In Schnip’s Picks, Pitchfork managing editor Matthew Schnipper identifies under-heralded music and sings its praises.

Steve Reich, one of the world’s greatest living composers, was born in 1936 to a Jewish family. When he was 1, his parents divorced. His father stayed put in New York and his mother moved to Los Angeles. As a child, he would travel between the two cities by train. Thinking of these trips later in life, it occurred to him that train travel was happening at the same time across Europe: to concentration camps. It did not take much magical thinking for him to imagine how, if he had a less lucky birthright, he would have a different life on a different train.

In 1988, Reich wrote a composition honoring that revelation, called “Different Trains.” Though it is centered by a string quartet piece, “Different Trains” is, in many ways, aligned with Reich‘s early, experimental work, both in its political theme and its grand scale. In 1964, as a young man during the civil rights era, Reich composed his watershed piece “Come Out.” The entirety of that composition is a looped recording of a young black man, Daniel Hamm, talking about the injuries he sustained when beaten by police. Reich utilized this method of tape looping in other pieces, some overtly political, some not, before he began to mimic its disorienting effect for larger orchestras. In 1978, he released “Music for 18 Musicians,” which added harmony to his oft-hard rhythms while still reflecting his interest in repetition. It was as though he was trying to make wordless, organic cover versions of his tape work. His music always had a haunting quality, but here he shifted away from shredding specific words into the abyss and just began with the nothingness itself.

“Music for 18 Musicians” is likely Reich’s most brilliant and beautiful piece of music; whereas “Come Out” finds its power through pain, “18 Musicians” does so through ecstasy. In a nice bit of foreshadowing, the album’s liner notes say, almost as an aside, that recently Reich had “begun studying the traditional forms of cantillation (chanting) of the Hebrew Scriptures.” Sure enough, four years after “18 Musicians,” he released “Tehillim,” the culmination of all his learnings and methods, enmeshed with a deep contemplation of his Jewish identity. On its surface, “Tehilim” is similar to “18 Musicians,” but instead of wordless syllables, there are lyrics: Jewish hymns, sung in Hebrew. At the time of recording “Tehilim,” Reich had “rejoined” the Jewish religion and was exploring his faith through music. Speaking about his renewed path in 2011, he said, “As a child I learnt nothing. I was given a transliteration to read from for my bar mitzvah. I may as well have been a parrot and this made me highly resentful and somewhat anti-Semitic, which I think it would make any normal, well-disposed young man.”

My experience was similar. In the 22 years since my bar mitzvah, I have almost entirely eschewed anything that might be interpreted as organized religion. While my Jewish identity has never been in question, what that meant in a tangible, everyday way has been largely undefinable. Mostly, it seems to correspond to pain, or at least ways out of it. I’ve used humor as a path through misery and thought as a path through adversity, and these things have always felt like vaguely Jewish parts of my life. My ability to recite parts of my Haftorah portion by memory seems about as close to my definition of who I am as the fact that I once learned multiplication tables.