Terry Riley

November 4, 1964. San Francisco. Gig goers are given a choice: Thelonious Monk at the Jazz Workshop, or the premiere of a new work by a little-known avant-garde composer.

Anyone in their right mind would have gone to see Monk. He was a huge star by that point, while the other composer hadn’t done much except a series of pretentious tape loops using ‘found sounds’.

For another piece, this composer hadn’t written any music at all; he just gave the musicians these instructions:

“The performer takes any object(s) such as a piece of paper, cardboard, plastic etc. and places it on his ear(s). He then produces the sound by rubbing, scratching, tapping or tearing it or simply dragging it across his ear, he also may just hold it there, it may be placed in counterpoint with any other piece of sound source.”

Anyone who missed Monk’s show to see the Terry Riley’s piece In C might well have regretted it. It was another fairly pretentious experimental piece. The pianist is told to play a steady pulse of C notes, while the rest of the musicians are given a set of 53 fragments of music, some of which are only one note long. They’re told to repeat each part however many times they want, then move on to the next one, while trying to ‘stay within two or three patterns of each other’.

The piece is confusing, and certainly not catchy, but that first performance of In C is now considered the birth of minimalism, perhaps the most important style of modern classical music.

One of the performers that night was Steve Reich, who would go on to write far better minimalist pieces than Terry Riley, and Riley himself made better music than In C, but that was his most important work. As he later said:

Although repetition is a major force in music it was never used in this way before. So, essentially my contribution was to introduce repetition into Western music as the main ingredient without any melody over it, without anything just repeated patterns, musical patterns.

Terrence Mitchell Riley was born in Colfax, California, on 24 June 1935. His father was in the Marine Corps, and fought in WWII’s Pacific campaign, so Riley was mostly brought up by his mother’s parents. He had piano lessons as a boy, but only started composing while at university, ‘merely to see if he had any talent for it’. He then took a composition course at Berkeley, where he met fellow minimalist pioneer La Monte Young.

Riley spent the early 60s travelling round Europe, where he gigged as a pianist. He also played piano with a travelling circus, providing musical accompaniment for anything from contortionists to “men shooting cigars out of women’s mouths with a bow-and-arrow”.

At about this time, he started giving epic live concerts, playing from 10pm till dawn:

People brought their whole families and they had their sleeping bags and hammocks...Throughout the evening I would be recording these long saxophone delays and about four hours into the concert, if I wanted to take a break I would just play back the saxophone. And a lot of people didn’t even wake up to know the difference because a lot of people just slept all night.

After In C, his work became more accessible, and in 1969 he released his most popular album, A Rainbow in Curved Air.

Rather than following up this success, though, he took a break from composing, and went to India to study with the singer Pran Nath.

At about this time Riley started using Indian-style scales. While the Western chromatic scale has all notes a semitone apart, Indian scales space out notes according to a mathematical ratio. With a specially tuned keyboard, Riley recorded two of his best albums; Persian Surgery Dervishes (1972) and Shri Camel (1980).

Now 75, Riley is still playing live, though he may never get round to performing the conceptual piece La Monte Young once designed for him: “I was supposed to push a grand piano into a wall and keep pushing until the wall fell down.”

What to hear: A Rainbow in Curved Air, Shri Camel, Persian Surgery Dervishes

Why: As well as inventing minimalism, his tune A Rainbow in Curved Air inspired the intro to the Who classic Baba O’Riley