Terry Riley

[7/4]

Baba O'Riley

On Terry Riley's Persian Surgery Dervishes

Terry Riley, Ingvar Loco Nordin, his son Ivan Nordin & Folke Rabe (1994)

Photo: Guido Zeccola

http://home.swipnet.se/sonoloco/Texter_om_...ey.english.html

[7/4]

Terry Riley - A Rainbow in a curved air - 1969

Woah! My head!

[7/4]

I see there are new updates to TR's performing schedule.

And a new release, Terry Riley's Piano Concerto - Banana Humberto 2000.

New CD Release of Terry Riley's Piano Concerto

sri moonshine 004

Banana Humberto 2000

Recorded live at ODC Theater in San Francisco on OCT. 4 2002

SOLOISTS

Terry Riley, Steinway D Grand Piano

Paul Hanson, Bassoon with electronics

Tracy Silverman, Electric Viola with electronics

MEMBERS OF THE PAUL DRESHER ENSEMBLE

Paul Dresher Electric Guitar

Joel Davel Mallet kat

Marja Murtu Synthesizer

Gene Reffkin Midi Drums

Washed Ashore 18:20

The Maze 7:30

Goodbye Goodtime Blues for Milleniums Child 15:39

Danzero 13:28

BH2K was commissioned by the Paul Dresher Ensemble and first performed on Feb. 10, 2001 at. Stanford University as part of the Lively Arts Festival and featured Terry Riley as piano soloist. The fifty-minute work is in four movements.

The work takes the form of a chamber concerto and was written specifically for the performance capabilities of the Dresher Ensemble and guest soloist Tracy Silverman on Electric Viola.

The first movement is the most classical in form and content opening with a piano solo that leads to the opening theme. After variations on the opening them the driving secondary subject is introduced and then combined with the opening theme. There follows more secondary themes that lead into the spacious Chorale from which the movement derives it’s name.

Then follows a piano cadenza that leads to the Eastern sounding Coda, which concludes the movement.

The Maze is a Labyrinthine movement based on polymetric patterns that float over a 17 beat rhythmic cycle. It is scored in an open way to allow the ensemble choices on how to assemble the flow of the music

Goodbye Goodtimes Blues for Millenniums Child is my one Millennium piece, feeling fortunate to be one of those having a foot in both the 20th and 21st centuries.. The inspiration was to create an old time blues tune, reminiscent of the music of the 20’s and 30’s that gives way to a more hard core version of 21st century Blues showing how this old “American Raga” is capable of so many expressions as it crosses over this imaginary time marker. This movement is open to large sections of improvisation.

Danzero, a made-up name for a movement with south American flavoring. It is the concluding movement containing shifting rhythms and tempos combining the tunefulness of Brazilian Choros superimposed on compound and polyrhythmic structures. Toward the end of the movement there are many improvised solos over the Latin groove that impels the highly energized ending.

[David Gitin]

Perhaps some of you will be interested in the CD by Terry Riley & Michael McClure I LIKE YOUR EYES LIBERTY which includes Terry's remarkable settings for Michael's poetry, issued by Sri Moonshine in 2004. Check out Terry Riley dot com.

[WD45]

Church of Anthrax, anyone?

[WD45]

Great! Not sure what I'm gonna do here.

I'll check a couple of possibilities in the morning as well.

I love the tambura too!

Here's a short excerpt from a long performance of mine

that used multi-tracked tamburas:

Helsinki - March 31, 2007

Shoot! This link gave me a 404 error...

[DTMX]

A question for those who knows: About 20 years ago I went to a Kronos Quartet concert in Atlanta. Terry Riley sat in with them on a piece called "Crow's Rosary" or something like that. Was that piece ever recorded and released?

[7/4]

A question for those who knows: About 20 years ago I went to a Kronos Quartet concert in Atlanta. Terry Riley sat in with them on a piece called "Crow's Rosary" or something like that. Was that piece ever recorded and released?

Probably recorded, but not released as far as I know.

May 22, 1988

Music; Premieres By Kronos Quartet

By JOHN ROCKWELL

The Kronos Quartet ended its first, sold-out and by all accounts highly successful series at Alice Tully Hall Friday night with a generous program that included three scores partly commissioned by Lincoln Center.

The Kronos Quartet ended its first, sold-out and by all accounts highly successful series at Alice Tully Hall Friday night with a generous program that included three scores partly commissioned by Lincoln Center.

All five pieces on the bill had their merits, and two of the three commissions - one especially - were remarkable. That is a superior average for a new-music concert, but the Kronos is a superior new-music group. The four - David Harrington and John Sherba, violinists; Hank Dutt, violist, and Joan Jeanrenaud, cellist - play pretty well, accurately and sensitively, for the most part.

But their real gift lies in their self-created repertory. They seek out composers who interest them and encourage - sometimes badger -them into writing pieces. The result has been a heady expansion of the contemporary quartet repertory, including traditional modernists but reaching miles beyond them into stylistic territory where most other quartets, even excellent ones that also specialize in the new, don't even begin to venture.

The most remarkable piece Friday came after the intermission, in Terry Riley's 38-minute ''Crow's Rosary'' for the quartet (lightly amplified) and a keyboard player - in this case (it would be hard to imagine any other) the composer.

Mr. Riley started the whole school of ''motoric Minimalism'' that includes Steve Reich, Philip Glass and John Adams. But after his pioneering work in the mid-1960's, he drifted into an all-consuming study of Indian music. When he re-emerged a few years ago as a Western-style composer - thanks to the Kronos - his music sounded stiff, as if he were working out the kinks in his composing muscles. The music was pretty and unusual, but it was also pretty simplistic.

It still sounded simplistic to some in Friday's audience, who walked out or grumbled at the end. But to this more sympathetic taste, Mr. Riley has composed his finest score in 20 years here. The music is harmonically denser and grittier than what preceded it, and timbrally, rhythmically and formally more inventive. The reason, other than a surer feeling for composition, seems to lie in its synthesis of his two musical modes -solo keyboard improvisation and stricter composition for others.

This is a quintet in suite form for keyboards and strings. Yet since the keyboards consist of two synthesizers, and since Mr. Riley has been ingenious in drawing varied sounds from them, the effect is of a quartet collaborating with a variety of instruments. The music flowed and darted and bounced along, happy yet smart. Mr. Riley has been a seeker for a quarter-century. It looks like he's found something.

The other true charmer on the bill was ''Four of One of Another for Quartet and Accordion'' by Mary Ellen Childs, with Guy Klucevsek as the accordionist. This proved a curious anticipation of the Riley, another piece for amplified quartet and reedy wind instrument full of timbral exotica and sharp shifts of mood.

Two other scores recalled 1960's sound-colorist experimentation. Jan Morthenson's ''Ancora'' alternated between Indian-sounding quiet passages, with shivering glissandos returning to a home note, and wilder, more ferocious eruptions. Kaija Saariaho's ''Nymphea'' blended amplified strings and a complex range of bowing techniques with subtly applied electronic coloration to eerie if not always dramatically persuasive effect.

In this context, Alvin Singleton's ''Secret Desire to be Black,'' a study in evolving repetitive figurations, sounded rather formulaic, even if on a normal new-music program it might well have commanded greater respect.

[DTMX]

Thanks for posting that article. About the only thing I remember about that Atlanta concert was that I was there (I think) and that they also played Singleton's Secret Desire to be Black .

Edited to add: Singleton may have been in attendance that night. He used to be the composer-in-residence for the Atlanta Symphony and turns up now and then for Atlanta-area chamber music performances of his works.

Edited January 25, 2008 by DTMX

[7/4]

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/entertainme..._lightness.html

Incredible lightness of being music's Terry Riley

By David Patrick Stearns, Inquirer Music Critic

Deep into composer Terry Riley's newest disc, The Cusp of Magic - once your ears have been lulled by drums and rattles not usually heard outside of peyote rituals - you catch the unmistakable squeaking of a rubber duck. Riley laughs benevolently when, incredulous, you call that to his attention.

"It's part of the way I work," he said, speaking from his Oakland, Calif., home. "With each piece I write, I pick up different sounds along the way in this musical journey. And part of it was generated by David Harrington's toy collection."

OK, let's back up here.

The Cusp of Magic is a string quartet Riley wrote for his most frequent muse, the Kronos Quartet, one of three new works heading Philadelphia's way in the coming weeks. Parts of the Nonesuch CD are Riley's own version of Schumann's Scenes From Childhood, based on lullabies and cartoon-character music. Though it's hard to imagine Kronos' super-hip violinist David Harrington with kiddie toys, the fact is that he's a grandfather and tends to pick up things that squeak while on tour.

Though the California cutting edge may still look and sound youthful, it is increasingly eligible for Medicare - not to suggest any dulling of that edge. Since Lou Harrison's death, Riley, 72, is de facto dean of West Coast composers, which comes with an unofficial mandate to be a bit of a trickster, putting together combinations of people, music and sound that prompt audiences to contemplate deeper meanings in what may or may not be moments of playfulness.

That's really the only guidance on offer for the American Composers Orchestra concert at 7:30 tonight at the Annenberg Center, where Riley's Remember This O Mind will be heard just days after its New York world premiere. Or at Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia's premiere of his triple concerto, Sol Terra Luna, for two guitars and violin, March 30-31 at the Kimmel Center's Perelman Theater.

Any given Riley work might involve Jack Kerouac text, a 108-beat rhythmic cycle taken from American Indian peyote rituals (in which Riley has participated), and perhaps a European fugue. The common denominator in all this is his spiritual life. Most composers have one, but few talk about it as frankly as Riley - a cornerstone figure in what was once a counterculture seeking enlightenment through hallucinogens.

Of music, he said, "It is a way of coming to know ourselves. For me, it's the best way. It doesn't have any dogma . . . or prescribed ritual, except in performing the music ourselves. By immersing ourselves deeply into music, we come to our spiritual nature."

And for him, that sometimes means taking a groove as far as possible, lending his music a lightness and an improvisational quality, even the massive orchestral work Jade Palace, a particularly extravagant 1990 Carnegie Hall commission that gives apoplexy to any conductor hoping to make each instrumental strand reasonably audible.

Similarly, Chamber Orchestra executive director Peter Gistelinck, commissioning the triple concerto, was cautioned by Riley's manager that the wait might be long. Instead, it arrived in two years (nothing in the classical music world) and at twice the prescribed length (40 minutes) with a somewhat sheepish explanation from the composer: "I don't know what happened to me."

Though more Eurocentric ears might hear Riley's works as outsized acts of dadaist eccentricity, they reflect a composer who has hit his peak creative years and accumulated the most singular pedigree in serious American music - partly because he has trafficked in areas that weren't so serious.

Riley first came to attention in 1964 with what's considered the minimalist movement's manifesto, the hour-long In C, which sought to strip music to its most essential basics. That and other works of this period not only influenced obvious figures - Philip Glass, Steve Reich - but prompted tangential followers such as the Who, the Soft Machine, Tangerine Dream and Curved Air. Riley also collaborated with John Cale, cofounder of seminal rock group the Velvet Underground, in the arty, respected album Church of Anthrax.

Work with raga vocalist Pandit Pran Nath took Riley in different directions in the 1970s, which brought him to Oakland's Mills College where he met Kronos' Harrington and developed a more personal style, suggesting mirages, hallucinations and unseen spirits.

"After I started moving away from so-called minimalism like in the Rainbow in Curved Air album, I lost some of my audience worldwide," Riley admits. "That happens. You can't get people to follow everything you do."

Other listeners' relationship with him began with 1983's Cadenza on the Night Plain, continuing through the two-hour string quartet Salome Dances for Peace, which he calls a "crossroads piece." Lots of works for traditional classical ensembles followed.

However, assuming that he has morphed into something different from his '60s self would be wrong. Again, he has a war to protest: The triple concerto's last movement is subtitled "Sarabande for Iraq."

"I'm pretty much the same person I was in the 1960s. And the world is similar now. . . . We're caught in a war we can't get out of, and facing the question of how to make peace in a world that doesn't seem to want it. In the '60s, idealism seemed to have a stronger thrust . . .," he says. "There was more hope. Maybe it's just taking longer for something to happen."

You ask if peyote rituals are still part of his life. He says no. He admits to having some interesting herbs in his garden, given to him by an Oklahoma medicine man, but they aren't there to be ingested. "The plants absorb the music," he explains, "and I absorb their vibes."

Contact music critic David Patrick Stearns at dstearns@phillynews.com.

[7/4]

http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment..._the_house.html

'Culture Shock' packs the house

Terry Riley, Uri Caine and Evan Chambers looked for ground to break at Annenberg.

By David Patrick Stearns, Inquirer Music Critic

If a concert program dedicated to groundbreaking new music is consistently successful, it hasn't reached out far enough into creative terrains worth investigating. So the full house that greeted the New York-based American Composers Orchestra at the Annenberg Center on Sunday had plenty to nosh on in the program titled "Culture Shock," even when there wasn't a lot to like. After all, today's misfire may lead to next year's breakthrough.

The centerpiece was Terry Riley's Remember This O Mind, and the composer himself was present, playing synthesizer and singing in a new orchestral version of his 1997 setting of words from The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. Given how seldom East Coast audiences encounter Riley, a Californian and a champion of hippie-era values, you felt blessed to be in the same room with his joyful presence and braided beard.

The piece itself, however, wasn't in optimum form. Riley's 72-year-old voice still approximates the micro-tonal passage work drawn from the music of India as well as American blues. But the content here is so personal that large performing forces don't make sense, even when sympathetically conducted by David Alan Miller. In more chamber-like circumstances, the piece could be a confession of spiritual truths; orchestrally, it's an unintended sermon.

Elsewhere, the concert showed that music need not be intelligible to be intoxicating. Philadelphia-born composer

jazz pianist Uri Caine arrived with Double Trouble, a piece that embraces the competitive aspects of the piano concerto, the orchestra representing order (if just barely), and the improvisatory pianist raging away at the polar opposite.

The music was dense and eventful, displaying a brinksmanship that comes with the constant threat of chaos. Even in the relatively melodic slow movement, Caine had musical side conversations, as if he couldn't stand to miss any possibility. Once you submitted, you could be swept away by the music's energy and industry.

As fusions go, Evan Chambers' Concerto for Fiddle and Violin was the concert's most successful piece because the string-based vernacular element (the Irish fiddle) automatically has common ground with the orchestra. Jigs, waltzes and reels were references, but not so specifically that the composer lost his own identity. Indeed, Chambers' starting point seemed more about inner need than outer experimentation. And with the requisite Irish sentimentality that goes with this musical landscape, how could it be any other way?

[7/4]

Just received this bulletin, courtesy of the Myspaces, from the Kronos Quartet:

---------------

New Album: The Cusp of Magic by Terry Riley

"One day I was talking with [Terry] and he said he wanted [his next] piece to be 'magical.' My granddaughter Emily was an infant at the time. We had little toys and noisemakers around the house, which we would play as I carried her around. Of all the experiences I've had, that is the most magical. 'Why don't you just come over, and we'll play some of Emily's toys?' I said."

-- David Harrington

Artistic Director, Kronos Quartet

This is was the spark that led to The Cusp of Magic by Terry Riley, now available on Nonesuch Records. Commissioned for Kronos on the occasion of our longtime friend and collaborator Terry Riley's 70th birthday, the piece features Kronos joined by Wu Man on pipa (a Chinese plucked string instrument, similar to a lute), with all musicians also playing a variety of percussion instruments, toys, and noisemakers.

David Harrington adds that "no composer has been as much a part of Kronos as Terry Riley. We first met at Mills College in 1978, and he has written 23 works for us so far." Kronos premiered The Cusp of Magic in 2005, and the piece was performed at Carnegie Hall as part of Kronos' 2006 Live Mix series. The Cusp of Magic will be performed on February 17 at Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at University of Maryland, College Park.

Listen to excerpts of Terry Riley's The Cusp of Magic on our website. Click here to purchase The Cusp of Magic via our website or iTunes.

[7/4]

February 20, 2008

Riley Shows His Range

Renowned composer Terry Riley uses the sound of children's toys and the

spirit of Native American rituals in his latest work The

Cusp of Magic. Ironically it is one of his

most accessible works to date.

By Charlie Richards

Composer Terry

Riley is a bit of a living legend. As one of the foremost

leaders of the minimalist school, he's interacted and

associated with many of the major names of modern

classical and avant-garde music, including La

Monte Young and South Asian Kirana master Pandit Pran

Nath. At 72, his music is enjoying a renaissance among young

listeners. Reissues of some of his earlier works, such as

Poppy Nogood and Les Yeux Fermes

(both available on Elysian Fields) are now available on

CD, and his latest work The Cusp of Magic hit

record stores on February 5.

The Cusp of Magic was written for and recorded

by Riley’s long-time collaborators the Kronos Quartet

(who also have a certain legendary status among the

cutting edge crowd) and the distinguished pipa

virtuoso Wu Man. The pipa, a lute-like Chinese

instrument, features prominently throughout, making

Cusp unique among Western works. The Cusp of

Magic, which astrologically is the week between

Gemini and Cancer, patterns itself after the Native American

peyote ritual in which each musician makes an

individual contribution to the ceremony.

The first two

movements constitute about half of the Cusp's length.

Like much of Riley’s music, they rely on

patterns established by minimalism and Indian

influence. The first movement begins with an insistent and

constant percussive beat from drum and rattle that

remains throughout its ten minutes. The quartet soon

introduces itself with short, staccato chords (for

which minimalism is known), followed by the entry of the

pipa. Within a few measures, the pipa comes more

into the foreground, creating an almost

improvisatory experience. Toward the end of the

movement, the music grows more fluid, allowing for greater

virtuosity from the players, and culminating in a very

brash, electronic, thrash-like conclusion.

''Buddha’s

Bedroom,'' the second movement, is a fine contrast, with the

string soloists plucking their instruments pizzicato in

imitation of the pipa. The overall feeling is light

and jazzy with a real swing. This atmosphere changes

during the movement’s central section, a haunting

lullaby with a text written by Wu Man and sung beautifully

by Elisabeth Commanday.

The Quartet

starts the third movement, ''In the Nursery,'' playing a

soft chorale-like melody under busier solo pipa

passages and electronically sampled nursery sounds.

A radical change

occurs in the fourth movement, ''Royal Wedding.'' It

opens with a grand Neoromantic theme, full of energy

and optimism, but ends on a somber note that

leads into the most eccentric--and riskiest--part

of the work. At its base ''Emily & Alice'' is

a collage of children’s toy sounds (from a

collection amassed by the Kronos Quartet during their

travels) combined with the whimsical theme to a

Russian cartoon series called ''Cherburashka.'' While the

use of all these elements might have made for a

cacophony of disparate sounds, it blends

instead--though it does draw attention away from the

soloists.

In the final

movement, ''Prayer Circle,'' The Cusp of Magic

draws to a satisfying conclusion. While the toy sounds

may have provided an unusual ground bass in the previous

movement, Riley now turns to a more conventional one:

Flamenco music. It casts an odd Spanish tone to the

piece’s final bars, which end abruptly and without

resolution.

The Cusp of Magic is certainly one of

Riley’s most optimistic, light-hearted, and easily

accessible works to date. Brevity is the soul of wit

here, and nothing is tedious or long-winded, a common

criticism of minimalist work by those with less

talent than Riley. And despite Riley's years, The Cusp of

Magic has a fresh and youthful feel that is

lacking in the music of many of Riley’s younger

colleagues. Those who already love Riley will most

likely adore it, and even those who don't may find

themselves charmed by it. It is hard to imagine a

performance of the piece being given with as much care,

love, clarity and tough-edged musicianship than the

one exhibited here by Kronos and Wu Man, and, as usual

with Nonesuch, the engineering is faultless.

Recommended to those who love new music—and even to

those who have shied away from it in the past.

http://www.advocate.com/exclusive_detail_ektid52206.asp

[7/4]

Kronos Quartet's Flair for the Dramatic

By Anne Midgette

Washington Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, February 19, 2008; C05

In its 35 years, the Kronos Quartet has reimagined the string quartet, created a new model for contemporary ensembles and demonstrated that audiences can love new music. Their performance with soloist Wu Man at the Clarice Smith Center on Sunday night, partway through their 18-month residency at the University of Maryland, shed light on how they have developed such an enthusiastic following.

It is not just unusual music, or the theatricality of their presentation -- which involved, on Sunday, dramatic lighting and a lot of walking around the stage in Tan Dun's "Ghost Opera." It is that their concerts aspire to be about something. Both "Ghost Opera" and Terry Riley's "The Cusp of Magic," the two pieces on Sunday's program, whatever their merits or failings, are rich in layers of meaning and allusion.

Riley's piece touches on relationships and childhood; Tan's on our relationship to our past, and art's to its ancestors. And both pieces are about the power of ritual and the creation of spiritual spaces -- of prayer, meditation, or art -- in our daily lives.

Of course, absolute music -- the standard classical repertory -- is about something, too. But extra-musical meaning at Kronos concerts is generally presented on a more literal, accessible level, like a pop concert.

In fact, those who value absolute music may have more trouble appreciating this group, which has historically tended to place less emphasis on the quality of its playing than on the experimental nature of its work. The New Age-y facility of some of its repertory is not to everyone's taste.

But on Sunday, the more New Age of the two pieces, "The Cusp of Magic," which invokes the spirit of peyote rituals and whose last movement is dedicated to world peace, was animated by a greater rigor and vitality than its companion. Riley, tagged as "the father of minimalism" since writing the seminal "In C" in 1964, is a master of the repeating musical patterns that are a defining feature of this mislabeled genre. Intricate and offbeat, these patterns drive the music forward from the start of this piece's first, eponymous movement, in which the juxtaposition of string quartet, pipa (Wu's lute-like stringed instrument), and synthesizer is framed by the constant shake of a rattle and the startling but carefully patterned thwacks of a drum. David Harrington, Kronos's founder and first violinist, took over percussion duties here and in later movements, two of which called on him to play children's toys (including a miniature toy violin) against a recorded backdrop, creating the effect of a nursery suffused with passing street noise, innocence contrasted with the bustle of the real world around it.

"Ghost Opera," written in 1994, is more focused and dramatic than some of Tan's subsequent works. There is more animation in the first 15 minutes of this piece than in the whole first act of "The First Emperor," premiered in 2006 at the Metropolitan Opera. The piece also introduces elements that were to become trademarks, notably the large, illuminated and amplified bowls of water, merging the functions of instruments and ritual objects, featured in a number of later works (including "Water Passion After Saint Matthew").

"Ghost Opera" is also a ritual, invoking the ghosts of the past, East and West (represented by a Chinese folk song and a Bach prelude), taking one step farther to the invocation of the past represented by most standard classical-music concerts. (It occasionally spoofs Western concert rituals: the tuning of the instruments or the exaggerated gestures of the conductor, mimed by Harrington.) But its material seems driven more by emotion than by compositional organization. As Kronos performed it, there was a lot of anger in this piece, thrusting to the surface in tense short roars of rage as the players roamed the stage playing their instruments, seeking, or unanchored. There was a lot to engage the ear: the jangle of Wu's pipa or the pure amber of her singing voice; the buzz and rattle of paper, rustled and blown; the rich tones of the quartet, suddenly offering a scrap of Western music before dispersing to the winds.

But the piece had exhausted its ideas before it was actually finished. Whereas Riley's final movement, a circle of music ascending upward through the instruments, its patterns spiraling together to culminate in a shower of notes, ended a piece that seemed to have gone on exactly long enough.

[7/4]

Cusp of Magic

(Nonesuch)

John L Waters

Friday February 22, 2008

The Guardian

This project by pipa player Wu Man and the untiringly eclectic string quartet Kronos continues a collaboration that began more than a decade ago, when they recorded Tan Dun's Ghost Opera. Long-time Kronos associate and minimalist pioneer Terry Riley has composed a six-part work that pits the sparkling, sparky pipa (a kind of lute) against the astringent, urgent ensemble sound that Kronos applies to everything from Africa to India. Extra drums, synths and vocals appear from time to time, and the somewhat creepy fifth movement, Emily and Alice, incorporates musical toys. Yet it is the straightforward partnership of pipa and string quartet that is most arresting and satisfying: witness the folky opening to Buddha's Bedroom (which evolves into a lullaby sung by Wu Man) and the closing Prayer Circle. The latter, like the atmospheric title track, is fuelled by what the fanciful liner notes call the "good medicine" of Native American peyote rituals.

[7/4]

http://www.buffalonews.com/entertainment/story/289616.html

Classical

Terry Riley, ^“The Cusp of Magic” performed by the Kronos Quartet and Wu Man, pipa (Nonesuch). No investigation of minimalism in America would miss the cherubic patriarchal presence of Terry Riley, whose “In C” was, at one time, even more of a rallying point than the music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass (who was known as “Phil Glass” back in the music’s protozoan downtown years.) Riley will be 73 this year. In 2005, the Kronos Quartet — among the greatest benefactors extant of multicultural postmodernism in music — commissioned Riley to write a piece in honor of his own 70th birthday. The resultant piece is this stunner for the Kronos and the great Chinese musician Wu Man whose instrument is the pipa, a kind of Chinese lute (and who also sings on the disc). The music is described as a “rite of midsummer” about the transition “from the mundane to the magical by juggling different spheres of experience” in the words of liner note writer Gregory Dubinsky. It is suffused, among other things, with love of children, using children’s toys for some of the sonic sources and Wu Man’s lullabies to her young son Vincent. It is, then, music of the spheres, of the religious temple and the nursery and it is a beautiful celebration of them all. ★★★ 1/2 (Jeff Simon)

[7/4]

the Kronos Quartet and Terry Riley's Sun Rings.

[7/4]

Terry Riley: "The Cusp of Magic." Kronos Quartet and Wu Man, pipa.

You don't need to eat peyote buttons to appreciate "The Cusp of Magic" -- though it probably wouldn't hurt. The opening and closing movements of this fascinating work by California composer Terry Riley are based on Native American peyote rituals, and the music in between -- at turns luminous, frightening and unbearably lovely -- shimmers with the elusive delicacy of a dream. Performed by the Kronos Quartet (which commissioned the work), "Cusp" takes its title from the summer solstice, and evokes those transitional moments in life when the sharp edges of reality become blurred, and anything seems possible.

Riley has grown in recent years from a minimalist to a little-of-everything-ist, and in "Cusp" he incorporates singing, a synthesizer, children's toys, a drum and the traditional Chinese "pipa" lute (played here by Wu Man) to bend and blend musical genres with protean ease. The effect is, in a word, magical: You have the sense of being swept into a surging ocean of memory, where lullabies float up over mysterious drones, nervous waltzes twist suddenly into quirky little marches, and nothing is ever quite what it seems. But the music never descends into runaway eclecticism: Riley's touch remains both sure and deft throughout, and the effect is powerful.

--

Stephen Brookes

Washington Post

3/9/2008

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...8030700957.html

[7/4]

The Kronos Quartet: An otherwordly experience

By NICK ROGERS

A&E EDITOR

Thursday, March 13, 2008

If ever the continuing wonder of the universe needed proof, consider this: Its sounds can surprise even someone who owns a recording of beetles chewing up pine forests in the Southwest.

David Harrington, violinist and artistic director for the Kronos Quartet, owns many nature recordings but until 2000 had not heard something literally out of this world: outer-space "sound."

"My first thought was that I didn't know there were sounds in outer space because there's no oxygen out there," Harrington says of a cassette tape he received from NASA. "And then I thought, 'Well, I have to hear this.'"

"Recorded" by plasma-wave receivers attached to Voyager spacecraft and the Hubble space telescope, the "sounds" were mixed to human-friendly frequencies by NASA and put on cassette.

Whether it sounded like a Moog synthesizer, R2-D2's nervous squiggle, serene birds, prolonged explosive blasts or the garbled electronic junk at the end of "Mr. Roboto," what Harrington "heard" actually were reverberations generated from pockets of plasma gas. The gas gets so hot that individual atoms separate into particles that can help propagate sound and radio waves.

Rarely must Harrington reconcile astronomical rules with musical aesthetics, but "Sun Rings" is an altogether different project, even for his avant garde string quartet.

Commissioned by NASA and composed by longtime Kronos collaborator Terry Riley, "Sun Rings" is a 10-movement, multi-sensory examination of the universe using instrumental strings, singing, the spoken word and extraterrestrial images and "sounds."

Under the direction of Marion van der Loo, the Springfield Choral Society will join Harrington, violinist John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt and cellist Jeffrey Zeigler for Tuesday's performance.

Harrington says "Sun Rings" isn't all science-fiction blips and squeaks.

"Nature does sometimes sound differently than you might expect it to," Harrington says. "There are beautiful melodies that Terry took from the hours of music and sound he listened to."

"Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector" was the first piece Riley composed for Kronos, so it seemed only natural that the quartet would send "Sun Rings" his way.

"I had known Terry was very interested in cosmology and various alternative ways of looking at the world that you don't normally think about," Harrington says.

Riley's many influences include the work of Pandit Pran Nath, a Pakistani classical singer. Onstage, when the quartet triggers prerecorded samples by running hands over sensors, it's Pran Nath's physical manifestations of raga (an Indian melodic practice) that they're channeling.

"'Sun Rings' is quite embracing of all Terry's styles — Indian, jazz, minimalism — that you can see everywhere he's gone with this piece," Dutt says.

Riley began working on the piece in August 2001 and, as Harrington says, "totally started over" after 9/11 — creating something that offers a greater appreciation of what humans have on Earth.

"As a listener, and a performer, I feel there's this opportunity to think about the world we're all a part of, and I come away from it feeling energized and almost recommitted, really, to the power of what a musical experience can be," Harrington says.

"I think (Terry) wanted to look at man from the universe's perspective, and that's actually a very humbling experience," Dutt says. "And it's more peaceful than anything."

Both men emphasize that Riley's music alone isn't enough to do "Sun Rings" justice.

Willie Williams, architect of the piece's visual design, incorporated abstract and actual images of outer space, as well as sketches from the Voyager missions' "golden record" — informational material about Earth and humans meant for use by anything encountered along the way.

Aliens, that is.

"To see those images is very inspiring," Dutt says of the diagrams and photographs designed by mankind with confidence that extraterrestrial life could be found and educated about our way of life.

Tethering "Sun Rings" to earthbound life forms, Riley incorporated choral work into several movements. The choral society will perform during "Earth Whistlers" and the two-part "Prayer Central."

"It's a crazy piece, but a fun piece," says van der Loo, the society's conductor and music director. "It's probably some of, if not the, most difficult music I've ever taught a chorus. It's extremely complex rhythmically, not just measure to measure but insofar as that one voice sings one part of a measure, and another voice comes in on the offbeat. And there are lots of shifting tonalities."

"Earth Whistlers" includes what van der Loo calls a mixture of "nonsense syllables" and words, all sung in unison by the chorus's women. And she views "Prayer Central" as a "'60s-ish" kind of text, with its talk of togetherness, kindness and Buddhist detachment from material things.

During those movements, van der Loo also will conduct the quartet.

"It's a once-in-a-lifetime experience for all of us," van der Loo says. "These guys (from Kronos) are first-rate. They've flown all over the world, and to be there in the pit with them is both terrifying and thrilling."

For van der Loo, the image that defines the mission of "Sun Rings" is that of Earth from the Hubble telescope — hanging vulnerable in the middle of vastness.

"There's a quote in the Book of Common Prayer which refers to 'this fragile Earth, our island home.' Earth is fragile physically, geologically, socially, economically and racially. It's an extremely tentative place," van der Loo says. "It's just an amazing thing in this dark universe to have this hub of humanity … and you see how important it is for people to sort of link arms in order to hold the whole thing together."

http://www.sj-r.com/Entertainment/stories/26750.asp

[Chalupa]

The Kronos Quartet: An otherwordly experience

By NICK ROGERS

A&E EDITOR

Thursday, March 13, 2008

If ever the continuing wonder of the universe needed proof, consider this: Its sounds can surprise even someone who owns a recording of beetles chewing up pine forests in the Southwest.

David Harrington, violinist and artistic director for the Kronos Quartet, owns many nature recordings but until 2000 had not heard something literally out of this world: outer-space "sound."

"My first thought was that I didn't know there were sounds in outer space because there's no oxygen out there," Harrington says of a cassette tape he received from NASA. "And then I thought, 'Well, I have to hear this.'"

"Recorded" by plasma-wave receivers attached to Voyager spacecraft and the Hubble space telescope, the "sounds" were mixed to human-friendly frequencies by NASA and put on cassette.

Whether it sounded like a Moog synthesizer, R2-D2's nervous squiggle, serene birds, prolonged explosive blasts or the garbled electronic junk at the end of "Mr. Roboto," what Harrington "heard" actually were reverberations generated from pockets of plasma gas. The gas gets so hot that individual atoms separate into particles that can help propagate sound and radio waves.

Rarely must Harrington reconcile astronomical rules with musical aesthetics, but "Sun Rings" is an altogether different project, even for his avant garde string quartet.

Commissioned by NASA and composed by longtime Kronos collaborator Terry Riley, "Sun Rings" is a 10-movement, multi-sensory examination of the universe using instrumental strings, singing, the spoken word and extraterrestrial images and "sounds."

Under the direction of Marion van der Loo, the Springfield Choral Society will join Harrington, violinist John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt and cellist Jeffrey Zeigler for Tuesday's performance.

Harrington says "Sun Rings" isn't all science-fiction blips and squeaks.

"Nature does sometimes sound differently than you might expect it to," Harrington says. "There are beautiful melodies that Terry took from the hours of music and sound he listened to."

"Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector" was the first piece Riley composed for Kronos, so it seemed only natural that the quartet would send "Sun Rings" his way.

"I had known Terry was very interested in cosmology and various alternative ways of looking at the world that you don't normally think about," Harrington says.

Riley's many influences include the work of Pandit Pran Nath, a Pakistani classical singer. Onstage, when the quartet triggers prerecorded samples by running hands over sensors, it's Pran Nath's physical manifestations of raga (an Indian melodic practice) that they're channeling.

"'Sun Rings' is quite embracing of all Terry's styles — Indian, jazz, minimalism — that you can see everywhere he's gone with this piece," Dutt says.

Riley began working on the piece in August 2001 and, as Harrington says, "totally started over" after 9/11 — creating something that offers a greater appreciation of what humans have on Earth.

"As a listener, and a performer, I feel there's this opportunity to think about the world we're all a part of, and I come away from it feeling energized and almost recommitted, really, to the power of what a musical experience can be," Harrington says.

"I think (Terry) wanted to look at man from the universe's perspective, and that's actually a very humbling experience," Dutt says. "And it's more peaceful than anything."

Both men emphasize that Riley's music alone isn't enough to do "Sun Rings" justice.

Willie Williams, architect of the piece's visual design, incorporated abstract and actual images of outer space, as well as sketches from the Voyager missions' "golden record" — informational material about Earth and humans meant for use by anything encountered along the way.

Aliens, that is.

"To see those images is very inspiring," Dutt says of the diagrams and photographs designed by mankind with confidence that extraterrestrial life could be found and educated about our way of life.

Tethering "Sun Rings" to earthbound life forms, Riley incorporated choral work into several movements. The choral society will perform during "Earth Whistlers" and the two-part "Prayer Central."

"It's a crazy piece, but a fun piece," says van der Loo, the society's conductor and music director. "It's probably some of, if not the, most difficult music I've ever taught a chorus. It's extremely complex rhythmically, not just measure to measure but insofar as that one voice sings one part of a measure, and another voice comes in on the offbeat. And there are lots of shifting tonalities."

"Earth Whistlers" includes what van der Loo calls a mixture of "nonsense syllables" and words, all sung in unison by the chorus's women. And she views "Prayer Central" as a "'60s-ish" kind of text, with its talk of togetherness, kindness and Buddhist detachment from material things.

During those movements, van der Loo also will conduct the quartet.

"It's a once-in-a-lifetime experience for all of us," van der Loo says. "These guys (from Kronos) are first-rate. They've flown all over the world, and to be there in the pit with them is both terrifying and thrilling."

For van der Loo, the image that defines the mission of "Sun Rings" is that of Earth from the Hubble telescope — hanging vulnerable in the middle of vastness.

"There's a quote in the Book of Common Prayer which refers to 'this fragile Earth, our island home.' Earth is fragile physically, geologically, socially, economically and racially. It's an extremely tentative place," van der Loo says. "It's just an amazing thing in this dark universe to have this hub of humanity … and you see how important it is for people to sort of link arms in order to hold the whole thing together."

http://www.sj-r.com/Entertainment/stories/26750.asp

I saw "Sun Rings" last year - amazing. I wish they would issue a recording of it.

[Chalupa]

Just got my ticket for this...

http://www.chamberorchestra.org/concerts/concert8.php

and just saw this....

Free in the Plaza!

Join us for a free performance featuring Terry Riley one hour prior to performance time

:excited: :excited:

[7/4]

Good for you! Have fun.

I should go, but I don't think I can.

.

[7/4]

[7/4]

Terry Riley: The Cusp of Magic

[7/4]

Chamber Orchestra premieres Terry Riley concerto

By David Patrick Stearns

Inquirer Classical Music Critic

Terry Riley is a composer who challenges limitations that you never thought existed - but without any iconoclastic confrontation. During his new concerto, Sol Tierra Luna, Concerto for Two Guitars, Violin and Chamber Orchestra on Monday at the Kimmel Center, you were ambushed by things that never happen in concertos - followed by "Well, why not?"

> Commissioned and premiered by Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, the concerto was supposed to be 20 minutes long but, in an amiably counterrevolutionary way, occupied 40. Though a single listening in a good but quickly assembled performance probably offered only a fraction of what was there, this is among the more substantial works this 71-year-old composer has written for traditional ensembles. That's "traditional" with an asterisk.

> A gurulike figure with a long white beard and a warm, inviting aura, the Bay Area composer is one for the musical competitiveness of conventional concertos. His once-minimalist aesthetic is about layers of unlikely music. And because Riley has gravitated with breathtaking ease toward Indian ragas, the music had a constant sense of alternative possibilities not guided by even the vaguest reference to Germanic classical forms, though the concerto's four movements did sport a fugue and, most moving of all, a funereal version of the 18th-century sarabande.

> The three soloists were a heterogeneous resource: Each had solo moments and various combinations of duets, particularly between the guitarists, David Tanenbaum and Gyan Riley. At one point, violinist Krista Bennion-Feeney laid down her violin and picked up temple bells.

> At the outset, Riley seemed out to cooperate with the medium, sounding vaguely like Ralph Vaughan Williams, but he soon drilled determinedly toward a desirable but elusive goal with music that's involved, complicated but not convoluted. The second movement was squarely within Riley's world, with non-Western scales used with unison string writing, plus exotic percussion interplay.

> The fugue in the third movement was more giddy than severe, while the fourth movement, "Sarabande for Iraq," had oblique references to "Taps," with muted trumpet playing a slow scale that descended into infinity.

> The program's Ravel-dominated first half had its breakthroughs. French impressionists don't really need lush string sound (one of my favorite encounters with Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande was with chamber orchestra), and often reveal their Gallic sense of logic without it. That's certainly what music director Ignat Solzhenitsyn was up to with Le Tombeau de Couperin. When string sound was needed, he summoned a forthright timbre that was arresting for not having the typical misty sonic scrim heard in conventional performances.