Terry Riley

Born June 24 (The Day of the Blissful Wizard)

Terry Riley’s musical approach is very similar to that of Johann Sebastian Bach in one important respect. As Bach took the strands of Italian, French and German Baroque along with other elements of English and continental music and synthesized them in his own compositions, so Riley did the same with the major trends of world music, incorporating Chinese, Japanese, Javanese, Indian, European Classical, Jazz, pop, electronic and many others into his rich compositional tapestry. This interweaving of musical styles and
techniques allows us to refer to Riley as the Bach of the later 20th and early 21st centuries.

Terry Riley burst on the world musical scene with his seminal composition In C, a composition built on a single piano pulse of the note C around which small musical units were added, each unit being continuously repeated by a given instrument until the entire composition was realized. The release of this piece on Columbia Records was for the general public the beginning of what came later to be called Minimal Music. Riley’s friends and associates LaMonte Young and Marian Zazeela were also active in this area, along with Steve Reich who was Riley’s student at Mills College in Oakland, California. Terry Riley is a true Californian, born and bred in Colfax and still living today in the Sierra foothills.

As a master musician, Riley’s varied styles are both compositional and improvisational, much as Bach’s also were. Both composers spent many hours improvising at the keyboard, their later compositional ideas often emerging from these explorations. To this day Riley still performs as an improvisational artist while publishing and recording his written compositions as well. Frequently he is commissioned to write works for existing ensembles, such as the Kronos Quartet who have premiered many of Riley’s compositions
on recordings and in live performance. Riley’s most recent endeavor with them was The Cusp of Magic, written in celebration of the composer’s 70th birthday, drawing its title from The Secret Language of Birthdays by his close friend Gary Goldschneider, to whom the work is dedicated. Two other commissions of many he has written that are particularly worthy of mention were those of Carnegie Hall in celebration of their 100th anniversary and NASA who provided Riley with sounds recorded in outer space as the basis for a new composition.

As a teacher and inspirational force, Terry Riley has fostered and encouraged not only the development of new music in America but of the emergence of many young composers and musicians. He himself was most musically indebted to the influence of Indian master singer Pandit Pran Nath, who was his teacher of Indian ragas. To this day, Terry Riley still awakens early and sings morning ragas, accompanying himself on a harmonium or by computer generated tones programmed on a laptop that he carries with him on his many overseas tours.

– Gary Goldschneider