Terry Riley

[Chalupa]

Thanks for posting the article.

I was at that performance on Monday night. Before the concert Riley improvised on the piano for about 20 minutes and then did a quick (<5 minutes) encore. He is an amazing pianist. My favorite part of the new piece was the third movement. Hopefully there are plans to record it. There were two frustrating things about Monday's show though, both of which were beyond Riley's control. The show was sold out but I would say only about 65-70% of auditorium was filled. WTF? It's not like there was a huge snow storm. The other thing was that both of the guitars were amped but the volume on David Tanenbaum's amp was set too low. I could barely hear him. The pairing of the Ravel w/ Riley worked well. The conductor, who is Alexander Solzhenitsyn's son, is an amazing pianist.

[7/4]

There were two frustrating things about Monday's show though, both of which were beyond Riley's control. The show was sold out but I would say only about 65-70% of auditorium was filled. WTF? It's not like there was a huge snow storm.

It was a Monday, but it sounds like there were a lot of comp tickets that weren't used.

Thank for reporting - I wish I could have gone.

[CJ Shearn]

I like the clips I checked out of the new album saw the link to AAJ on the yahoo Metheny list. I am attracted by traditional Chinese sounds as well as Japanese

[Chalupa]

Hey my son and Terry Riley share the same birthday!! Albeit, 69 years apart

[7/4]

November 16, 1985

CONCERT: NEW RILEY WORKS

By JON PARELES

The composer Terry Riley's latest efforts to bridge the music of East and West involve improvisation, a piano tuned in just intonation (using exact proportions rather than the usual well-tempered system), and collaborations with the sitar player Khrishna Bhatt. On Wednesday at Carnegie Recital Hall, they played two new duets, ''Salome Dances for Peace'' and ''Variations on Shri Camel,'' and Mr. Riley performed the hour-long piano solo ''The Harp of New Albion,'' in a radically different version than the one he played here in March.

Both duets were meditative dialogues, warm and easygoing. They drifted purposefully from one prearranged melody line or pattern to the next by way of forays up and down the piano keyboard, phrases tossed back and forth, and patterns that, by speeding up, grew richer rather than more propulsive. Both the just-tuned piano and the sitar are resonant instruments, and the duets filled the room with sustained overtones.

''Variations on Shri Camel'' grew from a gentle drone to an elaborate, raga-flavored melody; ''Salome Dances for Peace'' started with a cramped, chromatic handful of notes and unfolded with glittering, Chopin-esque scales and romantic trills to a final, floating pattern of melodies.

''The Harp of New Albion'' was even more impressive. Since its last performance, the piece's separate sections seem to have dovetailed; it came across as an exploration of scales - major, modal, pentatonic, whole-tone, raga - with each kind of scale suggesting its own kind of expanding, swirling patterns.

Mr. Riley and Mr. Bhatt will perform Saturday and Sunday at the Samaya Foundation, 75 Leonard Street.

[7/4]

From the Los Angeles Times

MUSIC REVIEW

Terry Riley at Walt Disney Concert Hall

The organist rides 'Hurricane Mama' into cosmic depths.

By Mark Swed

Times Music Critic

May 27, 2008

AT 4:53 p.m. Sunday, NASA's Phoenix spacecraft landed on Mars, and two hours later pictures from the dusty red planet arrived at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to prove it.

But sound doesn't travel as fast as light, so it took a half-hour longer before we had an indication of extraterrestrial life stirring. That is when Hurricane Mama awakened and began to make miraculous music a few miles from JPL at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Terry Riley -- a Space Age Prospero dressed in black, wearing a black skull cap and in striped stocking feet, his long gray beard flowing -- walked to the organ consol. The hall was darkened. The wooden pipes were illuminated deep purple. No longer "French fries," a nickname Riley told the audience he felt inelegant, the pipes were newly dubbed "radiant columns of Orfeo." Hurricane Mama is his name for the Disney organ.

For the next two hours, Hurricane Mama howled and roared. Orfeo's columns traced the shapes of swirling galaxies and accompanied accelerating quanta as they collided releasing astonishing quantities of energy. They strung out strings of space-time and hymned drones of mystical oneness with the universe. All of that came before lift-off, which occurred in a long-held ground-shaking, gravity-defying final chord.

Riley and the organ are a match made on the other side of Mars, namely heaven. As the composer who launched Minimalism in 1964 with "In C," he was an obviously crucial figure in the Los Angeles Philharmonic's "Minimalist Jukebox" festival two years ago. At that time, the orchestra invited Riley to create a new work for the organ. "Universal Bridge," which began with an Anthem for Disney Hall and concluded with nature unleashed in "Hurricane Mama Blues," was the result.

"Minimalist" is a strange tag for Riley. It suits him in that he has never lost his love for interlocking repetitive figures imbued with the strength to send the brain into psychedelic reverie. But Riley is really a musical accumulator.

Years of study in India have made him a master of raga, played on the keyboard and sung. A virtuosic pianist and inspired improviser, he began as a jazz player and, at 72, remains a brilliant jazz player. Hardly remaining in or anywhere near C, he roams through modes and microtones continually enriching his harmonic palate. Melodically and rhythmically he flows naturally between East and West, ancient times, recent music history and the present.

Although he has performed before on the pipe organ, Riley's main instruments are piano, electric organ and synthesizer. To prepare for Sunday's concert, he made several trips from his home in Northern California to spend nights familiarizing himself with the Disney organ, typically practicing from midnight to 6 a.m., a period when he could play in the dark uninterrupted with only the night watchman looking on. His original idea was to give an all-night concert, from around 11 to dawn, but he had to scrap that when the Philharmonic put him on its regular organ series.

For the first half of his program, Riley revised two classic pieces, first updating "Persian Surgery Dervishes," a study in whirling repetitions for electric keyboard and tape delay. (A famous performance of that was given and recorded in Los Angeles in 1971).

Sunday's new "A Persian Surgery Dervish in the Nursery" made his performance on the old electronic technology seem downright primitive. On Disney's instrument, Riley achieved a sense of awe-inspiring vastness with thick church-like diapason textures. For an arrangement of a few themes from his epic 1985 string quartet, "Salome Dances for Peace," Riley began with spellbinding rumbling of low notes and then traced trilling fanciful melodies, at one point adding raga-like vocalization.

The "Universal Bridge" premiere was after intermission. Its opening Anthem for Disney Hall proved an embracing celebration of succulent chords in grand progression. The second movement, "The Bull," began with Middle Eastern melodic figuration over an arpeggiated ostinato base that had a faintly tango feel and slowly evolved into Bachian exuberance.

In the next movement, "The Shape of Flames," calm, soft-grained Mexican-like figures radiated into musical styles from near and far, with occasional long dissonant blasts, as it built into the rapturous, overpowering, indescribable "Hurricane Mama Blues."

On a personal note, I am not a disinterested observer of Riley's music. I have been attending his concerts since the '60s. I lined up with other students waiting for a Berkeley record store to open to buy "In C" the day the first recording of it was released. I attended Mills College in Oakland when Riley taught there in the '70s (although I didn't study with him). I got goose bumps watching him receive an honorary doctorate at CalArts this month.

My expectations for Sunday's concert were impossibly high. They were exceeded.

[7/4]

sure thang edc...I only read out loud at meetings.

.

[7/4]

another stellar contribution from 1.75-- did you get the Antheil cd yet or are you content to "enlighten" us with the 1.75 Clipping Service? as Budd Johnson told Earl Hines that time (Budd had drank a little too much)...

No funding to run around buying discs for now. Antheil is on the list.

who the fuck is Sorabji? it's never been dicussed here before! at least according to edc

Only by you and then me. I still have to check out that massive piano piece by him that I have.

[7/4]

My fave albums with Terry Riley on orgone:

1. Shri Camel
   
2. A Rainbow in Curved Air
   
3. Last Camel
   

There's a few others *, but these are my choice picks (for now).

* Happy Ending (aka Les Yeux Fermes), Persian Surgery Dervishes, Le Secret de la Vie (aka Lifespan?), The Descending Moonshine Dervishes.

[7/4]

November 16, 1985

CONCERT: NEW RILEY WORKS

By JON PARELES

The composer Terry Riley's latest efforts to bridge the music of East and West involve improvisation, a piano tuned in just intonation (using exact proportions rather than the usual well-tempered system), and collaborations with the sitar player Khrishna Bhatt. On Wednesday at Carnegie Recital Hall, they played two new duets, ''Salome Dances for Peace'' and ''Variations on Shri Camel,'' and Mr. Riley performed the hour-long piano solo ''The Harp of New Albion,'' in a radically different version than the one he played here in March.

Salome Dances for Peace and 'Variations on Shri Camel as duets, that would be an interesting release. I've heard of the string quartets on Cadenza on the Night Plain and Salome existing as arrangements for piano and string qt. - wouldn't mind hearing those.

[7/4]

At that time, the orchestra invited Riley to create a new work for the organ. "Universal Bridge," which began with an Anthem for Disney Hall and concluded with nature unleashed in "Hurricane Mama Blues," was the result.

For the first half of his program, Riley revised two classic pieces, first updating "Persian Surgery Dervishes," a study in whirling repetitions for electric keyboard and tape delay. (A famous performance of that was given and recorded in Los Angeles in 1971).

Sunday's new "A Persian Surgery Dervish in the Nursery" made his performance on the old electronic technology seem downright primitive.

New compositions and new arrangements on an instrument he's never released recordings of. Cool...

Edited June 22, 2008 by 7/4

[Chalupa]

Happy Birthday wishes to Terry Riley and to my son who turned 4 today.

[7/4]

Happy Birthday wishes to Terry Riley and to my son who turned 4 today.

Happy Birthday to Son O'Deeley!

[Parkertown]

I'm listening to In C from an album on emusic called Bang On A Can. A Riley composition.

I'm listening completely because of your enthusiasm, 7/4.

Very, very interesting...

I believe this is the first I've heard by him...

[stuartjewkes]

I'm listening to In C from an album on emusic called Bang On A Can. A Riley composition.

I'm listening completely because of your enthusiasm, 7/4.

Very, very interesting...

I believe this is the first I've heard by him...

Excellent performance too

[AllenLowe]

just ordered "The Last Camel in Paris" - it better be good, 1.75

[7/4]

Happy birthday to a minimalist pioneer

By Jeremy Eichler

Boston Globe/June 27, 2008

CAMBRIDGE - The wind in the local new-music scene often blows in decidedly uptown directions, but the 73d birthday of minimalist pioneer Terry Riley this week did not go completely unnoticed. The Boston-based art-rock band Birdsongs of the Mesozoic has been hosting a salon series at the postage-stamp-size Outpost 186. On Tuesday, by way of a Riley birthday tribute, Birdsongs invited some friends - Vessela Stoyanova and Valerie Thompson from Fluttr Effect, and composer Marti Epstein - to form a seven-piece band that took on Riley's roiling, iconic score "In C."

This landmark of modern art music, often cited as the true opening blast of minimalism, was written in 1964 and premiered at the San Francisco Tape Music Center. (Steve Reich was one of the performers.) Serialism had been the dominant force in contemporary music but Riley's work seemed to explode every one of its tenets like a Molotov cocktail.

This marvelously protean piece can be played by ensembles of any size and instrumentation. Its score consists of 53 distinct melodic cells that individual players are encouraged to repeat as many times as they wish before proceeding to the next. The music morphs slowly yet constantly as different patterns emerge, like a kaleidoscope for the ears. Performances can vary wildly in their length and approach, but the best ones convey something of the joyful spirit of liberation with which this music first came into the world.

Flashes of that spirit appeared on Tuesday night, though occasional rhythmic imprecision, dynamic uniformity, and a certain expressive tentativeness kept this performance from truly scaling the heights. Still, it was an invigorating pleasure to hear this work played live in such close quarters. Guitarist Michael Bierylo set things in motion by producing the work's pulse on a laptop, and much of this reading's distinctive quality came from the unusual blending of Ken Field's saxophone, Thompson's cello, and Stoyanova's marimba lumina. The dense web of sound was nothing if not a full-ensemble creation.

This performance clocked in at just about one-half hour (the night also included some group improvisation) and the audience was not much larger than the band on stage. Rather impressively, one man brought his baby, who was wide awake in the front row, taking it all in. Her father apparently places more faith in Riley than in Raffi, when it comes to expanding the mind.

[7/4]

Music shares space with museum's art

Jesse Hamlin

Sunday, June 8, 2008

SFGate

A few weeks ago, Terry Riley, the great minimalist composer with the flowing white beard, strolled into the dynamic Yud space at the new Contemporary Jewish Museum, where the angled walls ascend 65 feet and come alive with the ever-shifting play of shadow and light pouring through 36 diamond-shaped windows. The master clapped his hands, sang a few notes and smiled. The acoustics seemed ideal.

"The room really hits you - the beauty of the design, the way the light comes down. When you walk in, your spirits are lifted," says Riley, one of several major artists whose work will inaugurate the soaring space intended for music and contemplation.

He was tapped for the museum's Aleph-Bet Sound Project by John Zorn, the avant-garde New York composer and saxophonist who rounded up an intriguing cast of musicians and storytellers to create music and sound installations that will play in the Yud during the next six months. (Yud is one of the two symbolic letters in the Hebrew word l'chaim, "to life," on which architect Daniel Libeskind based the new forms thrusting from the museum's historic brick shell.) Zorn also commissioned works from such noted collaborators as rocker Lou Reed, performance artist Laurie Anderson and jazz cellist and composer Erik Friedlander - all of whose work will be heard during the opening program - as well as composer Alvin Curran, conceptual artist David Greenberg and a half dozen other artists, Jewish and non-Jewish. Each piece is inspired by a letter in the Hebrew alphabet, or aleph bet.

Riley, who will perform his piece live later in the year, chose aleph, the first. He researched the letter's symbolism and associations - "there are layers and layers when you start reading about it," he says - and was inspired to explore it musically.

"The main thing is that it has this connection between heaven and earth," says Riley, on the phone from the East Bay. He hasn't cooked up his piece yet, but he's been thinking about "man's eternal striving to develop a connection with the heavenly realm and the divine." He plans to improvise much of it live on a MIDI grand piano. He envisions using the instrument's contrasting voices - the computer-and-synthesizer-made sounds and the acoustic piano - to create a dialogue between the earthly and celestial.

Riley, who isn't Jewish, appreciates the museum's broad vision.

"If you look at this country's production of art, so much has come from a Jewish perspective," he says. "Something in that culture has a great love of beauty."

Friedlander, who has performed with Zorn on the gritty downtown Manhattan music scene and shares his forward-looking notion of radical Jewish culture, says some of the music in his "The 50 Gates of Understanding" uses the harmonic minor scale of Eastern European Jewish music - "that exotic, mournful, cantorial quality" - but has many other flavors and moods as well.

Based on the 14th Hebrew letter, nun, his composition - which takes its title from the character qualities the ancient Israelites sought to achieve while wandering the Sinai desert - is divided into seven sections with seven short pieces each, with a final tune that stands alone. Each section builds on a 14-note theme that's reiterated seven ways.

"Every piece has a different way of looking at these 14 notes," says Friedlander, who performs the piece on cello in an improvising quintet featuring violin, piano, bass and drums. "Some are very dissonant, some are very melodic, and you recognize a sort of jazz tradition. And some are totally atmospheric and almost abstract expression."

Some of these miniatures are 12 seconds long, others a minute.

"I hope there's a little alchemy going on as these 50 gates open and close," says Friedlander, who was blown away by the museum's Yud space when he visited last month from New York (he was in town to perform at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with the exhibition of photographs by his father, Lee Friedlander). "I thought it was incredibly beautiful. It's like a temple in there."

David Greenberger will fill the space with the sound of his own voice, telling vignettes he collected from elderly people about their earliest memories. Greenberger, who lives in Greenwich in upstate New York, based his piece, "Tell Me That Before," on the seventh Hebrew letter, zayin, the first letter in the Hebrew word for memory. Each story, which revels in the "strange poetry" of fragmentary conversation and memory, is underscored by music written by Chicago composer Mark Greenberg. "I'm trying to honor this odd form of portraiture," Greenberger says. "I'm not creating a souvenir of that person's life. The world's already filled with those kind of things. I'm trying to create a doorway to think about our own lives."

[AllenLowe]

LOWE TURNS 54: NO ONE GIVES A SHIT

UPI MUSIC SERVICE: PORTLAND, MAINE

Allen Lowe turned 54 this April. Lowe, who plays music and writes songs, lives in South Portland.

"So who gives a shit?" said Chauncey Morehouse of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania.

[7/4]

Mass MoCA: Bang on a Can Marathon

Time flies when it's all fun

By Richard Houdek, Special to The Eagle

Article Last Updated: 07/29/2008 09:57:24 AM EDT

Tuesday, July 29

NORTH ADAMS — Bang on a Can's trove of music was so rich that the annual festival's customary six-hour Marathon Saturday evening at Mass MoCA suddenly became a seven-hour event.

And the throng on hand couldn't have been happier. By the time the last item on the program rolled around — two classics by Frank Zappa, after 10:30 — much of the crowd that earlier had nearly filled the museum's Hunter Center for the Performing Arts remained for the final standing ovation.

Terry Riley was the special guest, and the celebrated composer, involved in three of the evening's significant numbers, doubtlessly was the major drawing card.

Riley led the procession of instrumentalists in a clangorous percussion march to the stage before the players assumed their normal positions, and instruments, for the performance of his "Woelfli Portraits." This was a concert version of portions of a chamber opera based on the work of Adolf Woelfli, the artist and poet who learned to express himself while confined to a Swiss asylum for the insane for 35 years, until his death in 1930.

Illustrated with projected quirky drawings by Woelfli of animals, fish and other objects in color, the music in four movements, ranged from solemn, including lovely figurations from Lauren Radnofsky's cello to a playful ragtime pastiche from the piano, courtesy Vicki Ray, and staccato chords in the finale from everyone.

Riley's "Olsen III," originally a 53-minute undertaking for orchestra, chorus and his own soprano saxophone, was pared to 13 minutes of minimalist tension, with four singers offering insistent syllabic commentary in unison, occasionally in contrast, with the instrumental ensemble of nine. In attenuating solo turns, Evan Ziporyn alternated subterranean bass clarinet and shrieking clarinet timbres.

As promised, Riley returned during the marathon's final segment for an abbreviated session of improvisation, whimsically called "piano bar," in which he became an unofficial member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars.

With Riley at the keyboard displaying reasonably well-supported baritone sounds, he was joined by Gregg August, double bass; David Cossin, percussion; Todd Reynolds, violin, and Ziporyn, clarinets, all unflappable giants in their own realms, displaying considerable musical acumen in keeping up with Riley's sudden switches in styles and rhythm.

more

[7/4]

www.sequenza21.com - Interview with Terry Riley

.

[7/4]

Hmmm....can I say they're all as bad as each other?

I hate minimalism. One of the few contemporary composers whose music happens to have some lyrical AND intellectual content is Lowell Liebermann.

Philip Glass=a thief. I SWEAR he ripped of his themes for Notes on a Scandal from Barber's overture.

Riley's rep as a minimalist is based on one major piece, In C. It's one of a few pieces of his that could be considered minimalist.

The rest of his work, I don't think so. It's too busy and there's too much variety for his music to fit the shoe.

Edited November 20, 2008 by 7/4

[Bright Moments]

david - was the original 1964 "in C" ever put on cd? can you post a scan of the cover of the original?

thanks.

BM

[7/4]

david - was the original 1964 "in C" ever put on cd? can you post a scan of the cover of the original?

thanks.

BM

It came out in '69...just got re-issued with new liners for the 40th Anv. concert at Corny Gee Hall a few months ago.

original:

reissue:

[Chuck Nessa]

Pretty boring stuff without really good dope.