Terry Riley

'A Rainbow In Curved Air' is the piece I feel closest to. It came from a series of overlapping improvisations, it was the kind of music I was looking for, and it's the first successful experiment in that direction. It's a seminal piece that, using the delay technique, I can even perform live on my own.

(Terry Riley)

American minimalism was one of the most revolutionary and liberating movements of the twentieth century, creating a new musical syntax capable of setting itself apart from every prior experience. Born in the New York lofts of La Monte Young, over the course of several years and following shared criteria and rules — repetitions of single notes or short patterns, overlapping layers, notes of sometimes immoderate length — it managed to produce works that were extremely different from one another, often of great artistic value and marking a drastic break with the past. It's interesting to note that, even while remaining within the same school and following the same rules, the movement's key figures — La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass — created works that were rigorously personal and unique, showing how those rules, however strict, left enormous room for freedom. The accusation of "fascism", leveled by various musicians including Luciano Berio, thus appears unfounded.

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.

In a recent interview, Terry Riley said: "The primary reason for music is spirituality. Music tells us who we are. For me, religion means recognising where music comes from, and music comes from nature. To interpret and reproduce nature means to capture its vibrations and transmit them in the form of sounds. I'm not religious in the strict sense of the word, I don't hold a particular faith. But I am a person who leads a spiritual life; seeking God, for me, means seeking contact with nature, and music is the expression of this search of mine" (source).

Riley had known Young since his school days, but only began studying his principles and ideas in the early 60s; his music, however, has little in common with Young's extremism or with Steve Reich's icy geometries. What prevails in him is communication with the listener. Hence his first masterpiece – "In C" (1968) – which, starting from a single obsessively repeated note, builds a grand experiment culminating in a very long crescendo involving around 35 musicians playing roughly 53 bars. "In C" too conveys a sense of freedom, an almost childlike perception of joy and fun, while still remaining rigidly within the bounds of minimalism. But it was with the following "A Rainbow In Curved Air" that Riley truly achieved the sound he had long been aiming for.

"A Rainbow In Curved Air" had an enormous influence on 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 him. Moving to Italy, there's the experimental Battiato or Picchio Dal Pozzo. Even the unlikely Who dedicated to him the famous track "Baba O' Riley", featured on the album "Who's Next"; Birdsongs Of Mesozoic explicitly reference him in the track "Terry Riley's House" from their debut album "Magnetic Flip".

Riley moves beyond the single repeated note (as in the earlier "In C") to embrace the repetition of various patterns that continuously vary, layering one upon another. The memorable eighteen-minute title track is a classic example of this; a brief pattern of a few electric organ notes repeats and overlaps at different speeds; a new pattern of electric harpsichord, sped up to an almost unbelievable degree, is added with results of extreme vitality. There are never any variations in melody or harmony – if anything, it's the timbres that change – but attention is always focused on small details that shift over time. The repetitions are never rigid or mathematical, unlike, say, those of Steve Reich; instead, they are rich with inspiration, imagination, and unexpected surprises chasing one another in a dizzying whirl.

The moods can shift from the Oriental to the psychedelic, from Western electronics to tribal music. The development is a continuous layering of new sounds and new variants; the piece grows without harmonic or melodic variation, creating a world utterly different from anything heard before 1969. The result is a grand and unforgettable minimalist raga that marks an era; a monumental hymn to joy and expressive freedom. Joyous moments alternate with others that feel almost liturgical, but Riley's religion has no wish to instil guilt – it seeks to liberate.

"Poppy Nogood And The Phantom Band" (twenty-one minutes) is very different; the previous dynamism gives way, at least at first, to sounds that are more hushed and stretched out. Wind instruments dominate here; it opens with artificially elongated sax tones, like shifting, disorienting walls of sound running across a harpsichord drone. Endless loops of wind instruments follow one another, alternating chaotic moments with more meditative ones, building up to a genuine sax free-for-all that reveals a certain debt to the most experimental jazz. Here too there is no harmonic or melodic variation, but always great attention to small details, partly drawing on ideas from Indian musical culture.

"A Rainbow In Curved Air" is a groundbreaking work that stands as one of the greatest masterpieces of 20th-century avant-garde music; a few years later Riley would manage to reach similarly high levels with the wonderful "Persian Surgery Dervishes" (1972).

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23/10/2016