Kobuchizawa, Japan — On June 24, Terry Riley turned 90. It was a momentous occasion for American music that got little attention in the U.S. But Sunday night at the Ford, Bang on a Can All-Stars will pay tribute in a concert that surrounds “In C,” Riley’s 1964 work that was said to have launched Minimalism, with a few hints of where it came from and where music might yet go.
Rhythmically mesmerizing and harmonically alluring, Minimalism proved the most persuasive new musical method of the late 20th century. It reached all forms of classical music and energized rock with its harmonic trance and rhythmic repetitions (The Who acknowledged him in “Baba O’Riley”) and ultimately many forms of pop music and jazz. Opera succumbed, as did film music. The watered-down Minimalism that wormed its way into radio and TV commercials won’t go away.
Even so, “In C” promises to endure as a classic for as long as musicians find meaning in communing with each other. Written for any number of musicians and any instruments (it sounds great on Chinese instruments and Javanese gamelan), it consists of 53 melodic fragments, each of which is repeated until a player feels ready to move on to the next. That feeling of readiness is meant to be both personal and a sensing of the mood of others. Every performance then becomes a pleasure offering of its own period, place and people.
Riley didn’t invent Minimalism; a belief in revolutionary new beginnings was in the cultural air at the San Francisco premiere. Composers were fooling around with repetition, drones, tape loops and the like. There was an overpowering quest for spiritual betterment, along with a demand for permission to pursue your passion and an insistence on unfettered expression. “In C” appeared an agent of those good times, a shot of adrenaline (maybe mixed with a pinch of mescaline) into new music.
For Riley, “In C” launched a maximal musical journey and one of the most remarkable in American music. If he was the father of Minimalism — or, more accurately, the affable uncle — he presented “In C” as a gift to the world, rather than a plan for action.
The first recording came out in 1968 as an LP in a gatefold jacket that opened to reveal the score of those 53 fragments. Anyone could perform it. No royalties. It just so happened that the predecessor to “In C,” written the year before during a brief residency in Paris for the jazz star Chet Baker, happened to be called the “The Gift.” In it, Riley experiments with tape looping and live mixing of electronic music, previewing the fluid, unpredictable nature of “In C.”
Riley, a native Californian born in born in Colfax and raised in Redlands, remembers having his first spiritual awaking at age 2 when he heard a song on the radio. From that moment to his present life in Japan, he has sought musical enlightenment in music wherever he can find it.
His pilgrim’s progress began in his early years as a virtuoso pianist, enamored with Ravel and ragtime, to radical experimentation with electronics and pulse and drones as a student at UC Berkeley to extensive raga study in India to becoming a highly influential composition teacher at Mills College in Oakland. There were decades of traveling the world giving improvisatory keyboard recitals that sometimes included all-night organ recitals in Gothic French cathedrals.
Five years ago, Riley landed in the mountains of Japan, where he has remained ever since, and last year I visited him in his small apartment in Kobuchizawa. Step outside and Mt. Fuji loomed, as if a distant but personal stupa.
Riley had been invited to perform at a festival on Sado Island. After visiting the site in February 2020, he was about to set out on a world tour when COVID-19 struck and Japan immediately locked down. A former student, Sara Miyamoto, and her husband, Tadashi, a concert promoter, told Riley of an apartment next to theirs in the foothills of the Yamanashi Mountains where the couple could look after him.
He’s still there. He has traveled throughout Japan and taught in Kyoto and Tokyo. When his son, composer and guitarist Gyan Riley, visits, they sometimes give concerts together in Japan. While Riley says he is not against one day returning to California, he doesn’t expect to find the need.
Shortly after “In C,” Riley gave up the use of notation, devoting himself to keyboard improvisation and his vocal raga practice. But here I found Riley, who was managing a heart ailment but vital and productive, having one again — and he says, for good — disillusioned with traditional notation and prolifically composing new works based on painterly graphic scores that resemble psychedelic art works.
It had been at Mills that violinist David Harrington, leader of Kronos, doggedly convinced a reluctant Riley to write a string quartet. One led to another, and Riley has by now produced the most impressive large body of string quartets, 30 strong, since Haydn. Riley also went on to write a broad range of solo, chamber and orchestral works.
But he has always been an outlier, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which is presenting the Ford concert, has been the American orchestra most receptive. It commissioned a major organ concerto, “At the Royal Majestic,” for soloist Cameron Carpenter, that is as maximalist as it gets, referencing everything from gospel music to jitterbug to ragtime to blues to raga to Minimalism’s motoric phrasing, all of it coming out sounding like Riley.
The composer (whom I have known since my own student days at Mills, though I never studied with him) gamely attempted to reminisce about his earlier music in our conversations in Kobuchizawa. He dug deep in his memory. But his early years were most on his mind.
His first project during the pandemic was to make a solo piano recording in a small Kobuchizawa studio of jazz standards from the Great American Song Book. Riley says he considers some of them among the greatest American music and has played them all his life. But it took living in Japan for him to want to record them.
“Standard(s)and” is a Japanese release (easily ordered in the U.S.) on vinyl in luscious analog sound. Songs like “Round Midnight” or “Isn’t it Romantic” begin Bill Evans-ish before lovingly entering into a Riley-ish spacey realm. There is nothing like it.
“In C” was also on his mind. The 60th anniversary was coming up. After a 2009 performance in Carnegie Hall, Riley announced that enough was enough, he was retiring from playing it. Now, he thought he would make an exception for a special anniversary performance under the full moon. I joined him to check out the Japanese heritage Umenoki Site at Mt. Yatsugatake, where small circular cave dwellings from 5,000 years ago had been re-created. He figured it was a place where magic might occur.
Riley ultimately held the performance at the Kiyomizu-dera shrine in Kyoto under what was said to be a magical July full moon. The pressing personal significance to such an anniversary “In C,” and one so far from the madding crowd of them, appeared to be Riley’s own instinctive return, at this late stage of his work, to making a music wide open, free as a winged bird, presenting an imaginative kit for the performer.
Where this has led could be fathomed at the Ojai Festival in June. Claire Chase, this year’s music director, is Riley’s latest muse, and she presented a selection of scores they have been working on. In the 45-minute “The Holy Lift Off,” she was joined by the JACK String Quartet. Somehow, Riley’s drawing produced an astonishingly beautiful work sounding like a 21st century Ravel at his most elementally magical. But freer-flowing. More meditative. Less insistent. Ojai offers it as a gift on YouTube. Give yourself 30 seconds in which to get hooked.
Riley celebrated his 90th birthday in June with two Tokyo concerts by the Kronos Quartet, one being, at the composer’s request, the Japanese premiere of Riley’s most cosmic string quartet, “Sun Rings.” He also made a short recording singing an Indian raga,” Komal Reshab Asavari,” accompanied by Sara Miyamoto on tambura. The raga is meant to present an understanding of being in the present at the time of loss. Riley’s voice at 90 is as timeless as his music.
The Ford program sets up “In C” with Keyboard Study No. 2, a modular score written at the same time as “The Gift.” And it includes the West Coast premiere of Gyan Riley’s version of his father’s “Rainbow in Curved Air.” It is an improvisational work created in the recording studio with Riley over-dubbing several instruments. Listening to it today, one hears some of the Bill Evans-ish character of Riley’s recent standards recording, revealing the quality of Riley’s career of ever moving while discarding nothing and now sowing seeds for a new generation.
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