Who is composer Terry Riley?

But whilst he’s lauded for his minimalist work of that most experimental of decades, he himself has moved on spectacularly, diversifying his repertoire throughout his more than six decades in music.

‘I’m always interested in a kind of magic, in elements being transformed in music,’ Riley told The Guardian 2015, going on to add that for him ‘music is existing in a universal mind that’s out there all the time. When I’m working, I always feel like something is being given to me. It is very intuitive… it’s an interesting process, because so much of it comes from the unknown’.

This continued interest in music’s possibilities has sustained Riley into his late eighties, and here’s a little bit more about the life and work of this remarkable musician.

His musical journey began in California

As did his own. Riley was born in Colfax, California in June 1935, and subsequently grew up in Redding in the north of the state. Having taken up the solo piano his studies took him from Shasta College in Redding to the San Francisco State University and the San Francisco Conservatory, before undertaking an MA in composition at the University of California in Berkeley.

Berkeley gave him an education and some life-changing introductions

Riley was in good company at Berkeley. Studying alongside him was Seymour Shifrin – who would later be described by Time Magazine as ‘one of the most significant composers of his generation’ – whilst his teachers included Robert Erickson. It was also at Berkeley that Riley met La Monte Young, a man he’d later describe as ‘the freakiest guy I have ever met in my life’. Riley and Young’s first collaboration came while working with the dancer Anna Halprin, and their careers would continue to entwine over the following decades. In the 1950s, Young performed on Riley’s improvisatory composition Concert for Two Pianists and Five Tape Recorders; in the 1960s, Riley spent a year as part of Young’s New York-based Theater of Eternal Music; and in the 1970s they came together once again, this time in Asia. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.’ But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

He was a part of the experimental San Francisco Tape Music Center

In his work with Anna Halprin’s San Francisco Dancer’s Workshop, Riley began experimenting with tape loops – a kind of primitive sampling that involved physically cutting up the tape of musical recordings and reworking them as new pieces. Though the technique was novel, Riley wasn’t the only composer exploring the potential of tape technology, and he soon found a home among like-minds in the San Francisco Tape Music Center. Founded by Ramón Sender and Morton Subotnick, the SFTMC’s other composers included Pauline Oliveros, Joseph Byrd and Steve Reich.

The SFTMC helped him launch his best-known composition

In C, or ‘The Global Villages for Symphonic Pieces’ as Riley initially titled it, is a pioneering minimalist composition said to have done more than any other work to bring the movement of minimalism in music to a wider public. In C has no underlying melody or repeated patterns, but consists of 53 short melodic fragments that can be repeated at the discretion of the musicians, and the number of those musicians, like the number of repetitions, is unspecified. As Riley explained in a 1992 interview with Rhythmos Magazine, ‘although repetition is a major force in music it was never used in this way before.’ The work was premiered by the SFTMC’s members – including Reich, Oliveros, Subotnick, Jon Gibson and Stuart Dempster – in November 1964.

He became known for his epic all-night performances

In 1967, Riley was approached by the Philadelphia College of Art who wanted to hold a concert in their gallery to which people could bring hammocks and sleeping bags and spend the night. Riley worked with visual artist Robert Benson to put together shows that paired music with strobe lights, mylar installations, and even troops of gymnasts doing cartwheels. Though the concerts would last from 10pm until sunrise the music was all Riley, ‘I really didn’t have a plan, I just went in and started playing,’ he told Rhythmos, ‘one of my specialties was to be able to play for a really long time without stopping and I would play these repeated patterns for hours and hours and I wouldn’t seem to get tired’. The performances would become known as Riley’s ‘all night flights’.

He was a big influence on early 1970s British music

Riley’s work had already crossed into the world of rock music in the 1960s, with the composer cited as the inspiration for John Cale’s keyboard part on The Velvet Underground and Nico’s ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’, but it’s with 1968’s overdubbed electronic album A Rainbow in Curved Air that he really made waves across the pond. The organ parts in The Who’s tracks ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ and ‘Baba O’Riley’ are both influenced by Riley’s album – with the latter partly named in his honour – as too, it’s been argued, is Mike Oldfield’s ‘Tubular Bells’.

A performance by Ravi Shankar changed his musical life

‘I was probably in my late 20s, or even close to 30. It was late in life to encounter something so wonderful,’ said Riley of his first Indian music experience – a concert by Ravi Shankar and tabla player Alla Rakha at Berkeley – in a 2023 interview with Songlines. ‘I really had never encountered anything quite like that – and that’s when I realised that was the direction I wanted my music to go into’. And go into it he did, dropping out of a record contract with CBS to travel to India in 1970 and become a student of the Hindustani classical vocalist Pandit Pran Nath, who he’d met, inevitably, through Young.

He’s also been greatly influenced by jazz

Riley cites ‘the really great chamber music groups of John Coltrane and Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Bill Evans and Gil Evans’ as some of his favourite jazz performers. ‘There was a lot about their approach that I studied and found very useful in my own work,’ he explained in an interview with Bluefat. ‘One of their ideas was taking just a very simple chart and building a very comprehensive piece out of it… what really impressed upon me was that you can start with very limited means, and if you have great players you can evolve into quite an engaging structure.’

Though he became a teacher in the 1970s, that didn’t stop his collaborations

Returning from India and his studies under Pandit Pran Nath, Riley took up a position teaching Indian classical music at Oakland’s Mills College. Here, in 1980, he would meet David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet, starting a long association that would lead to Riley composing 13 string quartets, a concerto, a multimedia choral work and an epic five-quartet cycle for the ensemble. 

Although he plays a lot of instruments, he’s most at home on the piano

Though he began with the piano, Riley’s career has seen him become proficient in multiple instruments, including the synthesizer, saxophone and tambura, but he always returns to his first love, as he explained to online music magazine, Perfect Sound Forever. ‘I’ve always played the piano. I like the expressive quality of the piano. It allows you to control a lot of ideas, more so than a synthesizer. I find that harder to control. You can control the expressiveness much better with a piano.’

Though he’s unmistakable a pioneer of minimalism, he doesn’t like to be called a minimalist

Not least because he’s done so much since. Something he best explained in a 2023 interview with Songlines’ Daniel Spencer. ‘As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found different ways of working and every decade of my life has had a different focus, pushing the music from a different angle – not only from Indian music or jazz or classical music or any kind of ethnic music – it’s really an awareness of how music is working in all these and, as a composer, trying to be consciously aware of that as you’re making your selections about what is musical composition’.