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In C

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For the album by Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O., see In C (album).

In C
by Terry Riley
Incipit of In C
Incipit of In C
KeyC major
Genreminimalism
Formopen
ComposedMarch 1964
Performed4 November 1964 (1964-11-04): San Francisco Tape Music Center
Scoringopen

In C is a musical piece composed by Terry Riley in 1964. It consists of series of 53 short melodic fragments that can be repeated at the discretion of any number of musicians. It is one of the seminal works of minimalism.

Terry Riley's recording of In C was added to the National Recording Registry in 2022. The piece inspired many other composers like Philip Glass, Steve Reich, John Adams, and Julius Eastman.

Composition

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In C was inspired by Riley's previous work with tape loops and delay, as well by his interest in group improvisation which he has been developing since 1957-58, alongside his fellow students Loren Rush and Pauline Oliveros.[1] The immediate forerunner for the piece was the incidental music Riley wrote for Ken Dewey's theatrical event The Gift. It was being performed in Paris in 1963 when Riley was asked to provide music for it. He ran into Chet Baker and recorded his quartet performing songs that included Miles Davis' "So What". A technician from ORTF set up a tape loop system for the composer. The results inspired Riley to work with loops for years to come.[2]

When he was back in San Francisco, Riley was playing piano nightly at the Gold Street Saloon. On the way to work one night, he heard In C in his head and wrote it down after the show that night. Soon after, Morton Subotnick asked Riley to perform solo at the San Francisco Tape Music Center. He prepared the work to be performed with an ensemble on that concert.[3]: 277f 

Riley saw In C as a way to continue the style he had developed with tape loops with instrumentalists.[4]: 7  His artistic goal was shamanistic. A product of his generation, he was very involved with the psychedelic awakening, and he wanted to write music that created a satori for the listener:

I was never concerned with minimalism, but I was very concerned with psychedelia and the psychedelic movement of the sixties as an opening toward consciousness. For my generation that was a first look towards the East, that is, peyote, mescaline, and the psychedelic drugs which were opening up people's attention towards higher consciousness. So I think what I was experiencing in music at that time was another world...music was also able to transport us suddenly out of one reality into another. Transport us so that we would almost be having visions as we were playing. So that's what I was thinking about before I wrote In C. I believe music, shamanism, and magic are all connected, and when it's used that way it creates the most beautiful use of music.[3]: 269 

Performances

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The piece was premiered on November 4 and 6, 1964, by Riley, Steve Reich, Jon Gibson, Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster, Morton Subotnick and others at the San Francisco Tape Music Center.[5][6]

In the San Francisco Chronicle, Alfred Frankenstein raved, "'On C' was the evening's masterpiece, and I hope the same group does it again." He wrote:

"At times you feel you have never done anything all your life long but listen to this music and as if that is all there is or ever will be, but it is altogether absorbing, exciting, and moving, too. One is reminded of the efforts of Carlos Chavez to reconstitute the ceremonial music of pre-Columbian Mexico. Terry Riley may have captured more of its spirit than Chavez did."[7]

The New York premiere took place at Carnegie Recital Hall on December 19, 1967 on a program with Igor Stravinsky's Octet and works by Harley Gaber and Dorrit Licht. The performance reminded New York Times critic Donal Henahan of Alban Berg's Invention on One Note in Wozzeck, and he admired the ensemble's "gamenlanlike sonorities". He continued, "Mr. Riley's effort produced a happy din, which was at worst hypnotic and oiten fascinating in its multilayered rhythms and sound patterns. One observed with compassion that the woman pi-anist, whose duty was to pound one note throughout, wore gloves. It put one in mind of Hildegarde."[8]

The pianist was Margaret Hassell, and she wore bandages on her fingers underneath the gloves to pad them for the exertion of the part.[9]: 81  Lukas Foss had arranged speakers throughout the venue so that the music could be heard from multiple vantage points, and the audience was encouraged to circulate during the piece.[8]

Form

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In C uses an open score and an aleatoric approach. It consists of 53 short numbered musical phrases, lasting from half a beat to 32 beats, and having from one note to twenty-five. Performers are expected to play the first phrase once in unison, after which each performer may repeat the phrase or move on to the next. Each phrase may be repeated an arbitrary number of times at the discretion of each musician in the ensemble. Each musician is expected to use the same tempo, as led by "the pulse" on piano or pitched percussion (such as xylophone or marimba) but otherwise the performers have control over which phrase they play and how many times it is repeated. Performers are encouraged to play the phrases starting at different times, even if they are playing the same phrase. In this way, although the melodic content of each part is predetermined, In C has elements of aleatoric music to it and each performance will be different from others.[10] The performance directions state that the musical ensemble should try to stay within two to three phrases of each other. The phrases must be played in order, although some may be skipped. The first musician to reach the final numbered phrase repeats it indefinitely until all other musicians reach the same phrase, at which point they all crescendo and gradually stop playing until only "the pulse" remains and then goes silent. Riley suggests "a group of about 35 is desired if possible but smaller or larger groups will work".[11]

Program notes from first UK performance, May 1968

The score has gone through many iterations. Riley's handwritten instructions for the original score explain, "The pulse is traditionally played by a beautiful girl on the top two octaves of a grand piano. She must play loudly and keep a strict tempo for the entire ensemble to follow."[12][13] The idea for a pulse came to Steve Reich when the ensemble was struggling to stay together during rehearsals for the premiere. Riley acceded to it, even though he conceived of the piece as having no prevailing rhythm.[9]: 44 

In C has no set duration; performances can last as little as fifteen minutes or as long as several hours, although Riley indicates "performances normally average between 45 minutes and an hour and a half." The number of performers may also vary between any two performances. The original recording of the piece was created by 11 musicians (although, through overdubbing, several dozen instruments were utilized), while a performance in 2006 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall featured 124 musicians.

The piece begins on a C major chord (patterns one through seven) with a strong emphasis on the mediant E and the entrance of the note F which begins a series of slow progressions to other chords suggesting a few subtle and ambiguous changes of key, the last pattern being an alternation between B♭ and G. Though the polyphonic interplay of the various patterns against each other and themselves at different rhythmic displacements is of primary interest, the piece may be considered heterophonic.

The first UK performance of In C was on 18 May 1968 at Royal Institute Galleries by the Music Now Ensemble directed by Cornelius Cardew as part of a series of four Music Now, Sounds of Discovery Concerts.[14][15]

Recording

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In C
Studio album by
Terry Riley
Released1968
RecordedMarch 27–8, 1968
StudioCBS 30th Street Studio
Genreminimalism
Length43:00
LabelColumbia Records
ProducerDavid Behrman
Terry Riley chronology
Reed Streems
(1966) 		In C
(1968) 		A Rainbow in Curved Air
(1969)

In late 1965, Terry Riley moved to New York City and started performing on soprano saxophone in his apartment on Grand Street in the Bowery. He would use Revox machines to create tape delays and loop his improvisations. One of the people who loved the shows was David Behrman, the producer for Columbia Records' Music of Our Time series.[9]: 76–8 

When Columbia was ready to record the piece, Riley performed it once more at Carnegie Recital Hall on March 26, 1968. The musicians then recorded the piece on the following two days, along with works by Carlos Alcina, David Rosenboom, and Yuji Takahashi. The sessions were engineered by Fred Plaut and Russ Payne. David Behrman conducted the ensemble by holding up cue cards for each module. His job was to keep the ensemble on pace for a recording that would fit on the two sides of an LP record.[9]: 80–2 

Riley knew that the texture would be more captivating if it were thicker. With only eleven musicians, he decided to record the piece three times and overdub the takes.[16]

The album's cover was designed by Billy Bryant, and it incorporates a blurb from Victor Frankenstein's review of the premiere. The liner includes a copy of the score. The founder of Crawdaddy!, Paul Williams, also wrote an enthusiastic essay for the package. He writes:

"I'm not here to justify this record, or explain it...Allright, so let’s say that what we have here is a 'trip,' a voluntary, unpredictable, absorbing experience, one which brings together parts of one’s self perhaps previously unknown to each other...Playing this record for a small group of people is like watching a web being spun. Playing it for a friend means watching a Pilgrim’s Progress of reactions."[17]

In 2022, the 1968 LP recording of In C was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Recording Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".[18]

Personnel

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Track Listing

All tracks are written by Terry Riley

Side One
No.TitleLength
1."In C"23:50
Side Two
No.TitleLength
1."In C"19:10
  • Terry Riley - saxophone
  • Jon Hassell - trumpet
  • Edward Burnham - vibraphone
  • David Rosenboom - viola
  • Darlene Reynard - bassoon
  • Jerry Kirkbride - clarinet
  • David Shostac - flute
  • Jan Williams - marimba
  • Lawrence Singer - oboe
  • Stuart Dempster - trombone
  • Margaret Hassell - piano

Legacy

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Upon hearing the premiere of In C, Victor Frankenstein remarked that Riley had developed "a style like that of no one else on earth", and the critic accurately predicted, "he is bound to make a profound impression with it."[7] Indeed, Riley's composition is often cited as the first minimalist composition to make a significant impact on the public consciousness and inspire a new movement.[19]

Discography

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Robert Carl published extensive analyses of several commercial recordings. He found tempi ranging 92–132 beats per minute:[9]: 111–23 

Adaptations

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References

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  1. ^ "In C Forever: The eternal evolution of Terry Riley's minimalist masterpiece". NPR.
  2. ^ Strickland, Edward. American Composers: Dialogues on Contemporary Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. 112.
  3. ^ a b Duckworth, William. Talking Music. Schirmer Books, 1995.
  4. ^ Alburger, Mark. "Shri Terry: Enlightenment at Riley's Moonshine Ranch." Twentieth‐Century Music 4, no. 3. March, 1997. 1–20.
  5. ^ "A guide to Terry Riley's music" by Tom Service, The Guardian, 29 January 2013
  6. ^ "Radio Eclectus: Stuart Dempster interviewed by Michael Schell", April 9, 2020
  7. ^ a b Frankenstein, Alfred. "Music Like None Other on Earth", San Francisco Chronicle. November 8, 1964. 28.
  8. ^ a b Henahan, Donal. "NEW-MUSIC SERIES PUTS TOES TO TEST: Audience Exhorted to Walk Around—Some Don't Stop", The New York Times. December 20, 1967. 55.
  9. ^ a b c d e Carl, Robert. Terry Riley's in C. Oxford University Press, 2009.
  10. ^ Honigmann, David (October 7, 2013). "In C, Barbican, London – review". Financial Times. Archived from the original on December 10, 2022. Retrieved July 28, 2014. In C – probably the second-best-known aleatory classic – is less a score than a set of instructions
  11. ^ Riley, Terry. "In C: Score and performing directions", – via Brooklyn College, CUNY; "Performing instructions and score", Associated Music Publishers – via issuu
  12. ^ Riley, Terry. In C in Analytical Anthology of Music. Edited by Ralph Turek. 2nd ed, McGraw-Hill, 1992. 540.
  13. ^ "Terry Riley" In C" (PDF). Williams College, Department of Music. July 27, 2007. Retrieved February 26, 2025.
  14. ^ Programme for the Cornelius Cardew Ensemble, Royal Institute Galleries. (1968)
  15. ^ Anderson, Virginia (2013). "4. Systems and Other Minimalism in Britain". In Keith Potter; Kyle Gann; Pwyll ap Siôn (eds.). The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. ISBN 9781472402783.
  16. ^ Carl, Robert. "'In C'—Terry Riley (1968)", Library of Congress, National Recording Preservation Board (2022).
  17. ^ Riley, Terry. In C. Columbia Records (MS 7178), 1968.
  18. ^ "National Recording Registry Inducts Music from Alicia Keys, Ricky Martin, Journey and More in 2022". Library of Congress. Retrieved April 13, 2022.
  19. ^ Christopher Bonds, The Musical Impulse, second, revised edition (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall Hunt Publishing Company, 1994): 345. ISBN 9780840398024
  20. ^ "In C", harmonies.com. Accessed March 17, 2025.
  21. ^ "In C". move.com.au. Accessed March 17, 2025.
  22. ^ CD Recording, minimalistensemble.co.uk. Archived December 30, 2007. Accessed March 17, 2025.
  23. ^ Radiolab, "In C", December 14, 2009
  24. ^ "In C Remixed". GVSU New Music Ensemble. Retrieved February 26, 2014.

Further reading

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