Riley, Terry (*1935)
California composer Terry Riley launched what is now known as the Minimalist movement with his revolutionary classic "In C" in 1964. This seminal work provided the conception for a form comprised of interlocking repetitive patterns that was to change the course of 20th century music and strongly influence the works of Steve Reich, Philip Glass and John Adams as well as rock groups such as The Who, The Soft Machine, Curved Air, Tangerine Dream and many others. In the 60's and 70's he turned his attention to solo works for electronic keyboards and soprano saxophone and pioneered the use of various kinds of tape delay in live performance resulting in another set of milestone works, "A Rainbow in Curved Air", "Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band", "The Persian Surgery Dervishes" and "Shri Camel". These hypnotic, multi-layered, polymetric, brightly orchestrated, eastern flavored improvisations set the stage for the New Age movement that was to appear a decade or so later.
Terry Riley on "A Rainbow in Curved Air":
"Rainbow was written four years after In C, and at that time I was trying to get myself a solo keyboard program to perform around, so I wouldn't have to rely on a lot of other musicians. I wanted to be a little independent that way, so I could play as many places as I could.
Rainbow was one of these pieces that I wrote for solo keyboard concerts; before Rainbow, I wrote a few pieces called the Keyboard Studies, and I took some of the ideas from them as its model. But there are some new things that I introduced into the process of Rainbow. It's actually simpler than In C. I use a lot of different patterns, but what it builds on one repeating 14-beat pattern, which goes through the whole process of retrograde and inversion and augmentation and dimunition. So it uses these kinds of techniques with just very little material, in many different ways. And then on top of that there's a lot of free improvisation."
Terry Riley on jazz:
"The periods of jazz when I was listening the most or most involved was the time of the really great chamber music groups of John Coltrane and Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Bill Evans and Gil Evans. There was a lot about their approach that I studied and I found very useful in my own work. One of them was taking just a very simple chart and building a very comprehensive piece out of it. It sounds like it might be all written out, and they were all doing just because they were great improvisers.
So what really impressed upon me was that you can start with very limited means, and if you have great players you can evolve into quite an engaging structure."
Riley's solo keyboard and piano concerts have become somewhat legendary due to his unique blending of eastern and western styles and the unusual all-night solo concerts he gave in the 60's. He was listed in the London Sunday Times as one of the 1000 Makers Of The 20th Century.
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Resources
John Cage
Joseph Beuys
Pierre Boulez
Luc Ferrari
Egberto Gismonti
Charles Edward Ives: Central Park in the Dark
Gyorgy Ligeti
Olivier Messiaen
Steve Reich
Ad Reinhardt
Terry Riley
Jean-Claude Risset
David Tudor
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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[11] · Piano drone #1 [04:40]
[10] · Piano minimal #2 inspired by quaggy [13:06]
[09] · Piano minimal #1 [04:46]
[08] · Train Sonor: Piano NYC Subway #4 [10:17]
[07] · Cluster medicine [pianodrone #2] [18:54]
[06] · Flute stream [09:54]
[05] · Supernatural drone [guitardrone reverse] [17:02]
[04] · Piano minimal #3 [simultaneous] [08:50]
[03] · For Marjan K. [excerpt three] [05:44]
[02] · For Marjan K. [excerpt two] [05:40]
[01] · For Marjan K. [excerpt one] [06:21]
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