Terry Riley

Terry Riley
Background information
Birth name	Terrence Mitchell Riley
Born	June 24, 1935 (1935-06-24) (age 74)
Origin	Colfax, California, USA
Genres	Minimalist music Western classical music
Occupations	Composer
Instruments	Piano, keyboards, saxophone
Labels	CBS Records New Albion Records
Notable instruments
Electronic organ Piano Voice

Terrence Mitchell Riley^[1], better known as Terry Riley (born June 24, 1935), is an American composer associated with the minimalist school of Western classical music.

Life

Born in Colfax, California, Riley studied at Shasta College, San Francisco State University, and the San Francisco Conservatory before earning an MA in composition at the University of California, Berkeley, studying with Seymour Shifrin and Robert Erickson. He was involved in the experimental San Francisco Tape Music Center working with Morton Subotnick, Steve Reich, Pauline Oliveros, and Ramon Sender. His most influential teacher, however, was Pandit Pran Nath (1918–1996), a master of Indian classical voice, who also taught La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. Riley made numerous trips to India over the course of their association to study and to accompany him on tabla, tambura, and voice. Throughout the 1960s he traveled frequently around Europe as well, taking in musical influences and supporting himself by playing in piano bars, until he joined the Mills College faculty in 1971 to teach Indian classical music. Riley was awarded an Honorary Doctorate Degree in Music at Chapman University in 2007.

Also during the 1960s were the famous "All-Night Concerts", during which Riley performed mostly improvised music from evening until sunrise, using an old organ harmonium ("with a vacuum cleaner motor blower blowing into the ballasts") and tape-delayed saxophone. When he finally wanted a break, after hours of playing, he played back looped saxophone fragments recorded throughout the evening. For several years he continued to put on these concerts, to which people came with sleeping bags, hammocks, and their whole families.

Riley began his long-lasting association with the Kronos Quartet by meeting its founder, David Harrington, while at Mills. Over the course of his career, Riley composed 13 string quartets for the ensemble, in addition to other works. He wrote his first orchestral piece, Jade Palace, in 1991, and has continued to pursue that avenue, with several commissioned orchestral compositions following. Riley is also currently performing and teaching both as an Indian raga vocalist and as a solo pianist.

Musical style and techniques

While his early endeavors were influenced by Stockhausen, Riley changed direction after first encountering La Monte Young, in whose Theater of Eternal Music he later performed from 1965-66. The String Quartet (1960) was Riley's first work in this new style; it was followed shortly after by a string trio, in which he first employed the repetitive short phrases for which he and minimalism are now known.

His music is usually based on improvising through a series of modal figures of different lengths, such as in In C and the Keyboard Studies. In C (1964) is probably Riley's best-known work and one that brought the minimalist music movement to prominence. Its first performance was given by Steve Reich, Jon Gibson, Pauline Oliveros, and Morton Subotnick, among others, and it has influenced their work and that of many others, including John Adams, Roberto Carnevale, and Philip Glass. Its form was an innovation: the piece consists of 53 separate modules of roughly one measure apiece, each containing a different musical pattern but each, as the title implies, in C. One performer beats a steady pulse of Cs on the piano to keep tempo. The others, in any number and on any instrument, perform these musical modules following a few loose guidelines, with the different musical modules interlocking in various ways as time goes on. The Keyboard Studies are similarly structured – a single-performer version of the same concept.

In the 1950s he was already working with tape loops, a technology then in its infancy, and he has continued manipulating tapes to musical effect, both in the studio and in live performance, throughout his career. He has composed in just intonation as well as microtonal pieces.

Riley's collaborators include the Rova Saxophone Quartet, Pauline Oliveros, and, as mentioned, the Kronos Quartet.

A Rainbow in Curved Air inspired Pete Townshend's synthesizer parts on the Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again" and "Baba O'Riley," the latter named in tribute to Riley as well as to Meher Baba.^[2]

Notable works

• In C (1964)
• A Rainbow in Curved Air (1967)
• Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band (1968)
• Shri Camel (1980), for solo electronic organ tuned in just intonation and modified by computerized digital delay
• Terry Riley: Cadenza on the Night Plain (1984), a collaboration with the Kronos Quartet
• The Cusp of Magic, with Kronos Quartet (2004), composed by Terry Riley (b.1935) for his seventieth birthday, an ode to the rite of Midsummer Eve
• The Harp of New Albion (1986), for piano tuned in just intonation
• Salome Dances for Peace
• Chanting the Light of Foresight, with Rova Saxophone Quartet in just intonation
• Persian Surgery Dervishes
• Sun Rings for the Kronos Quartet
• Church of Anthrax, with John Cale

Notable students

• Robert Davidson
• Noah Georgeson
• Jin Hi Kim

Films & Games

• 1970—Corridor. Film by Standish Lawder.
• 1976—Crossroads. Film by Bruce Conner.
• 1976 - Music With Roots in the Aether: Opera for Television. Tape 6: Terry Riley. Produced and directed by Robert Ashley. New York, New York: Lovely Music.
• 1986 - In Between the Notes...a Portrait of Pandit Pran Nath, Master Indian Musician. Produced by Other Minds, directed by William Farley.
• 1995 - Musical Outsiders: An American Legacy - Harry Partch, Lou Harrison, and Terry Riley. Directed by Michael Blackwood.
• 2008 - "A Rainbow In Curved Air" features in the in-game soundtrack of Grand Theft Auto IV. It can be found when listening to the fictional radio station, "The Journey".

See also

• Minimalist music
• John Adams
• Philip Glass
• Steve Reich
• La Monte Young
• David Behrman

References

• [Anonymous] (2002). Album notes for The Who: The Ultimate Collection by The Who, 12. MCA Records.
• Potter, Keith (2000). Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass. Music in the Twentieth Century series. Cambridge, UK; New York, New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Edward Strickland, "Terry Riley". Grove Music Online (subscription access).

Notes

1. ^ Family Tree Legends [1]
2. ^ (2002) Album notes for The Who: The Ultimate Collection by The Who, p. 12. MCA Records.

External links

• Terry Riley's home page
• Elision Fields, his management and CD label
• Otherminds.org score of In C
• Allmusic Page
• Short biography of Terry Riley by Robert Davidson
• Interview with Terry Riley
• NewMusicBox: Terry Riley in conversation with Frank J. Oteri, 2000 (includes video)
• A Concert in Honor of Terry Riley on his 50th Birthday, featuring the Kronos Quartet
• Epitonic.com: Terry Riley featuring tracks from The Book of Abbeyozzud and The Light of Foresight (with Rova)
• Art of the States: Terry Riley In C (1964)
• Audio and Video at Ubu Web
• Free scores by Terry Riley in the International Music Score Library Project