venerdì 22 febbraio 2013

Two pieces by Terry Riley


Thesis about Terry Riley.
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Two pieces by Terry Riley


(This is not the official version, it's a traduction of the italian version. There may be grammatical errors.)

Introduction


Terry Riley, composer and performer, was born in California on 1935. He studied composition and piano at the San Francisco State College.
Riley's music has influenced composers such as Steve Reich, Philip Glass and John Adams and many Rock-Psichedelic band such as The Who, The Soft Machine, Curved Air and others.
Riley was a pioneer of minimal music, a genre that developed in the 1960's and can be traced back to minimalistic composers such as La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass and John Adams. Although these composers developed minimalism in different and personal ways, it's possible to define the general aspects of this type of music:
  • Use of few elements
  • Simplicity of elements
  • Repetition of simple cells (patterns)
  • Continous and transforming form
  • Dephasing
  • Long-held tones (drones)
In C, composed by Terry Riley in 1964, was the first minimalistic masterpiece. This work, written for undefined ensamble, consists of 53 simple patterns that must be played consecutively. Performers may choose the number of repetitions for each cell but they have not to race too far ahead or to go lag too faar behind, they should stay within three patterns of each other. This means that each player will take a different lenght of time to run through the cells, in order to create complex rhythms. In C ends when each performer completes the last figure.

Although Riley is considered a pioneer of minimalistic music, he didn't limit his experience to this genre of music, in fact after composing his masterpiece "A Rainbow In A Curved Air" he decided to study the Indian music and culture.

From serialism to minimalism

Whilst studying at Berkeley, Riley became very interested in serial music. He particularly appreciated the music for piano written by Schoenberg, for his tonal freedom, so that he wrote himself some pieces for piano that clearly bear the influence of the Austrian composer.
Riley also became fascinated by the Stockhausen's rhythmic complexity, in particular Zeitmasse became important for him for its simultaneous presentation of different tempi. Bearing his work in mind, he composed Spectra (1959), in which there are two different speeds.
During his studies at Berkeley he met La Monte Young who greatly influenced his subsequence production. He became interested in long sustained tones presents in Young's Trio for Strings, so that in 1960 he composed the String Quartet.

This was a first approach to the long-tones minimalism of La Monte Young.
With his next work String Trio (1961), Riley began to use patterns of few notes and the repetition technique.

What led Riley to envision the music like a cyclic entity, that repeats itself in time, was the use of the tape, particularly the tape-loop technique1.

“there was many changes before the repetitive patterns and to get it I've used the tape because I was interested to hear some frequencies that regularly returned in the same intervals […] this generated a cycle so I have start to think at music such something of cyclic”2

In these words is evident the interest of Riley for the sounds as acoustic phenomena, an interest born in 1959 with the early collaborations with Young. In the improvvisations used as accompaniment to Ann Halprin's dance, the two composers used unconventional means of producing sounds.
“[…] for example opening and closening doors or windows. We wanted to explore the acoustic in general”3

This interest for the acoustic phenomena and the research of new sounds, that can be traced in the influence of John Cage's experiments, was really important for Riley and took him to watch music under a deeper view: as an entity that can affect the moods and the human's emotions.

“we was working with sounds that wasn't considered as in “pure music” so I began to be interested in the frequencies and their effect on our emotions”4

Certainly this is a concept tha Riley never abandoned, rather he have study in deep during his career.

Jazz influence and improvisation

During Berkeley's studies La Monte Young introduced Riley to Jazz.

“La Monte was a jazz musician and had been playing a lot in L.A. with lots of musicians. And he introduced to a lot. He introduced me to Coltrane.”5

He was immediately influenced by Jazz's expression freedom and improvvisation. For Riley, improvvisation was the best way that a musician has to indulge their feelings, to express their emotions and moods. In his pieces he let freedom elements to performers, an example is certainly In C in which every players decides the number of repetitions for each patterns. From this point of view In C is also a piece with aleatory6 elements, it is an open-form7 music, so is also evident the influence of Cage's music.
At the same time of In C, Riley began to compose the Keyboard Studies. These are based on a series of modal figures that the performer can play in any order and with any number of repetitions, provided the rules noted on the score are respected. The different combinations of this patterns creates progressive dephasing and variations. Though the keyboards Studies are not properly compositions, are rather organ or piano improvvisations as daily exercises to be used as preparation for the performances, these pieces were the basis for Riley's next works.

A Rainbow in Curved Air

Published in 1969, A Rainbow in Curved Air was the Riley's most successful ablum. The two pieces inside, with a 40:25s total duration, summarizes those wich were his attitudes during the 70s, but at the same time ended his minimalistic period.
First pieces is A Rainbow in Curved Air, composed in 1967 for electric organ, electric harpsichord, rocksichord, dumbec (or goblet drum) and tambourine all played by Riley and recorded using overdubbing8 technique. The pieces is really similar to Keyboard Studies comopositinal methods. A 14-notes theme, consisting of two modules played by left hand, is the base of this work.
Eample 3 - Terry Riley, A Rainbow In A Curved Air (1967), left hand theme

The first figure consisting of two cells of three notes, the second is a variant with four notes. The figures and cells can be combinated with each other, but the internal order of the cells has to be respected. The melodic evolution allows each note to be the beginning or end of a musical phrase. Many of these are also transposed to four different octaves, with rhythm and tempo variations. By this continuous microstructural changing there is a sensation of an apparently motionless atmosphere, that in reality evolves imperceptibly.
Overlap to this pulsing and repetitive plateau, there is a layer played by right hand. This is a melismatic style layer, based on modal improvvisation, using decorated beams which articulate the cycle into seven-note groupings. Finally there is the time-lag accumulator9, which signal, splitted stereophonically, create canons that follow one or two beats behind the original signal, creating really complex structures.
Durign the 18:39min. of A Rainbow, the instruments aren't played all at once, there are many alternations, and there is the impressions to be conducted in a mood-like atmosphere that flow through human emotions. Although in continuous form, three distinct sections stands in a A Rainbow. The first, really fast, starts with the main repetitive theme of the organ, others instruments slowly entered and the sonority begin more colorful. At 6:40min. the slower section begin with a chords and arpeggios alternation, tone is darkens, but gradually recur many instruments and the tone is brighter. The last is a rythmic section, begins at 11:41min. until the piece end, with a percussive instruments dominace.
The auditory experience is made more impressive by the stereo utilization of the tape-lag accumulator and a particular stereophonic recording technique used for the tambourine:

“I had a bunch of microphones set up in a circle and I was waving the tambourine around, so I could get a very “panning” kind of sound” 10

Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band (21:38min.), the second pieces of the album, can be defined the “dark” side of A Rainbow in Curved Air for its depht sonirities. Written in 1968, for organ, saxophone, and time-lag accumulator all played by Terry Riley, it's based on long notes. It is clear the influence of La Monte Young drones music. On this low regiter reperitive and sustained tone, littles improvvisated phrasis overlaps. These are processed by the time-lag accumulator that, more than in A Rainbow, has a main role.

“I felt the only way I could develop Poppy Nogood and His Phantom Band was to play the saxophone myself, because I didn't want to tell the saxophone player to do this or that. I felt it had to come out of my own musical spontaneity”11

A Rainbow in Curved Air is the album that more represents the minimalistic style in Riley's music, but also it is the end of this phase. Though based principally on repetitions and variations of the same pattern, this work demonstrates the beginnings of a melodic style influenced by Indian classical music. Instead after A Rainbow, that was his greatest success, Riley decides to go away from the clamor, preferring to devote himself to the study of Indian music and culture.

Riley and Indian music

An important phase of Terry Riley's musical career began in the year 1970, when La Monte Young introduced him to Pandit Pran Nath, him to study Indian classical music. What more interested him was the capacity of this music to deeply involve listeners and players, moreover this trend was presence since his first improvvisational works.

“Working with improvvisation I realized that there were many similarities between what I was doing and the oriental music.” 12

Although Jazz based on improvvisation, Riley found something of deep and enganging in Indian music, that led him to take an interest to.

“Orientals played a modal music, they improvised, but the formal structure of their music is strictly defined: there are rules to create moods and emotions, in a very formal way, while Jazz was interested on expression above all.”13

For these reasons Riley's music can't be defined occidental or oriental, it is a fusion of the this two cultures.
During this years he devotes himself to Prandith Pran Nath teaching, until the guru's death in 1996, focusing on the music influences on our emotions.

“I began to conceive pieces as molecolar operations and universal models with swirling sound galaxies and these became my model for a new musical form. It's for this reason that, personally, minimalism term describes in simplified manner my cosmic vision of the sounds.”14

Riley and the Kronos Quartet, Sun Rings (2001-2002)

From the 70s, Riley abandoned notated composition preferring to devote himself to the study and teaching of Indian music. Towards the end of his time at Mills College he met David Harrington, leader of the Kronos Quartet, who persuased him to compose for the group. With this meet begins a long collaboration, that very influenced him and marked Riley's return to musical notation. But this return was not a nostalgic one, rather a renewed compositional approach that united his research on tuning systems, improvisational techniques, and especially the experience of the years devoted to study of Indian classical music. For this reason, the work written from the 80s are a perfect synthesis of past experience with a more mature and aware approach.

Sun Rings is a recent work, for string quartet, chorus and pre-recorded sounds, written during 2001 and 2002 for the Kronos Quartet. It consists of ten movements with no interrupt successions, for a total of about 80min.

1. Sun Rings Overture
2. Hero Danger
3. Beebopterismo
4. Planet Elf Sindoori
5. Earth Whistlers
6. Earth/Jupiter Kiss
7. The Electron Cyclotron Frequency Parlour
8. Prayer Central
9. Venus Upstream
10. One Earth, One People, One Love

A particularity are the audio/video materials from space records, granted by NASA Art Program, that wraps the quartet in many different atmospheres, like they were traveling in a space probes.

“[the ten movements] where written as separate musical atmospheres with the intention to let the sounds of space influence the string quartet writing and then to let there be an interplay between live “string” and recorded “space” sound.[...] In some cases, fragments of melody that I observed in these sounds became the basis for themes that were developed in the quartet writing.” [About Sun Rings, Terry Riley writes] 15

Space sounds and instruments are as a single experience, such something indivisible, to which Riley decided to introduce the chorus, to emphasize that this work is about humans and his relation with their Solar System.
Riley says that these NASA recordings were to be the point of departure and source of inspiration for the composition. These sounds were not adjusted to accomodate to our ears.

“the sounds represent the true frequency at which the signals were detected in space. […] if humans could somehow live out where these space probes were, and if we had sensitive enough ears, we could hear these very sounds.”
[Program note by Blake Marie Bullock] 16

Because there is no air, it's common to think of space as a silence place. In reality around and between the planets there are areas of plasma where “plasma waves” can propagate with similar sound waves vibrations. These plasma waves can be capted using an electrical antenna and a radio receiver, developed by Dr. Donald Gurnet to which Sun Rings is dedicated.
For the video footage by the spacecraft are used, also in the last movements some images from the Voyager Golden Record17 appeares.
An ambient music like sonorities overture open Sun Rings, rapidly involves the listener and drags him toward new never heard sonorities. During this pieces we cen hear all the Riley's music characteristics of a style developed since Berkeley study years. In Beebopterismo, for example, he used few looped sounds to recreate repetitive rhythmic figures, as the techniques of the concrete music that he knew in France. A percussed gong-like sound is constantly repeated in Planet Elf Sindoori with the strings. Initially little figures are played by the viola, the cello makes it to, slowly violins appears and the atmosphere becomes increasingly deeper, with sustained tones. By this soft sounorities, it gradually moves towards the darkness of Earth/Jupiter Kiss, and finally to the celestial Prayer Central, where are a long low register drone, the chorus, and then the strings.
Although minimalistic elements are presented, as repetitions, simple elements, continuous form and long-tones, it's incorect equate Sun Rings to 60s and 70s compositions. In fact minimalisic term is unsuitable to the works written after the study with Prandit Pran Nath, it describes in a too simplified manner Riley's vision of music and sounds. He uses all this elements to recreate atmosphere that involves the listener and positively influences his emotions.

“It is how to create a chemical, a perfume. There is this responsability: be able to create the best possible vibrations.” 18

Bibliography

Alburger, Mark Terry Riley after "In C" to "A Rainbow in Curved Air", 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC, Vol. 11, No. 2, Febbraio 2004. http://21st-centurymusic.com/ML210402.pdf (Accessed February, 2013)

Alburger, Mark Terry Riley in the 70’s, 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC, Vol. 11, No. 3, Marzo 2004.

Bernard, Jonathan W. Minimalism, Postminimalism, and the Resurgence of Tonality in Recent American Music, American Music Vol. 21, No. 1, University of Illinois Press, 2003

Coteni P., Antognozzi G.. La musica minimalista: storie ed altre storie, Textus, 2000.

Hodgson, Jay. The Time-Lag Accumulator As A Technical Basis From Brian Eno’s Early Large-Scale Ambient Repertorire, 1973-75, University of Western Ontario, 2008

Kronos Quartet website: http://www.kronosquartet.org/ (Accessed February, 2013)

Mertens, Wim. American Minimal Music: La Monte Young. Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass. London: Kahn & Averill, 1983

Niren, Ann. An Examination of Minimalist Tendencies in Two Early Works by Terry Riley, Indiana University Southeast, 2007

Potter, Keith. Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip
Glass. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Terry Riley website: http://terryriley.net/ (Accessed February, 2013)

____ Terry Riley in conversation with Frank J. Oteri, Wortham Theater Center, Houston TX, 2001 http://www.newmusicbox.org/assets/26/riley_interview.pdf (Accessed February, 2013)

____ From Raga to Rag: On Terry Riley’s Stylistic Synthesis, New World Records, New York

1tape-loops are loops of prerecorded magnetic tape used to create repetitive musical patterns
2 (ita-eng traduction) P. Coteni, G. Antognozzi, La Musica Minimalista, pag. 47
3 (ita-eng traduction)La Musica Minimalista, pag. 47
4 (ita-eng traduction),La Musica Minimalista, pag. 45
5______ Terry Riley in conversation with Frank J. Oteri, pag. 4
6Aleatory or change music, developed in 1950s with J. Cage, is a music in which the indeterminacy is the primary elements of the composition.
7Open form is a term used for a music where some elements are fixed by the composer and others, as the order and repetitions of movements or sections, are inderterminate or left up to the performer.
8Overdubbing is an audio technique used to add supplmentary recorder sound to a previously recorded preformance.
9The Time-lag accumulator was developed bi Terry Riley and many engineers in ORTF french studios during the 60s. This technique requires two tape machines, and one piece of looped audio tape. At the same time a machine playback the loop, and the second is used to continously record it, as consequence there are dephasing overdubbing of the same audio loop.
10Alburger, Mark. Terry Rile after “In C” to “A Rainbow in Curved Air”, pag.9
11Terry Rile after “In C” to “A Rainbow in Curved Air”, pag.7
12 (ita-eng traduction), La Musica Minimalista, pag. 47
13 (ita-eng traduction), La Musica Minimalista, pag. 7
14 (ita-eng traduction), La Musica Minimalista, pag. 7
15Kronos Quartet website, Sun Rings (2002) http://kronosquartet.org/projects/detail/sun_rings
16Kronos Quartet website, Sun Rings (2002)
17The Voyager Golden Records is an informative package, which were included aboard the Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977, destined to diffuse the human culture to extraterresrial life form. They contain sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth.
18(ita-eng traduction), La Musica Minimalista, pag. 49