Terry Riley @ 90 It’s nothing more than an ascending arpeggiated clavinet chord, but it rises from a liquid surface with the gentle inexorability of steam. Listening deeper reveals a moment of transformation embracing heft with restraint, the sudden incendiary shift amidst icy repetitions prefiguring Boulez’s “trapped bang.” Coming 7:28 into the titular piece on Terry Riley’s A Rainbow in Curved Air, like the Hindu God Shiva, it creates and destroys, blowing the surrounding sound world apart while paving the way for all succeeding events. The single gesture is a calmly self-contained revolution. Beyond the sudden sound burst, like the phoenix, the ever-present organ patterns gradually reassert themselves. A bifurcating path is illuminated. The instant can now be explored in its proper contexts, as it forms a moment representing and even defining the innovative spirit of Terry Riley: The Columbia Recordings, issued to honor the composer’s 90th birthday. The set deserves its own context. Residing as we do in sampling’s micro-diverse aftermath, it is easy to forget how disparate and novel late 1960s musical alliances seemed to audiences entirely unprepared for them a mere five years earlier. The convergent and interdisciplinary scenes that brought us the likes of Riley, La Monte Young, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Tony Conrad had been converging since the very late 1950s, but with the exception of Reich, whose politically charged “Come Out” was released on the Odyssey label, the underground – when the concept actually had meaning – was their home. Significantly, it was an underground that also birthed the AACM, Bill Dixon, and the New York Art Quartet among so many other pioneering spirits of that socio-musical phenomenon still fumblingly labeled as “Free Jazz.” It and the music Riley represents – let’s not use its purported and problematic descriptor any more than necessary – was a work in vibrant progress. When The Velvet Underground finally edged toward the mainstream in 1968 and 1969, the music had softened and lost some of its timbral fire, most obviously following John Cale’s departure. For context, we are now especially fortunate to have William Robin and Kerry O’Brien’s edited compendium On Minimalism: Documenting a Musical Movement (University of California Press, 2023) to clarify just how thoroughgoing the sounds and aesthetics of the music under discussion really were and the difficulties in describing its emergence. The documents capture an astonishing array of genres and an equally confounding confluence of verbiage attempting to detail the drones, repetitions and concepts, not to mention the histories fostering and unifying these disparities. Around, in and through it all, there is a sense of magic, ineffability in essence perceived if not to be articulated in orderly syntax. O’Brien and Robin’s book is a superb way into the three albums Riley recorded for Columbia between 1968 and 1969, a fourth album following in 1977. Like the equally radical Jack Kerouac discs waxed a decade before, Riley’s three slabs of incendiary vinyl proved summative while also anticipating developments only recognizable in retrospect. Unlike other complete recordings sets that chart a development, Riley’s comprises a multifarious moment captured in sonic technicolor. He had been working on the techniques defining each album-length essay for years, but various layers of circumstance, aided by the tireless efforts of producer David Behrman, aligned to create the opportunity for these recordings to tell what would prove to be a paragraph of a much longer tale. None of this is to diminish the set’s value, and fortunately, it receives the lavish booklet note treatment it so richly deserves, demonstrating jubilant disparity even in its documentation. Behrman contributes a wonderful essay describing initial events and the fresh aural experiences they captured and unleashed on the world, and we are treated to other appreciations as well as original album liner notes to paint a more detailed picture. One of the take-aways from that superb time-capsule is a reminder of Columbia President Goddard Lieberson’s mission to record new music. I needn’t remind readers of the label’s contemporaneous dedication to Stravinsky and Boulez, and it is to his credit that they devoted similar resources to Riley’s ground-breaking In C, the set’s first disc. Not only do Riley’s tape experiments informing projects like “The Gift,” “Bird of Paradise,” and “You’re No Good” come to a kind of fruition, but the instrumentation, heavy with percussion and winds, documents a sort of timbral genre conflation, and yet, there was no resting on laurels. A Rainbow in Curved Air, Riley’s second Columbia album, plunged unapologetically into the electroacoustic worlds of organ, percussion, and tape delay that would soon capture the influential ears of Mike Ratledge and Pete Townshend. Riley’s soprano saxophone guides each work’s pattern-inflected and improvisational tendencies forward, foregrounding the link to improvised music’s more radical manifestations, as Young had been doing with the Theater of Eternal Music. The complex lineage of Motown, Hindustani Raga, and Coltrane’s equally inclusive engagements ensured sonic signifiers well beyond the easily categorized and digestible Beatles and Stones infusions, pushing the music into territory equally ambiguous and exciting. The liner notes, by Paul Williams, speak to another aesthetic, one of seriously humorous rebellion: “I’m not here to justify this record, or to explain it, or to in any way connect it with anything else that already exists on the face of this earth. ... I don’t know anyone who wiggles his ears to music. The experience of music is not fully in the ears. If it were, we could concern ourselves with sound and its permutations to the exclusion of all else that musicians might be interested in. Since it is not, we must realize that we listen partly with our memories, allowing what we hear to clash and sing with the patterns already established in our minds; ...” Memory is as diverse and deep as the contexts it fashions. Despite whimsy and the obvious inter-communal warmth this music harnesses and generates, there is a seriousness in it exposing part of its origin story, a stone still partially unturned, an avenue still shrouded in the foliaged complications of conflicting histories. Consult the primary studies of Riley’s music, including Keith Potter’s Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass (Cambridge, 2002) and Robert Carl’s Terry Riley’s In C (Oxford, 2009) to understand the contradictory reception of Anton Webern and the succeeding “serialist” composers in Riley’s immediate sphere of influence. Webern was notoriously non-compromising, and performances of his music remain relatively rare, especially satisfactory ones. What follows suggests neither direct lineage nor homage, only a possible and transgenerational relationship exposed by sonic kinship. The second movement of Webern’s sole symphony, premiered in 1924, contains a moment anticipating what Terry Riley would accomplish via very different means and intentions four decades later. I recommend Robert Craft’s Naxos version, his second recording, from which I include timestamps. The second movement, Webern’s astonishing set of eight variations with introduction and coda, is based on a theme whose static figuration (0:07) sets that peaceful moment beyond its neighboring events. Harp and clarinet repetitions employ Webern’s ubiquitous pointillism and symmetry, a characteristic most readily apparent in the fifth variation (beginning at 1:22.) Here, string patterns distributed in low and high registers flank harp iterations, all elements crescendoing as they repeat. It is stunning to realize that the crescendo constitutes the variations only sense of motion. All else remains static. For its time and mode of expression, it is an absolutely staggering conceit. There are certainly partial precedents in the 19th century, including the opening of Mahler’s first symphony, The slow-building E-flat arpeggios inaugurating Wagner’s Das Rheingold, the coronation scene from Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov and the G-Major chords building toward climax in the third movement of Beethoven’s penultimate piano sonata, but these are cumulative events. Webern’s variation is a statement of self-contained innovation. It is not simply that notes repeat in the same register or that points abound instead of lines. Anticipating the second movement of his 1935 Piano Variations, Webern eschews motion in favor of a stasis that would come to fruition long after the master of canon and pointillist orchestration’s death in September of 1945. Rhythm, timbre and staggered repetitions combine to create a gesture as concise as it was prophetic. The fact that Craft’s recording follows Webern’s metronome markings, as he observes in the disc’s notes, ensures that the fifth variations revolutionary combination of stasis and motion are heard afresh. Repetitions are there but nearly blurred, neither taken slowly enough to lose momentum nor too quickly for the patterns to blur. In Craft’s hands, the variation becomes a kind of crossfade, a transition occupying but outside time. The variation amplifies but thwarts the moment of repose centering Webern’s theme, but it also foreshadows the Columbia recordings’ place at the conjoining and widening centers of Riley’s oeuvre. Hearing In C, in this context and especially in the Columbia version, recontextualizes the work. Each pattern becomes a point perceived as it moves along a non-teleological trajectory reminiscent, at least in spirit, of the Webern variation. The 1968 recording is heavy on winds and percussion, readily apparent as the patterns emerge from the piano’s high-register pulse. Only two and a half minutes into the piece does the Webern pointillism become clear, especially in the 2009 remaster used for this compilation. Here, we ride the waves of Riley’s patterns in the moment-to-moment timbral shifts common to so many composers, regardless of nationality, traveling in Berlioz’s wake. Like them, Riley has proven himself a master of orchestration, as these timbrally diverse iterations attest. Beyond the surface level timbral shifts, these moments can portend long-term cataclysmic results. At 10:14, a saxophone plays an F-sharp. Suddenly, without warning or ceremony, a microcosmic timbral event signals a sea change. As the patterns evolve along their glacial paths, that single pitch becomes a center, determined not by any post-Romantic teleology but merely by its existence in the work’s continuum. E-minor is reached nearly three minutes later not by modulation but by circumstance and the spiraling repetitions guiding it. Heard in this ever-evolving context, In C occupies a static space, an introspective plane of intersecting histories that would give rise to its own long and fruitful series of intersections with every subsequent recording. Meanwhile, In C was the explosion that rocked the idealistically revolutionary world of late 1968 simply by being the totality it was. Riley’s other offerings for Columbia were recorded between 1969 and 1977. Each of the three releases took a page from In C’s playbook, not necessarily in terms of score but as a sonic document. The saxophone-heavy sound of Columbia’s version would play a significant role in Church of Anthrax, Riley’s fascinating, uncategorizable and only partially successful collaboration with John Cale. As if In C’s protean modulations were being serialized, each track on Anthrax occupies a different sonic space. Anyone familiar with the backgrounds of these sonically malleable collaborators needn’t have been surprised, but again, and achieving another layer of continuity with Riley’s previous work, we hear the intriguing juxtaposition of attendant histories and musical tropes. “Ides of March”’s two drummer and two piano mélange molds itself into a funky brew reeking of ragtime and saloon, prepared piano charmingly antique along the lines of the “tacky” old-time vibe established by “Rocky Racoon” but with less safety and compromise. Immediately preceding it is the melancholy “The Soul of Patrick Lee,” its jangle-folk nestled deep in the bosom of Cale’s typically lush arrangement. Despite grit and venom, he can be an orchestrator in the most traditional sense of the word, packing this little gem full of voice and reverb, lifting the music and poetry toward a welcome abstraction never quite grounded by layers of guitar. The stage-setting titular piece leaves the world immediately on droning wings only to return to it post haste, grinding and growling jubilantly forward in psychedelic ascent, emoting on all modal cylinders in yet another musical statement of not-quite-rock and jazz, something orbiting counterpoint anchoring saxophone, organ, and guitar riffage atop propulsive groove. Riley’s soprano saxophone improvisations, about which more presently, mirrors In C’s patterns just as Monk’s compositions reflect his playing’s angularly ambiguous rhythmic precision. Most convincing, beyond the sudden high-frequency scree that ends the album with such a jolt, is “The Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles.” The track glides in on an ocean of piano, presumably courtesy of Cale, gradually inhabiting centerstage and out of which Riley’s soprano emerges, delay conjuring All-Night Flight reminiscences even as an additional melodic layer is added. Cale’s pianism is propulsively rhythmic, defying the punch and groove occupying so much of the album in favor of gently loping sonorities alluding to his pre-Velvet Underground forays in and outside of La Monte Young’s Theater of Eternal Music. A subtle mixture of chord and drone willfully eschews facile linearity, a conceit only partially offered by Riley’s atomistic post-Coltrane patterns of shifting rhythm and accent. Each of the three layers offsets the other, reflecting and deflecting just as the title suggests, and each tonal center is an area not to be approached by forward motion or retrospective engagement but to inhabit. Riley’s patterns imply rather than bespeak harmonic intent even as Cale’s lush triads and clusters push and pull them in and out of consciousness. Shades of “East meets West” imbue Riley’s sinewy sound-pictures” with an inner light until they evaporate, temporarily replaced by piano and ... what is that high-register sound? Before disappearing into the ether, it glistens, sizzles, and crackles with a quiet but never subdued energy. Like the luminous triangle unifying the blissful “The Christ, Light of Paradise” movement of Olivier Messiaen’s final masterpiece, Illuminations of the Beyond, Riley and Cale charge this peacefully transcendent moment with something otherworldly, beyond the album’s many genre and historical considerations, something magical. It increases in volume, either threatening or enhancing the piano’s prominence depending on listener perspective, and then evaporates with the re-entrance of Riley’s saxophone glissandi. Recorded nearly a decade apart and centering largely on Riley’s organ work, A Rainbow in Curved Air and Schri Camel comprise something between dialectic and mirror image. During that time span, Riley immersed himself in Raga study with Pandit Pran Nath, paramount to all that follows, and the mentorship accounts for the rhythmic intricacies and just intonation on Shri Camel. While In C focused on the felicities of tape-loops transferred to real-world performance and Church of Anthrax brought Riley’s interest in electronically manipulated saxophone into Cale’s orbit, the other two Columbia albums turn inward, Riley being the sole musician inhabiting soundscapes of surprisingly vast and diverse but focused sonic import. As Thomas Welch’s excellent liner essay observes, Shri Camel was the end of an era. Riley would soon return to notated composition, but this multi-tracked organ offering also harkened back to Riley’s ground-breaking use of electronics for a label initially even unprepared to work out payment for the process. How, exactly, is a spontaneous composer-performer remunerated? Welch quotes some in-house Columbia correspondence to this effect, and it is to the label’s credit that they understood the pioneering path Riley was forging. If In C was difficult to categorize, the two organ-centric albums bend notions of genre and space to breaking point. Listening to the first side of Rainbow in class engenders shock and awe, especially after I reveal its 1969 provenance. The students inevitably reference ambient and techno, apt comparisons as the vast sweep, various fades and moments of immediate transformation nest new forms within a form constantly finding and resting comfortably in its elasticity. The percussion’s 11:31 entrance enhances previously established notions of sonic signifier just as the layers, at various tape speeds, of organ line, motive and pattern effect temporal perception. Notions of pulse are simultaneously present but thwarted at every turn by a crystalline rhythmic counterpoint of razor-sharp articulation and accent. The very occasional tonal center modifications, as in the section shift at 6:38, take on the import of similar instants of modal mixture in a track like “So What” but in an entirely different temporal context. Riley’s is a piece of nearly constant motion, freneticism nonetheless in repose. The album’s second side, Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band, slows the tempo but raises the stakes by incorporating jump-cut sonics anticipating nothing so much as Japanese tricksters The Boredoms. We enter the darkly modal organ and soprano saxophone exploration in medias res, and just as acclimation is achieved, the soundstage broadens, fanning outward to engulf perception. As with Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments, sudden switches in perspective prove disorienting. The single sonority at 6:05 also ends the album, bracketing flight-of-fancy soprano improvisations using Riley’s now-iconic time-lag accumulator technique. The side-long venture harkens back to the Theater of Eternal Music while anticipating Riley’s organ concerts of the 1970s. It is as if Coltrane’s mode and pattern excursions, directly influenced by immersion in Hindustani music, have been transported to the psychedelic world of Riley’s album-cover-adorning poem, a place beyond preconceptions and borders, physical and otherwise. Shri Camel’s icy introspection bridges similarly wide gaps while simultaneously reducing and expanding timbral intrigue. Riley proffers an organ ensemble, a superficially homogeneous universe of articulating percussives and sustains diverse in attack and wave structure. Diminished is the communal whimsy of real and phantom ensembles, replaced by an obviously deeper and more serious intent while spontaneity continues unabated. The descending brassy implications of “Anthem of the Trinity” serve as precis and invocation, prefiguring the subsequent pieces. Their titles bespeak transience, or motion, or at the very least a series of multi-perspective views in transit. The aptly titled “Desert of Ice” encapsulates the album’s vast transience while epitomizing the focused diversity of Riley’s Columbia recordings. It heats up as it proceeds, as layers of delay-drenched organ coalesce so that each produces terraced dynamics reminiscent of Baroque-era compositions even as modal improvisations akin to Rainbow accumulate and disperse. The final minutes blaze with a frozen light, notions of melody, harmony and timbre unifying in an astonishing crescendo sampled and held, caught and wavering before, as with Rainbow, the music simply subsides and disappears. Annotator Hugh Gardner concludes with quotations from students for whom he’s played tapes of the music: “For me it’s being carried away down a sparkling river.” “I feel forced to look directly at the sun, but allowed to see only the good and pure things, and not the heat or conflict.” “It reminds me of all those millions of little synapses and electro-chemical impulses working together inside.” This diversity of perspective mirrors the temptation to view Riley’s Columbia recordings as a commencement rather than as the point of broader exposure they became. True, In C was the first link in a chain of increasingly numerous recorded interpretations, endlessly imaginative and culturally inclusive, encompassing Brooklyn, Mali and so many points and ensembles in-between, but even that canonic composition is only a point on a spiraling line. Look back to Riley’s string quartet and trio, both composed in the very early 1960s and now available in excellent performances by the Calder Quartet, to hear a more direct involvement, and a subtle break, with contemporaneously established musical traditions. The aforementioned tape-loop pieces serve as prototypes for the Columbia albums as do the organ meditations on the timbrally intricate Reed Streams, his 1966 debut LP, but they also prefigure the wild jump-cuts and non-sequiturs of The Light Is Real, his 2022 collaboration with Thollem and Nels Cline. Viewed in this multihued light, the Columbia legacy is less beginning than continuation, consolidation and refinement, research and development catalyzing Riley’s diverse musical trajectory from 1980 onward. A return to written notation began with Riley’s collaborations with the Kronos Quartet, including Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector (1980) and Cadenza on the Night Plain (1984.) This relationship reached an early, but by no means only, apex with Salome Dances for Peace (1985-86) in which all of Riley’s various transcultural assimilations unfold on a grand scale in one of the late 20th century’s most intricate and varied contributions to the quartet literature. To suggest that the monumental work stands in direct contrast to the more overt Americanisms of At the Royal Majestic (2013), Riley’s concerto for organ and orchestra, or to the literally conversational counterpoint, staggered repetitions and evocative slides of This Assortment of Atoms – One Time Only (his 2022 Kronos collaboration) would be to highlight difference when it is only one variable of the equation. These pieces form points along an interconnected series of complex lines. As with his Columbia recordings, Riley’s journey has been an evolving concentricity of points reached in non-teleology, pointillism in emergent combination and revisitation. His recent disc of piano improvisations on jazz standards, recorded in Japan, his home since the pandemic, reminds beautifully of his roots in conjoining jazz traditions; yet, on his 90th birthday, on YouTube, he released “Komal Reshab Asavari,” a Raga in which he and Sara Miyamoto are joined by the resonant foundations of Pandit Pran Nath’s tanbura, a gift to Riley from his guru. It is a touching tribute and another revisitation as the composer-performer moves effortlessly and seamlessly between ensemble works, electroacoustic soundworlds and the cultures attending them. He is a fusion artist in the truest and noblest sense of the word, elevating the worn trope beyond the facile categories it so often conjures. Beyond the sounds, Riley bends and blurs notions of time and space, even confronting planetary considerations, as in his multi-media Kronos quartet collaboration Sun Rings (2006). Form transforms and diversifies as instants, like the ascending clavinet arpeggio implying elements far beyond its brief existence, vignettes and paragraphs converging, mirroring a lifetime’s compositional and performative trajectories. Returning once again to On Minimalism, in an epigraph, the composer provides the best and simplest precis: “I felt like a transcendentalist, an illusionist, or a magician. Something that has to do with magic. I feel it’s my field to try to create magic in sound. Magic in the sense of transcendence of this ordinary life into another realm,” (O’Brien & Robin, 17). Palpably, six decades later, Riley’s Columbia recordings connote a time of idealism, of possibilities inhabiting the territory between motion and repose.
© 2025 Marc Medwin
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