Terry Riley Press Clips - 6-2-09

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Terry And Gyan Riley: Together IN C : NPR Music

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CLASSICAL » Terry And Gyan Riley: Together IN C By Jacob Ganz

Listen Now [5 min 42 sec] add to playlist All Things Considered, May 12, 2009 - Legend has it that composer Terry Riley was sitting on a bus in San Francisco when the idea came to him for one of the most important and influential pieces of music of the last half of the 20th century. Riley began composing IN C in May of 1964. The work had its premiere that November, and it is often credited as the launching pad for the minimalist movement. IN C influenced countless musicians from Phillip Glass and this year's Pulitzer Prize winner, Steve Reich, to such rock bands as The Who and Soft Machine. Carnegie Hall recently hosted a 45th-anniversary celebration of IN C featuring the likes of Glass, Kronos Quartet and Terry and Gyan Riley, the composer's son, in the ensemble. Courtesy of Terry Riley

Father and son (Terry and Gyan Riley, respectively) celebrate the 45th anniversary of Terry Riley's minimalist piece IN C with a New York performance.

THE SOUND OF RILEYS TERRY RILEY: IN C (EXCERPT: TERRY, VOCALS; GYAN, GUITAR) [5 min 0 sec] add| purchase music

PURCHASE FEATURED MUSIC "IN C, For Unspecified Performers" CD: Riley: In C (25th Anniversary Concert) Artist: Terry Riley Label: New Albion Released: 1995

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TERRY RILEY AND GYAN RILEY: 'THE LOCUST' (GYAN, GUITAR; TERRY, PIANO) [6 min 22 sec] add| purchase music

PURCHASE FEATURED MUSIC "La Cigale (The Locust)" CD: Imaginational Anthem Artist: Various Artists Label: Tompkins Square Released: 1969

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Composer Osvaldo Golijov was also part of the group. Golijov has won his share of laurels — including Grammy awards and a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant — and here's what he has to say about Terry Riley's most famous work: "The greatness of IN C is like the greatness of the Rite of Spring or Demoiselles d'Avignon by Picasso. These are the first pieces — No. 1 in history — and then constantly imitated, consciously, unconsciously, with thousands of spinoffs," Golijov says. "And yet, the original — both IN C and Rite of Spring — they are still superior to any imitators. So that is sensational. How can somebody be so radical and then in one masterstroke include the future?" What IN C isn't really is a score. It's a single page of melodic phrases, or themes, or modules. Anyway, each performer plays the same 53 phrases, but there's no — well, maybe we should just let Terry Riley himself explain. "IN C is made up of 53 modules and we progress from 1 to 53 as we're playing and each player has to decide when he enters into the stream of the music and when he comes out. so the more people you have, of course, the more complex web you're going to build up," Riley explains, sort of. From Distant Echo to Pulsing Cacophony At Carnegie Hall, the number of people performing IN C topped 60, so complex only begins to describe the music. Terry Riley describes it this way: "It's very much like if you're watching birds on a lake and they suddenly take flight and as they move through the air they create different patterns and they regroup. For me, IN C is very much a sonic image of that," Riley says. Gyan Riley says that listening to the work and playing it as a member of the ensemble isn't really that different. During the rehearsal for IN C Gyan Riley sat with his guitar directly in front of his father's keyboard and behind Kronos Quartet — with a table of homemade instruments and a Guzheng player to his left and a trio of didgeridoos to his right. "There's so much spontaneity and complexity in it," says the younger Riley, "that it's so much more important to just listen to all the other sounds happening around you and just be a part of it." Golijov was part of the IN C ensemble at Carnegie Hall. Where the original recording of the work runs about 40 minutes and was met with some befuddlement by the establishment, the 45th-anniversary presentation ran close to two hours and received a standing ovation that lasted over five minutes. That acceptance, Golijov says, suggests that time has finally caught up with the ideas Terry Riley was exploring back in 1964. "IN C is a radical experiment but it's also so embracing and so joyous," Golijov says, "that it also symbolizes what the spirit of California was at the time and how it really was in a way at the center of our world at that time and how it propagates, how it reverberates up to today and across the world." An Influence Beyond Minimalism

GYAN RILEY: 'BALAMA' (GYAN RILEY, GUITAR) [4 min 43 sec] add| purchase music

PURCHASE FEATURED MUSIC "Balama" CD: Gyan Riley: Food for the Bearded

Gyan Riley has been listening to IN C and other pieces by his father for his entire life. He has been playing in Terry Riley's ensembles, as well as composing his own music — mostly on the classical guitar — for the past decade. "Growing up in a house that had his music being played by him or by someone else," says Gyan Riley, "rehearsing ensembles [like] Kronos [Quartet] — just having that in my ears from a small child I think is probably the biggest influence because that's the time when you're not even quite aware that something is influencing you." What becomes clear in listening to the Rileys is that they both thrive in the kind of

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5/14/2009

Terry And Gyan Riley: Together IN C : NPR Music

Artist: Gyan Riley Label: New Albion Released: 2002 iTunes » Your purchase helps support NPR Programming. How?

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environment where unexpected developments are allowed to blossom into major themes. And that's the case whether they're on a stage with 60 other musicians, or it's just the two of them. "What I see with our duo work," says Riley the elder, "is this kind of intuitive collaboration where nobody quite knows what's going to happen in the next moment and we influence each other by what kind of energies we're putting out."

Gyan Riley says that growing up around his father's music helped prime him for that kind of off-the-cuff collaboration. Even in those moments where they're forced to wing it entirely, which happened when the duo walked out onstage one night a few years ago to perform what was supposed to be a very traditional through-composed piece. "So what happened," Gyan Riley remembers, "is he forgot the music backstage for that piece. So we got onstage and [he] sort of motioned to me, 'Looks like I don't have my sheet music,' and then starts playing something I've never heard before and I thought, 'Oh, this is going to be interesting.' And it was. It was tons of fun and those are usually the best things that come out of [the duo], and sometimes they're accidents." Whether it's a psychic link, or shared musical DNA, or just the product of years of playing with and listening to each other, it's a relationship onstage that echoes the one off. "We have complete trust in each other as far as what we're going to do musically," says Terry Riley. "And that's what really makes it happen for me because you know the other person's gonna be there wherever you go."

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Gordon Sundberg (HerrVanNorden) wrote: Let’s celebrate the premier of Nogärd’s Clarinet Trio! According to Erling Kullberg, the world premier of Per Nogärd’s first major composition, the Trio, Opus 15 took place in October of 1956. Although the trio has been categorized as the beginning of his infinity series, it’s place in modern music history as the first expression of the minimalist aesthetic should be self-evident upon careful listening. I doubt that Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Daniel Lentz or Philip Glass were aware of Nogärd’s work, but because the Clarinet Trio predates Terry Riley’s “In C" by nine years, in my opinion, Nogärd’s littleappreciated contribution to minimalism should be reassessed. It can be heard on a rare 1996 CD featuring the LIN Ensemble. Wednesday, May 13, 2009 1:14:51 AM Recommend (0) Report abuse

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SOURCE: Dow Jones Newswires DATE: 05−01−2009 HEADLINE: WSJ(5/2) WEEKEND JOURNAL: Music: Listening To 'In C,' A 1960s Icon Source Website By Greg Sandow Dow Jones & Company, Inc. (From THE WALL STREET JOURNAL) New York −− The 1960s didn't do much for classical music in America, or at least they didn't change the major concert halls. Musicians didn't grow long hair, and the same familiar masterworks went on being played. But outside the mainstream, a classical−music counterculture did develop, and its own founding masterwork was a piece by Terry Riley called "In C," premiered in San Francisco (where else?), in 1964. This is music that seems to have the ideals of the '60s in its DNA. And that's because Mr. Riley didn't simply write everything down, and then ask musicians to play exactly what he wrote. Instead, he imagined a cooperative piece. Working quickly, flying on instinct, he wrote out 53 short phrases, all more or less in the key of C. And that's all there is. Musicians −− any number of them, playing any instruments −− can join together and perform the piece. One taps out a quick, unending pulse (of course on C). The others play the 53 phrases, in order, but at their own pace, repeating each phrase many times, if they like, completely on their own, though Mr. Riley does suggest they stop sometimes, to hear what everybody else is doing. When everyone gets to the end, the piece is over. And the results? Just magical. All kinds of musicians have played this piece − − new music experts, Baroque music specialists, rock musicians, you name it. And they tend to sound delighted, as if they've found something that brings out both their joie de vivre and their love of good, hard work. In each performance, the phrases combine in new and different ways, making sounds that no one could have predicted. But the order of the phrases creates musical knots for the players to untie, when all at once a familiar chord gets tangled by a new, emerging dissonance. Excitement sometimes mounts and everyone gets louder. Or else the music suddenly subsides and the sound grows quietly transparent. And last week there was a performance unlike any other. This was a celebration of the 45th anniversary if "In C," played by more than 70 people, at what might be classical music's most famous mainstream venue, Carnegie Hall. And what diversity filled the stage! Front and center were the four members of the Kronos Quartet, whose first violinist, David Harrington, had organized the festivities. In the middle sat Mr. Riley, resplendent in his big white beard. Mixed among the performers were members of the Young People's Chorus of New York City, wearing clothes of many colors, the composers Philip Glass and Osvaldo Golijov, and an ensemble of koto players from Japan. Scattered through them all were a few veterans of the 1964 premiere, and also of the lively first recording, made in 1968. (It's just been reissued on SONY/BMG, though the most joyful recorded version might be the one released in 2001 by the Bang on a Can All−Stars plus friends, on the Cantaloupe label.) At first I thought the pulse was heavy, and the texture muddled. I'd see people playing, but I couldn't hear them. But then I simply listened to the sound, and stopped caring about how I thought "In C" should be organized. The sound was large. It enveloped me. It moved as it if were a living being, shifting, changing, falling away to let me hear (just for instance) the piping of four recorders, played by the members of Quartet New Generation, a recorder ensemble that specializes in challenging new repertoire. 1

I got lost in this sound. I didn't want it to end, and it kept on delighting me for the full length of the piece, which on this festive anniversary was close to two hours. This was one of the happiest evenings of my long life in music, a celebration not only of "In C" and everything that stemmed from it −− including mimimalism and today's alternative classical music scene −− but of life itself. Even the audience was fascinating. Distinct individuals, hundreds of them, of all ages, each one plausibly an artist, the kind of person who could absorb the cooperative spirit of "In C" and carry it forward into something new (as the older ones among this crowd may have already done). I went home delighted, as I hope Mr. Riley did. Not that the world had changed. Concert halls continue to present the same old masterworks for audiences that surely include many of the same people who came to concerts back in 1964. (The classical music audience was younger then, and renewed itself by drawing in new cohorts of people in their 20s and their 30s). But Terry Riley and "In C" had come in triumph to Carnegie Hall, and the winds of change that started blowing 45 years ago had now grown stronger. −−− Mr. Sandow is a critic, composer and consultant who writes about classical music for the Journal. Click here to go to Dow Jones NewsPlus, a web front page of today's most important business and market news, analysis and commentary: http:// www.djnewsplus.com/nae/al?rnd=rX4niQXJjYgIJl3Wiwfg5g%3D%3D. You can use this link on the day this article is published and the following day. (END) Dow Jones Newswires 05−01−09 1803ET Copyright (c) 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. 2009−05−01T18:03:00−04:00 Highlights: In C, concert, Terry Riley, perform, performance, celebration, Concert, concerts

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May 2009 In C **** TERRY RILEY Sony Classical 88697 45368 2 1 track - 41:57 Modernist composer Terry Riley’s seminal and experimental work In C is celebrating its 45th anniversary of head scratching, navel gazing and audacity with a recent concert at Carnegie Hall and a re-release of the first recording of the work. The idea behind the piece is that an ensemble of musicians is given an outline of 53 musical ideas that they can play at any length (a controlled aleatory) with a pianist playing the top two C notes in even eighth-note octaves as the only real constant motif. The recent concert with musicians such as composers Philip Glass and Osvaldo Golijov was 90 minutes long, with pianist Katrina Krimsky recreating her finger-numbing duties from the world premiere 45 years ago. This remastered recording is a little over 40 minutes. Repetitive and intriguing, this work is not for everyone, but if you’ve gotten this far into the review without saying, “Are you kidding me?” then maybe you should give this piece a try! By Cary Wong

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PlaybillArts: Features: A Stoned Mozart? Terry Riley and David Harrington Discuss In C

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A Stoned Mozart? Terry Riley and David Harrington Discuss In C

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By Jason Victor Serinus 22 Apr 2009

Forty-five years after its premiere, Terry Riley’s minimalist masterpiece In C arrives at Carnegie Hall April 24. This one-time-only event will feature the talents of Riley, the Kronos Quartet and 60 artists from all musical disciplines.

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Before the walls of this venerable institution begin to melt and reform anew, here’s what Riley and Kronos Quartet founder David Harrington say about the minimalist musical be-in that altered the course of music history.

Terry Riley photo by Christopher Felver

Jason Victor Serinus: As I recall the origins of In C, Terry, you were playing honky tonk at the Gold Street Saloon in San Francisco, and you were stoned …

Terry Riley: Properly stoned … JVS: … riding the bus to your gig in May of ’64, when … Polls Quizzes RSS News Feed

TR: ... I heard the opening of In C. I was sitting there and thinking, “This is an amazing sound—it would be a great idea for a piece.” The patterns started unfolding, maybe the first two or three lines, before I had to get off the bus. But I wasn’t able to solve the problem until the idea for In C came along as a package. The next day, I got up and wrote down all 53 repetitive patterns. It was funny because it seemed like at the end of the page, I was done. I didn’t think to start page two; it seemed like that was the conclusion of it. David Harrington: That’s faster than Mozart, isn’t it? TR: It was more simple-minded than Mozart. JVS: It was Mozart stoned. TR: Consistently and always. Eternally. JVS: Did it take you a while to figure out what to do with the patterns? TR: I didn’t have a game plan. The music sat on the shelf until Ramon Sender, who was directing the San Francisco Tape Music Center with Morton Subotnick, said that he’d like to do a show at 321 Divisadero Street. People like Phil Lesh and even Janis Joplin were dropping in to 321 Divisadero. It was on the circuit of hip places to check out. Their light shows with music were a preview of the rock light shows that were yet to happen at the Fillmore and other places. JVS: That was before the Summer of Love. TR: It was the beginning of the psychedelic movement, just before the big psychedelic Trips Festival at the Longshoreman’s Auditorium with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. I had to get friends to play for free in the first performance. I didn’t ask them what instrument they played. It didn’t matter. We had recorders; Steve Reich had a melodica [a combination between an accordion and a harmonica]. JVS: Who else was in the premiere besides Steve Reich? TR: There were about 20 people. I keep finding posters for the first concert with everyone’s names, but I can’t remember all of them. JVS: And in Carnegie Hall … DH: We’re looking at around 60. [to Riley] Did you have voices for the premiere? TR: We didn’t have voices. But we had the Chamberlin organ, which plays tape loops. Ramon pushed on a key, and you could have chickens or voices or any sound.

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PlaybillArts: Features: A Stoned Mozart? Terry Riley and David Harrington Discuss In C

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JVS: Did you have chickens? TR: I think they came in once in a while, yeah. JVS: Did you learn early on never to question why? If you’d started questioning why the patterns came to you and what to do, you’d never have ended up here. TR: I’ve always felt that the most important thing about an artist is that you somehow are connected to some kind of universal mind. Nothing originates with you. So if you hear something come through, that means it’s something given to you. Try to get it down right away and not question it. DH: One of the great things about In C is no matter what instruments or voices are playing the piece, you always recognize it. The concept and feel is so strong and so boldly stated that it casts a very large aura ... or rainbow over the future of music. JVS: How do you envision this upcoming In C at Carnegie Hall to take form? DH: One of the things I’m looking to accomplish is binding this multigenerational community of musicians together to have a joyous time, because there’s something about this music that’s so joyous. TR: As we’ve been doing In C over the years, it has changed a lot. I feel In C should grow in the 21st century. For my own part, I’d urge as much experimenting as we can do to allow all the great talent from different generations to be heard. I’m looking forward to discussing with the group what unusual things we can do to build a two hour performance. DH: For me, In C is a ritual. It’s a piece that invites the performers to listen in a new way and contribute when it feels like the right moment. As I’ve noticed with other pieces by Terry, it creates a community around it. That’s one of the beautiful things about it. JVS: How has In C changed over the years? TR: Originally I wrote a set of performance directions, which people took very seriously. Then I’d start performing with people and they’d say, “That’s not in the directions.” So a long time ago I decided that those directions are only guidelines for people who haven’t played the piece before. JVS: So it’s always created in the moment. TR: For me, the most important thing about music is that it grows with the time. After 45 years of In C, I sort of say, “Okay son. You’re a big man now. You go out and do it yourself.” I haven’t kissed it goodbye, but I feel I don’t have to tell people too much about it anymore. It has a life of its own. * Terry Riley’s In C will be performed at Carnegie Hall on Friday, April 24 at 8 PM. Curated by the Kronos Quartet for the 45th anniversary of the premiere of the work, this one-time-only event will feature the talents of Riley, the Kronos Quartet and original In C performers Stuart Dempster, Jon Gibson, Katrina Krimsky, and Morton Subotnick. Participating musicians include Ustad Mashkoor Ali Khan, Sidney Chen, Dennis Russell Davies, Loren Kiyoshi Dempster, Bryce Dessner, Dave Douglas, Trevor Dunn, Jacob Garchik, Philip Glass, Osvaldo Golijov, Michael Harrison, Michael Hearst, Scott Johnson, Joan La Barbara, Saskia Lane, Alfred Shabda Owens, Elena Moon Park, Lenny Pickett, Gyan Riley, Aaron Shaw, Judith Sherman, Mark Stewart, Kathleen Supové, Margaret Leng Tan, Jeanne Velonis, Wu Man, Yang Yi, Dan Zanes, Evan Ziporyn, the Koto Vortex, Quartet New Generation, So Percussion, members of the GVSU New Music Ensemble and members of the Young People’s Chorus of New York City. A special reissue of the original In C recording is also available as part of the Carnegie Hall Presents series, in collaboration with Sony Masterworks. For tickets, priced $21-$72, visit Carnegie Hall.

Jason Victor Serinus writes for Opera News, Stereophile, American Record Guide, and Muso.

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