Riley’s pioneering piece, which premiered 60 years ago, leaves many decisions up to the performers. It helped launch the movement known as minimalism, but In C itself has also survived and changed.
Riley’s pioneering piece, which premiered 60 years ago, leaves many decisions up to the performers. It helped launch the movement known as minimalism, butInspiration can spark in the most mundane circumstances. In 1964, a young composer named Terry Riley was on his way to work — playing ragtime piano at San Francisco’s Gold Street Saloon — when he had a light bulb moment that would alter the American musical landscape. A tiny, hiccuping, 2-note seed unexpectedly came to him.
“When we first started rehearsing it, nobody, including me, knew how to play it,” Riley says. “I had a kind of idea of how it should sound, but to rehearse it and actually turn it into music took a bit of doing.”innovative is that it carries so few guidelines. And that’s the idea — the composer gives up control to the performers. The score is just a single page containing 53 short musical “riffs” that any number of musicians can play in order, but at their discretion.
Appropriate to Riley’s improvisatory way of thinking, Beiser and her recording engineer began with a mostly blank slate, just Riley’s spartan score. “We started to kind of loop all those melodic modules and I literally found my way into it as I was going because I deliberately didn't want to decide anything,” she recalls. Armed with just her cello, a looping machine and a pair of percussionists, Beiser emphasizes the deep, sometimes headbanging, grooves inherent in the music.
This was at a time, Robin points out, “when a lot of American composition is extremely inaccessible in terms of the musical language — composers writing highly atonal, cerebral scientific music.”“Terry just came into it from a completely different place,” Beiser notes. “Because he studied in India, he was influenced by Indian classical music, by African music, by all these other non-Western traditions, and of course, free jazz improvisation.
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