Complex Patterns Within a Simple Key
Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times
Terry Riley’s ‘In C’: Mr. Riley, center, at Carnegie Hall, accepting applause for his groundbreaking 1964 piece.
By STEVE SMITH
Published: April 26, 2009
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.
