If Steve Reich — who is perhaps as famous as a contemporary music composer can be –– ever wondered what life would be like as a rock star, this next month may give him some idea. In celebration of his 70th birthday on October 3, Mr. Reich will receive a unique bash: The three major music presenters in the city — Lincoln Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Carnegie Hall –– will host a month-long celebration, featuring, among other artists, the Kronos Quartet and the choreographer Akram Khan. The celebration will include three premieres, including the U.S. première at Carnegie Hall of “The Daniel Variations,” a work co-commissioned by the Daniel Pearl Foundation in Mr. Pearl’s memory. “It’s truly unprecedented,” the executive producer of BAM, Joseph Melillo, said of the joint celebration, which opens Tuesday at BAM.

The artistic adviser to Carnegie Hall, Ara Guzelimian, compared celebrating Mr. Reich’s birthday with marking Mozart’s centenary, which was also this year. Honoring Mozart, he said, “You can be nostalgic and wish you lived in the Vienna and Salzburg of [his] time. In Steve’s case, you can actually just bask in the fact that we live in the same city at the same time as an artist like him.”

Part of what makes Mr. Reich remarkable as an art music composer is that he attracts large audiences, audiences much more diverse than the usual New York Philharmonic or Carnegie Hall crowd. His music — minimalist, often made up of pulsing, repeated phrases, with subtly varying rhythms and harmonies — appeals both to devotees of traditional music and to fans of electronic music and rock.

“His music can speak to people of many different musical appetites,” Jennifer Bilfield, the former president of Boosey & Hawkes, Mr. Reich’s music publisher, said. “When you go to Europe and see the lines around the block for his performances … [you see] people who love Stravinsky and who love Mahler and who love Radiohead. That’s really unusual,” she said. “But to me it represents a very healthy way of looking at the world and a very healthy sign that people are taking this music and giving it their own context.”

That all three institutions wanted to join forces to honor Mr. Reich reflects how far back his relationships with the three go — in each case, to the early 1970s, when Mr. Reich was establishing himself as a pioneer in musical minimalism, with pieces like “Drumming,” a 90-minute work focused on subtle rhythmic variations, and inspired in part by Mr. Reich’s study of African and Balinese drumming.

About two years ago, Ms. Bilfield called Mr. Guzelimian, Mr. Melillo, and the vice president for programming at Lincoln Center, Jane Moss, and suggested that they collaborate on a celebration of Mr. Reich’s birthday, instead of competing or stepping on one another’s toes.

They were all game, and the subsequent organizing between institutions was “remarkably straightforward and organic,” Mr. Guzelimian said. “We each had a distinct idea of what we wanted to do and it was all complementary.” Carnegie Hall will focus on Mr. Reich’s ensemble and chamber pieces, of which it has presented several premières in the past. Lincoln Center will focus on his vocal music, with a presentation of Mr. Reich’s video-opera “The Cave” and the New York premiere of a work co-commissioned by Lincoln Center and the Los Angeles Master Chorale. And Mr. Melillo at BAM knew what he wanted BAM’s contribution to be: dance.

BAM has a long relationship with the Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, “an extraordinary interpreter of movement” to Mr. Reich’s music, according to Mr. Melillo. So BAM composed an evening out of her works to his music, along with the American premiere of a piece Mr. Reich recently wrote for the London Sinfonietta and the choreographer Akram Khan, called “Variations for Vibes, Pianos and Strings.” Opening Tuesday, it will launch the month-long Reich extravaganza.

Later in the month, Carnegie Hall will present several of Mr. Reich’s most significant works, including “Music for 18 Musicians,” the piece with which Mr. Reich began to move into more complex harmonic territory, and “Different Trains,” in which Mr. Reich contrasts his childhood train trips between his divorced parents’ homes in New York and Los Angeles, with the deadly purpose trains were put to in late 1930s and early 1940s Europe. He utilizes the recorded speech of his African-American governess, who accompanied him on the train; of a retired black Pullman porter, and of three Holocaust survivors.

Mr. Reich’s Jewish faith has long been a strong influence on his music, and religion will play a critical role in “The Daniel Variations,” which will have its world première at the Barbican Centre in London on October 8 and its American premiere at Carnegie on October 22. In composing the piece, Mr. Reich had an unusual, and chilling, text with which to work: the transcript of the video of Mr. Pearl’s murder. Mr. Reich uses only the first five words: “My name is Daniel Pearl.” “A perfect, gemlike, beautiful name,” Mr. Reich said.

In the work, Mr. Reich alternates movements directly related to Mr. Pearl with ones inspired by the Book of Daniel, which takes place in Babylonia, modern-day Iraq. He focuses on a section in which the young Daniel is called to interpret a terrible dream of the king, Nebuchadnezzar. Mr. Reich said that Nebuchadnezzar’s ominous dream reminded him of September 11, 2001, when his son and granddaughter were in his apartment four blocks from the World Trade Center –– they escaped and are fine –– and of all the violence that has taken place since then.

“This dream of Nebuchadnezzar unfortunately describes the reality of the world that we are living in now,” he said.

That Mr. Reich brings his moral concerns into his music has always been one of its distinctive features, but Mr. Reich is not one to overestimate the power of art to change, say, the situation in the Middle East. Referring to the impact of his music, “I believe that, basically, it’s prima la musica” he said, referring to the Italian saying about opera music. “You’ve got to write a piece of music that works.If it works, then the ideas that are in it will be carried along with it.”

October’s events will celebrate the fact that Mr. Reich’s music has “worked” for 50 years and counting. “The only thing I find remarkable about all of this,” Ms. Moss joked, “is it seems impossible to me that Steve Reich is 70 years old!” But “it doesn’t mean anything in music,” she added. “You have conductors going strong at 85.”