Terry Riley Press Clips - 6-2-09

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All Things Considered, May 12, 2009 - Legend has it that composerTerry 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 Cin May of 1964. The work had its premiere that November,

and it is often credited as the launching pad for the minimalist movement. IN Cinfluenced

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 ofIN Cfeaturing the likes ofGlass, Kronos Quartet and Terry and Gyan Riley, the composer's son, in the ensemble.

ComposerOsvaldo 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 ofIN Cis like the greatness of the Rite of SpringorDemoiselles 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 Cand 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 Cisn'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 Cis 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 Ctopped 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 Cis

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 CGyan 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 Censemble 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 Cis 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 has been listening to IN Cand 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 whenyou'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

CLASSICAL

Terry And Gyan Riley: Together IN CByJacob Ganz

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

[5 min 0 sec]add| purchase music

PURCHASE FEATURED

MUSIC

"IN C, For Unspecified Performers"

CD: Riley: In C (25th AnniversaryConcert)

Artist: Terry Riley

Label: New Albion

Released: 1995

Your purchase helps support NPRProgramming. How?


PURCHASE FEATUREDMUSIC

"La Cigale (The Locust)"

CD: Imaginational Anthem

Artist: Various Artists

Label: Tompkins Square

Released: 1969



PURCHASE FEATUREDMUSIC

"Balama"

CD: Gyan Riley: Food for the

TERRY RILEY: IN C(EXCERPT: TERRY, VOCALS;GYAN, GUITAR)

TERRY RILEY AND GYANRILEY: 'THE LOCUST' (GYAN,GUITAR; TERRY, PIANO)

GYAN RILEY:'BALAMA' (GYAN RILEY,GUITAR)

Page 1 of 2Terry And Gyan Riley: Together IN C : NPR Music

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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."

Comments

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Gordon Sundberg (HerrVanNorden) wrote:

Lets celebrate the premier of Nogrds Clarinet Trio!

According to Erling Kullberg, the world premier of Per Nogrds 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, its 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 Nogrds work, but because the Clarinet Trio predates Terry Rileys In C" by nine years, in my opinion, Nogrds little-

appreciated 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)

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Artist: Gyan Riley

Label: New Albion

Released: 2002

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Page 2 of 2Terry And Gyan Riley: Together IN C : NPR Music

5/14/2009http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104061137


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SOURCE: Dow Jones Newswires

DATE: 05012009

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

majorconcert halls. Musicians didn't grow long hair, and the same familiar masterworks went on being

played.

But outside the mainstream, a classicalmusic 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, Baroquemusic 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 eachperformance, 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 aperformance unlike any other. This was acelebration 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 KronosQuartet, 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 AllStars 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
http://www.dowjones.com/http://www.dowjones.com/http://www.dowjones.com/


4/11

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, acelebration 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 anartist, 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 050109 1803ET

Copyright (c) 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

20090501T18:03:0004:00

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 - 41:57Modernist composer Terry Rileys seminal and experimental workIn Cis 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 musiciansis 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 youve 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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10/11

April 23, 2009

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A Stoned Mozart? Terry Riley and

David Harrington DiscussIn C

By Jason Victor Serinus22 Apr 2009

Forty-five years after its premiere, Terry

Rileys minimalist masterpiece In Carrives at Carnegie Hall April 24. Thisone-time-only event will feature thetalents of Riley, the Kronos Quartet and60 artists from all musical disciplines.

Before the walls of this venerableinstitution begin to melt and reformanew, heres what Riley and KronosQuartet founder David Harrington sayabout the minimalist musical be-in thataltered the course of music history.

Jason Victor Serinus: As I recall theorigins ofIn C, Terry, you were playinghonky tonk at the Gold Street Saloon inSan Francisco, and you were stoned

Terry Riley: Properly stoned

JVS: riding the bus to your gig in May of 64, when

TR: ... I heard the opening ofIn C. I was sitting there and thinking, This isan amazing soundit would be a great idea for a piece. The patternsstarted unfolding, maybe the first two or three lines, before I had to get offthe bus. But I wasnt able to solve the problem until the idea for In Ccamealong as a package. The next day, I got up and wrote down all 53 repetitivepatterns. It was funny because it seemed like at the end of the page, I wasdone. I didnt think to start page two; it seemed like that was the conclusionof it.

David Harrington: Thats faster than Mozart, isnt 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 didnt have a game plan. The music sat on the shelf until RamonSender, who was directing the San Francisco Tape Music Center with MortonSubotnick, said that hed like to do a show at 321 Divisadero Street. Peoplelike Phil Lesh and even Janis Joplin were dropping in to 321 Divisadero. Itwas on the circuit of hip places to check out. Their light shows with musicwere a preview of the rock light shows that were yet to happen at theFillmore and other places.

JVS: That was before the Summer of Love.

TR: It was the beginning of the psychedelic movement, just before the bigpsychedelic Trips Festival at the Longshoremans Auditorium with Ken Keseyand the Merry Pranksters. I had to get friends to play for free in the firstperformance. I didnt ask them what instrument they played. It didntmatter. We had recorders; Steve Reich had a melodica [a combinationbetween 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 concertwith everyones names, but I cant remember all of them.

JVS: And in Carnegie Hall

DH: Were looking at around 60. [to Riley] Did you have voices for the

premiere?

TR: We didnt have voices. But we had the Chamberlin organ, which playstape loops. Ramon pushed on a key, and you could have chickens or voices

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Page 1 of 3PlaybillArts: Features: A Stoned Mozart? Terry Riley and David Harrington Discuss In C

In searching the publicly accessible web, we found a webpage of interest and provide a snapshot of itbelow. Please be advised that this page, and any images or links in it, may have changed since we createdthis snapshot. For your convenience, we provide a hyperlink to the current webpage as part of our service.


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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 youd startedquestioning why the patterns came to you and what to do, youd never haveended up here.

TR: Ive always felt that the most important thing about an artist is that yousomehow are connected to some kind of universal mind. Nothing originateswith you. So if you hear something come through, that means its somethinggiven to you. Try to get it down right away and not question it.

DH: One of the great things about In Cis no matter what instruments orvoices are playing the piece, you always recognize it. The concept and feel isso strong and so boldly stated that it casts a very large aura ... or rainbowover the future of music.

JVS: How do you envision this upcoming In Cat Carnegie Hall to take form?

DH: One of the things Im looking to accomplish is binding this multi-generational community of musicians together to have a joyous time,because theres something about this music thats so joyous.

TR: As weve been doing In Cover the years, it has changed a lot. I feel InCshould grow in the 21st century. For my own part, Id urge as muchexperimenting as we can do to allow all the great talent from differentgenerations to be heard. Im looking forward to discussing with the groupwhat unusual things we can do to build a two hour performance.

DH: For me, In Cis a ritual. Its a piece that invites the performers to listenin a new way and contribute when it feels like the right moment. As Ivenoticed with other pieces by Terry, it creates a community around it. Thatsone of the beautiful things about it.

JVS: How has In Cchanged over the years?

TR: Originally I wrote a set of performance directions, which people tookvery seriously. Then Id start performing with people and theyd say, Thatsnot in the directions. So a long time ago I decided that those directions areonly guidelines for people who havent played the piece before.

JVS: So its always created in the moment.

TR: For me, the most important thing about music is that it grows with the

time. After 45 years ofIn C, I sort of say, Okay son. Youre a big man now.You go out and do it yourself. I havent kissed it goodbye, but I feel I donthave to tell people too much about it anymore. It has a life of its own.

*

Terry Rileys In Cwill be performed at Carnegie Hall on Friday, April 24 at 8PM. Curated by the Kronos Quartet for the 45th anniversary of the premiereof the work, this one-time-only event will feature the talents of Riley, theKronos Quartet and original In Cperformers 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, DaveDouglas, Trevor Dunn, Jacob Garchik, Philip Glass, Osvaldo Golijov, MichaelHarrison, 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 Supov, Margaret Leng Tan,Jeanne Velonis, Wu Man, Yang Yi, Dan Zanes, Evan Ziporyn, the KotoVortex, Quartet New Generation, So Percussion, members of the GVSU NewMusic Ensemble and members of the Young Peoples Chorus of New YorkCity.

A special reissue of the original In Crecording is also available as part of theCarnegie Hall Presents series, in collaboration with Sony Masterworks.

For tickets, priced $21-$72, visit Carnegie Hall.

ason Victor Serinus writes forOpera News, Stereophile, American RecordGuide, andMuso.

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Terry Riley Press Clips - 6-2-09

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