Terry Riley

Terry Riley was born on 24 June 1935 in Colfax, a small town in California at the foot of the Sierra Nevada. He grew up in Redding, in the north of the state, where he learned piano and violin and discovered on the radio classical music as well as jazz and boogie-woogie. A gifted pianist, he soon earned his living playing in bars and saloons, an experience of improvisation that marked all his music.

He studied first at Shasta College, then at San Francisco State University and, from 1959, at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied composition. There he met La Monte Young, an avant-garde composer exploring very long sustained sounds and repetition, and became one of the pioneers of what would later be called “minimalism”. In San Francisco Riley took part in the experimental art scene and began working with tape recorders, creating tape loops that endlessly repeat the same pattern.

From 1962 to 1964 he lived in Europe, mainly in Paris and Scandinavia. He earned his living playing piano in bars and cabarets, notably for soldiers on American bases. In Paris he worked for the theatre and, in a radio studio, experimented with a system of tape loops and delays he called the “time-lag accumulator”. These experiments allowed him to layer repeated patterns that gradually shift out of phase.

Back in San Francisco he composed in 1964 In C, a revolutionary work. The score fits on a single page: it consists of fifty-three short musical phrases, all built around the note C. Each musician, whatever the instrument, plays the phrases in order, repeating each as many times as they wish before moving on. A pianist plays the high C constantly in a steady pulse to keep everyone together. The result is a huge living texture that can last fifteen minutes or several hours.

The premiere of In C on 4 November 1964 at the San Francisco Tape Music Center brought together, among others, Steve Reich, Pauline Oliveros and Morton Subotnick. It was in fact Reich who suggested adding the steady pulse. The 1968 recording made the work known worldwide. In C is regarded as the founding work of minimalist music. It influenced not only art music but also rock, electronic music and bands such as The Who and Soft Machine.

In 1969 Riley recorded A Rainbow in Curved Air, playing electric organ and other instruments alone by overdubbing tracks. In 1970 he became a pupil of the great Indian singer Pandit Pran Nath, a master of raga, whom he followed for more than twenty-five years, often accompanying him in India and the United States. Indian singing and its improvisations deeply influenced his music. From 1971 to 1983 he taught at Mills College in Oakland, California.

From 1980 he began a long collaboration with the Kronos Quartet, writing many works for string quartet, including Salome Dances for Peace (1986), a work of nearly two hours, and Sun Rings (2002), commissioned by NASA, which incorporates sounds from space recorded by space probes. He continues to give improvised concerts on piano and organ, often with his son Gyan Riley, a guitarist. He spends part of his time in Japan. His ninetieth birthday in 2025 was celebrated with many concerts.