Terry Riley has turned ninety, and after the celebrations in London last month – with the ensemble Band on a Can in regular and extended formation performing the super-classics A Rainbow in Curved Air and In C – New York also celebrated the event with a special concert on June 25 at the Roulette, where the very recent The Holy Liftoff was performed in the solo flute version by Claire Chase and again In C with a large number of musicians involved (more than forty).
Tonight it will be the turn of the Kronos Quartet, who managed to convince the composer to join them in Kanagawa from Yamanashi, his residence for a few years, to attend the first performance in Japan of the splendid Sun Rings, a multimedia cycle partly commissioned by NASA for string quartet, choir, images and sounds captured from space granted by the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Iowa.
It is not yet available – it will be in a couple of months – but even the simple announcement contributes in some way to the birthday celebrations of Our Man currently underway:
it is The Columbia Recordings, a box containing the albums that Terry Riley recorded for the New York label between the Sixties and Seventies, namely In C (1968), A Rainbow in Curved Air (1969), Church of Anthrax (1971, with John Cale) and later Shri Camel (1980).
Innovative and very influential works – especially the first two, which have become of historical importance – here accompanied by unpublished photographic documents and several written contributions including those of direct protagonists and expert witnesses such as David Behrman and Thomas M. Welsh.
Un cofanetto deluxe di 4 CD che riunisce le seminali registrazioni Columbi
Terry Riley. A landmark reissue of one of the most important figures in 20th-century music.
The Columbia Recordings brings together the four seminal albums Terry Riley created for Columbia Masterworks between 1968 and 1980, a body of work that redefined the possibilities of minimalism, electronic music, and compositional freedom.
Each title marks a critical moment not only in Riley’s evolution, but in the broader cultural shift in American music: where avant-garde practice collided with high-fidelity production, and radical sonic ideas met mass distribution.
Carefully remastered and presented with extensive archival material, this set captures Riley at his most transformative, when the pulse of innovation was inseparable from spiritual and sonic exploration.
“In C” alone marked a revolution, influencing contemporaries like Steve Reich, Philip Glass and La Monte Young, while “A Rainbow in Curved Air” paved the way for ambient, psychedelia and proto-electronics.
“Church of Anthrax” opened up new dialogues between experimentalism and rock, and “Shri Camel” explored Indian tuning systems through digital delay, resulting in one of Riley’s finest full-length works.
In addition to all four complete recordings and rarely seen archival photographs from the sessions at Columbia’s legendary 30th Street Studios in Manhattan, the set also includes a 50-page booklet with firsthand reflections from David Behrman, the original producer of “In C” and “A Rainbow in Curved Air”; and an essay by Thomas M. Welsh, Terry Riley’s longtime manager and archivist;
and the reissue of all essays and liner notes from the original vinyl editions. Released as Riley approaches his 90th birthday,
The Columbia Recordings is not just a retrospective, but a celebration of the power of music to build new worlds and change the one we live in.
Tate Modern e Africa Express presentano “In C Mali” di Terry Riley, in occasione del cinquantesimo anniversario della celebre composizione “In C” del compositore Terry Riley. Il direttore d’orchestra André de Ridder reinterpreta il celebre brano di Riley con la collaborazione di membri di Africa Express, tra cui gli innovativi artisti africani Bijou e Adama Koita e il frontman dei Blur Damon Albarn. Nella versione interattiva (clicca sul link sottostante), il filmato dell’esibizione dal vivo è intervallato da opzioni interattive che permettono allo spettatore di immergersi in un’ode al minimalismo. È possibile scegliere di sedersi con la band o di partecipare a un tour tra le iconiche opere d’arte minimalista attualmente esposte alla Tate Modern, tra cui opere di Donald Judd, Josef Albers e Frank Stella.
Jean-Louis Tallon’s book Terry Riley, figure libre, published in Marseille by the excellent Le mot et le reste, is ready and already being distributed.
The American composer Terry Riley is best known for his work In C, a pioneering piece of repetitive music that has enjoyed undisputed international popularity since its creation. In C, however, is the tree that hides the forest of an immense and plural corpus of works at the intersection of minimalism, jazz, blues, electronics and trance, between East and West.
First of all, the album A Rainbow in Curved Air, which influenced Mike Oldfield, Pete Townshend and Soft Machine, as well as The Harp of New Albion, not to mention the twenty or so string quartets he wrote for the Kronos Quartet since 1980. Thus in Terry Riley, figure libre, Jean-Louis Tallon traces the biographical and aesthetic trajectory of a composer who today occupies a founding place in the history of music.
The video of the evening at Roulette:
