Terry Riley

Terry Riley, born in 1935, is an American composer recognized as one of the founding fathers of minimalism.

American minimalism was one of the most revolutionary and liberating movements of the twentieth century, creating a new musical syntax capable of breaking away from every previous experience. Born in the New York attics of La Monte Young, over the course of several years and following shared criteria and rules — repetitions of single notes or short patterns, layering, sometimes boundless note lengths — it managed to produce works that were extremely different from one another, often of great artistic value and a drastic break with the past. It's interesting to note how, while remaining within the same school and following the very same rules, the movement's main protagonists — La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass — created works that were rigorously personal and unique, showing how those rules, however rigid, left enormous room for freedom.

Riley's compositions have spanned six decades of avant-garde music, devising processes and structures so flexible that they have stood the test of time and influenced an extraordinarily wide range of music that might otherwise seem distant and irreconcilable.

Terry Riley was, more than any other minimalist, the one who best represented the movement's mystical/spiritual soul, bringing into a context that sits somewhere between academia, Western popular music and Indian classical music – part of the pop-rock language and part of the counterculture typical of the American west coast of the second half of the 60s (pacifism, the hippie movement, fascination with the East and with India in particular). Riley was, in a sense, the hippie of the minimalist movement, bringing the Summer Of Love and its ideals into Young's attics; his experimentation combined mysticism and religiosity, pacifism and psychedelia, East and West; his role is in some ways not unlike the one played by Florian Fricke of Popol Vuh in the Germany of kraut-rock. An essential aspect for understanding Riley's music is his enormous communicative power, which sets him apart from most avant-garde composers; his boundless palette of colours makes him capable of painting huge chromatic and musical structures of great variety and vitality. Riley frees himself from any abstract academic rhetoric, breaks away from rigid scholastic schematism, and cleanses himself of intransigent conventions, and for this reason he unfolds across vast spaces that feel like the purest freedom; few have managed to create music so liberating.

Terry Riley began his career in the 1950s playing piano professionally, and influenced by legendary artists like John Coltrane and John Cage, he started gravitating toward improvisational and avant-garde music. This led to his first album, "Mescalin Mix", in 1960.

In 1964, a year after the release of "Music For The Gift", came the work that established Terry Riley as a pioneer of minimalist music, "In C". The piece's distinctive feature lies in the fifty-three musical phrases that make it up, which can be repeated and arranged at the discretion of any musician who takes on the interpretation. The composition was conceived to allow for infinite possibilities of interpretation, and it stands as a landmark of composition, giving rise to a new musical style built from repeated, interwoven figures.

Then, in 1969, Riley released what would probably remain his masterpiece, "A Rainbow In Curved Air". A record that enormously influenced rock music; every musician who wanted to experiment from 1969 onward had to reckon with it, from Robert Fripp to Robert Wyatt, from prog-rock to Canterbury, from Talking Heads to Glenn Branca. The prog band Curved Air even took their name from it. Moving to Italy, there's experimental Battiato or Picchio Dal Pozzo. Even the unlikely Who paid tribute to him with the famous track "Baba O' Riley" on the album "Who's Next"; Birdsongs Of Mesozoic name him explicitly in the track "Terry Riley's House" from their debut album "Magnetic Flip".

In 1972 Riley released "Persian Surgery Dervishes", an album made up of recordings from two performances, one in Los Angeles and one in Paris. During the 1970s he began a steady collaboration with David Harrington, the iconic founder and first violinist of the Kronos Quartet, performing with him in a series of concerts and releasing "Salome Dances For Peace" with him in 1989, which earned a Grammy nomination.

In 1990, for the twenty-fifth anniversary of its first release, Terry decided to stage a celebratory performance of "In C", and for the rest of the 1990s he devoted himself to reissuing his historic works and collaborating with artists of the caliber of bassist Stefano Scodanibbio and poet Michael McClure.

2008 and 2010 saw the release of two original projects: "Cusp Of Magic" for the Kronos Quartet, a piece commissioned by the quartet itself in honor of Riley's seventieth birthday, and "Terry Riley: Autodreamographical Tales", an audio collage made up of music, digital sampling, and the extensive use of the American artist's own voice reading from his dream diary.

In 2015, twenty-five years after the reissue of "In C", Riley revisited the iconic composition once again and released "In C Mali". The album came out of the artist's collaboration with Africa Express, featuring a seventeen-piece ensemble of musicians from West Africa giving their own interpretation of the composition. It was with two artists from this group, Lansiné Kouyaté (balafon and percussion) and Moussa Sanou (Kora), that Terry Riley took the stage at Triennale Milano Teatro in 2016. The performance, also joined by Riley's son Gyan as well as Amedeo Pace of Blonde Redhead, remains a memorable one.