '60s when the Bob, Russ, etc. were taking the bus down from Wesleyan to rehearse what became Drumming in Steve's loft. He entered my consciousness my freshman year of high school, when Betty Jacobsen -- a hip, elderly "Materials of Music" teacher -- tore our heads open with It's Gonna Rain.

Steve Reich’s music first came to my attention during my university years in the mid '70s. I was beginning to find my own way into a life in music and art, and the power and innovation in his early works—the amplified Pendulum Music (perhaps the first formal use of amplified feedback in a composition), tape pieces such as Come Out and It’s Gonna Rain, the encyclopedic Drumming, and the mind-blowing Four Organs provided huge inspiration.

One of my high-school jobs was as a stock boy in a classical music record store. A perk of this job was that I got great discounts on records and I would buy anything that caught my attention. One day around 1973 I noticed a Columbia Records release with a violin in a rainstorm on the cover. It was a recording of two recent pieces - Violin Phase and It's Gonna Rain. I bought it.

Steve Reich has taken over our blog. For each day of an eight-day extended Maximum Reich blog, Q2 reveals a new portrait of Reich from those with deeply personal connections to the man and his music, including devoted musicians and ensembles, conductors, and a former member of Steve Reich and Musicians. Check back in each day, as we light another candle of tribute to this icon of contemporary music.

The holiday season is in full swing, and many of the upcoming holidays are steeped in tradition - religious and cultural.

A few days ago while cleaning my apartment and listening to the radio, a piece of music came on that immediately caught my full attention.

An eventful two weeks here, including the first public performance of Don Byron’s and my work last Saturday as part of the 46th annual Nuova Consonanza Festival marathon concert and concluding with Thanksgiving dinner at the Academy.

This past month, I’ve been involved in a particularly lovely version of my freelance life, working on some fantastic projects all over the world.

Mode Records is a label based here in New York City, and for over 25 years they've recorded and presented modern classical, avant-garde, and new music.

Recently President Obama brought classical music to the White House. His only problem: he claimed not to know when to applaud.

Like drive-in movie theaters, fireflies, and fireworks, some things are just meant for the nighttime. This week on Q2 with Terrance McKnight we'll listen to music that was written for, or about things nocturnal.

It seems strange to introduce myself as your blogger in Rome, seeing as how I'm currently in CDG airport in Paris. But I’m on my way back to Rome now, where I’ve been living for the past two months as a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.

In the comments on last week's blog, listener Michael wrote of the "brilliantly talented artists" who worked in advertising in the mid-20th Century. He's right, they certainly were brilliant.