about: terry riley

[swaas]

Minimalist pioneer Terry Riley was among
the most revolutionary composers of the
postwar era,

famed for his introduction
of repetition into Western music motifs,
he also masterminded early experiments
in tape loops and delay systems which
left an indelible mark on the experimental
music produced in his wake.

Riley was born June 24, 1935 in Colfax,
California, and began performing professionally
as a solo pianist during the 1950s;
by the middle of the decade he was
studying composition in San Francisco
and Berkeley, where among his classmates
was fellow minimalist innovator La Monte Young.
Influenced by John Coltrane and John Cage,
he began exploring open improvisation
and avant-garde music, and in 1960 composed
Mescalin Mix, a musique concrète piece
composed for the Ann Halprin Dance Company
consisting of tape loops of assorted found sounds.

By the early '60s, Riley was regularly
holding solo harmonium performances
beginning at 10:00 pm and continuing
until sunrise, an obvious precursor of
the all-night underground raves to follow
decades later. After graduating Berkeley in 1961,
his next major work was 1963's Music for the Gift,
composed for a play written by Ken Dewey;
among the first pieces ever generated by
a tape delay/feedback system, it employed
two tape recorders — a setup Riley dubbed
the "Time Lag Accumulator" — playing a loop
of Chet Baker's rendition of Miles Davis' "So What."
The loop effect sparked Riley's interest
in repetition as a means of musical expression,
and in 1964 he completed his most famous work,
the minimalist breakthrough In C; a piece
constructed from 53 separate patterns, it was
a landmark composition which provided the conception
for a new musical form assembled from
interlocking repetitive figures.

In time, Riley also learned to play saxophone,
introducing the instrument into his so-called
all-night flights; these epic improvisational
performances became the basis for his most
successful recordings, 1968's Poppy Nogood
and the Phantom Band and the following year's
A Rainbow in Curved Air, the music's cyclical
patterns and etheral atmospherics predating
the rise of the ambient concept by several
years. In 1970, Riley made the first of many
trips to India to study under vocal master
Pandit Pran Nath, with whom he frequently
performed in the years to come; another
collaborator was John Cale, a pairing which
resulted in the 1971 LP Church of Anthrax,
arguably Riley's most widely-known recording
outside of experimental music circles.
Throughout the 1970s, he also taught
composition and North Indian Raga at Mills
College in Oakland, California.

A pair of early-'70s live performances — one in L.A.,
the other in Paris — resulted in the 1972
album Persian Surgery Dervishes, a work of
meditative machine music clearly prescient
of the trance sound to follow. Around the
same time, while on staff at Mills, he befriended
David Harrington, violinist of the Kronos Quartet;
their camraderie yielded a total of nine
string quartets, the keyboard quintet Crows
Rosary and The Sands, a concerto for string
quartet and orchestra commissioned by the
Salzberg Festival in 1991. Another Riley/Kronos
collaboration, 1989's Salome Dances for Peace,
was even nominated for a Grammy. Recording less
and frequently as the years passed, Riley agreed
to stage a performance celebrating the silver
anniversary of In C which was then released in 1990.

allmusic.com

Comments

[serkorkin.livejournal.com]

Есть у Вас Terry RILEY "in C" ?

[swaas.livejournal.com]

да