Complex Patterns Within a Simple Key
Terry Riley’s ‘In C’: Mr. Riley, center, at Carnegie Hall, accepting applause for his groundbreaking 1964 piece.
Any counterculture embraced by enough people becomes culture; works of art meant as blows against orthodoxy become classics worthy of enshrinement. A case in point is Terry Riley’s “In C,” whose 45th anniversary was celebrated at Carnegie Hall on Friday night.
When Mr. Riley created the piece, in 1964, modern music had long been dominated by serialism: rigorously controlled, intellectual in its appeal, often bone dry. Mr. Riley’s simple recipe — performers repeat each of 53 melodic kernels for as long as they like against a pulsating C in octaves, ending when everyone has played every section — asserted a view of music as a communal action and a key to transcendence.
“In C” made its Carnegie Hall debut on Dec. 19, 1967, when it was played in Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) by an ensemble from the State University of New York at Buffalo, which recorded it for CBS the next year. In The New York Times the critic Donal Henahan noted, among other observations, that the pianist responsible for the pulse wore gloves.
Katrina Krimsky, the same pianist, donned her gloves again on Friday, seated in the thick of a huge ensemble, this time in the main auditorium. Two more 1967 participants reprised their roles: Mr. Riley, beatific behind an organ at center stage, and the trombonist Stuart Dempster. Jon Gibson on saxophone and the composer Morton Subotnik, on clarinet, were among several players who had been heard either in the piece’s 1964 premiere or its first recording, from 1968.
Emphasizing a communitarian spirit, the Kronos Quartet violinist David Harrington gathered 70 diverse performers, including the composers Philip Glass and Osvaldo Golijov, jazz improvisers, rock musicians, two vocal groups, a recorder quartet, a koto trio and players of invented implements. Mr. Riley’s manuscript was projected on a screen overhead.
Following a gorgeous classical Indian alap sung by Ustad Mashkoor Ali Khan over a rumbling bass drone, the first 21 cells made for a splashy, variegated opening. Timbres and rhythms mixed and evolved with the changeability of clouds. Dennis Russell Davies, billed as the “flight pattern coordinator,” used flash cards and hand signals to shape the sprawl.
Long, floating tones in Sections 22 through 26 amounted to an adagio. Syncopated fidgets starting in Section 27 suggested a quirky scherzo, followed by a dashing finale.
Some listeners rocked in place. Others sprawled in their seats, adrift; one hammered the pulse into his palm with a rolled-up program. At the end, after 98 minutes of muddy thunder and hypnotic bliss, Mr. Riley and his ad hoc community received a tumultuous ovation.
The person in the background with the crazy red hair is pianist Kathleen Supove. She is a new music wizard, especially in interpretation of minimalist and post-minimalist New York composers (we never really went over the terms Downtown and Uptown, but she's probably the oldest and most established Downtown performer). Man, 98 minutes. We did In C here a couple of years ago. I sat next to Holm-Hudson (who was playing electric guitar) and I played tabla. It was a great time.
ReplyDeleteSo when you refer to 'Downtown' and 'Uptown', is that literal? I mean, is there really a significant difference between the music heard on either side?
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely! Gann has written a book, Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice, which goes into a lot of depth (and he may cover it in his American Music book as well...)
ReplyDeleteBasically, Uptown was centered around Lincoln Center and anything by composers that were either considered traditional (Bernstein) or academic (Babbitt, Carter, etc) and all the stuff between.
Downtown was centered around Greenwich Village way down near the World Trade Center and was where Reich, Glass, and all the other people not interested in symphony orchestras and serialism hung out (like pre-Lennon Yoko Ono!). Downtown is basically the birthplace of Minimalism, post-minimalism, and all the other -isms from the late 70's and 80's. Gann does go into many of those in our text.
I will have to revisit the text. Thank you for the insightful info. I have to say, I'd be torn if I had to choose between the two. I live performance of La Monte Young Downtown or a New York Philharmonic performance Uptown. Luckily we don't have to choose, as seen by the anniversary post of the performance of Terry Rileys 'In C' last month.
ReplyDelete