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One day late in 1964, the 28-year-old composer Steve Reich took a tape recorder out onto the streets of San Francisco.

Reich was a New Yorker, but he鈥檇 moved West for a while to study with the Italian modernist Luciano Berio. Then he worked with composers like Pauline Oliveros and Terry Riley at the San Francisco Tape Music Center. These composers were making an American kind of electronic music; an alternative, a counterpoint to the European version that Berio had brought to Mills College.

The young Reich loved Bach, bebop and Stravinsky and had little natural affinity with Berio鈥檚 European modernism. But he was fascinated by the pieces of electronic music Berio showed him that had the human voice as the main event. The voice of the boys in the furnace in Stockhausen鈥檚 Gesang der Junglinge, and Berio鈥檚 own homage to James Joyce performed on tape by the great vocalist Cathy Berberian: both of these greatly impressed Reich.

What Reich was searching for in San Francisco was a voice to record and take back to the San Francisco Tape Music Center, to make his own kind of electronic music. And he found that voice in Union Square, where a fiery Pentecostal preacher called Brother Walter was preaching an apocalyptic outdoor sermon about The Flood. "It鈥檚 gonna rain... for 40 days and for 40 nights..." and so on. Reich noticed at once the melody in Brother Walter鈥檚 voice - the phrase "It鈥檚 gonna rain" was on a major third, somewhere between D and E flat moving to somewhere between F sharp and G. It had its own melody - albeit simple.

When Reich got back to the studio, he played the tape back. He cut it up and isolated the phrase "It鈥檚 gonna rain", putting it on a tape loop so that it repeated and repeated, a repetition that served to emphasize the melody in the phrase. He also picked up something he hadn鈥檛 noticed in Union Square: just as Brother Walter said the phrase "It鈥檚 gonna rain," a pigeon had taken off near the microphone and the flap of its wings, repeated on the tape loop, sounded like a drumbeat.

Reich made an exact copy of the loop, thinking that he鈥檇 try to create a kind of counterpoint by playing the copies in canon with each other. He lined the two tape loops up on two rather inexpensive tape machines, hoping to play them in unison to test things out. But very quickly, the loops started to move out of sync of their own accord. They created a shifting canon of a complexity that Reich could never have deliberately achieved - with shifting perspectives, sub-melodies and irrational rhythms. "Sometimes, the best things come by accident," he said, "or, by divine gift."

It鈥檚 Gonna Rain is a very dark piece. Reich was going through a divorce at the time, and has said this personal crisis comes through in the piece. But "It's Gonna Rain" is also is a snapshot of the apocalyptic atmosphere of the times. Americans were still shaken by the Cuban Missile crisis, when the world was brought to the brink of nuclear catastrophe. "We had the end of the world still hanging over our heads," Reich said, "if not by water, then by fire. And this piece has an intensity that comes from the loop, comes from the pigeon and comes from the context that I felt while making it as a participant in the world around me."

This is one of 100 significant musical moments explored by 麻豆社 Radio 3鈥檚 Essential Classics as part of Our Classical Century, a 麻豆社 season celebrating a momentous 100 years in music from 1918 to 2018. Visit bbc.co.uk/ourclassicalcentury to watch and listen to all programmes in the season.

This is an excerpt from It's Gonna Rain by Steve Reich.

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