1964 was also the year that one of Young's former partners Terry Riley produced his monumental contribution to Minimalism with In C, but events leading up to In C also warrant examination. Riley, like Young, attended school at Berkeley, and he describes his meeting with Young "in terms of finding a spiritual brother." 12 Riley assisted Young in many of his earlier, Cagean pieces such as 2 sounds.13 Eventually the two went their separate ways, with Riley taking his family abroad and supporting himself playing lounge piano in officer clubs. After Kennedy's assassination in 1964, the clubs he played in closed out of respect and, without a job, he was forced to return to America. 14 While in Europe, he wrote three pieces utilizing magnetic tape processes (mostly an echo effect): I Can't Stop No, She Moves, and Mescalin Mix, and also employed a time lag effect in his piece Music for The Gift, in which he manipulated an arrangement of Miles Davis's So What.15
During work on Music for The Gift, Riley came to use repetition; he "started understanding what repetition could do for musical form." 16 The final culmination of his use of repetition is his Minimal masterwork In C. John Schaefer gives an apt description of the work:
Each member of a group of musicians is presented with fifty-three short, numbered fragments to be played in numerical order; but each figure may be repeated for a different period of time, at the discretion of the individual musicians. Once all the players have played all the fragments at least once, the piece ends. Any combination of instruments can be used, and performances may vary widely in duration; but the work always includes the same patterns. And it's always quite repetitive. 17In C was the first Minimal work to find a wide listening audience due to its release on the CBS label. Other important works after In C include Poppy Nogood and His Phantom Band (1968) and Rainbow in Curved Air (1969), which employs electronic drones under repeating modal patterns. 18 Unlike Young, who's drones are the emphasis of his music, Riley has much more activity happening under a static background, or so much activity occurring that the music sounds static; an effect similar to Young's "clouds" of The Well-Tuned Piano. Another great contribution Riley made to the Minimalist style is that of a constant pulse, something that Young's drone music lacks. Strickland cites Riley's earlier work Piano Studies No. 2 as a work in which pulse plays a role, but Strickland also explains that if Piano Studies No. 2 has an "implicit" pulse then In C has an explicit. The "capital-p Pulse" in In C takes the form of the pitch C repeated on the same key of a piano for the work's duration, which served to keep the ensemble together. It also became an important factor in the works of Philip Glass, John Adams, and Steve Reich (who gave the idea to use the pulse in In C). 19
Last updated on 95/07/26 22:00:08 EDT.