New York Classical Review

The temperature was still near 100 degrees outside when the celebration of Terry Riley’s 90ᵗʰ birthday began Tuesday night in Roulette. The spirit of the night was set when flutist Claire Chase greeted the packed house from the stage and, in case Riley was watching the livestream of the performance from his current home in Japan, asked everyone to shout out “Happy Birthday!”

Riley more than deserves the well wishes. He has been a remarkable figure across genres for more than 60 years. Call him a classical composer, a jazz pianist (with phenomenal chops), a rock musician, an experimentalist—all are correct. Riley has always thought of himself, though, as a shaman using music as a means to access metaphysical experiences, which places Riley both beyond and at the foundation of multiple genres and styles.

Tuesday night, it was Riley as composer, represented by a contemporary work and an early masterpiece. Chase played excerpts from his ongoing piece, The Holy Liftoff, then the Darmstadt New Music group organized what was their 22nd annual performance of In C.

The Holy Liftoff mixes notation and graphic elements, and Tuesday those included two graphic scores prepared by composer Samuel Clay Birmaher, who has created a 60-minute version of the work for Chase and JACK Quartet. The work is for solo flutist, a la Steve Reich’s Vermont Counterpoint, with the performer playing against pre-recorded tracks of various flutes, including the contrabass model, and bird calls. With a current total duration of about six hours—Riley continues to add to it—Chase played about 20 minutes of it. 

This started with a slowly snaking modal melody, Chase playing with a beautiful tone that was so enormous it seemed bigger than possible for the instrument. Flowing seamlessly from one section of ideas to another, the music drew in Copland-esque melodies, jazz elements, even some neo-baroque phrases and cadences. 

Chase and Riley seemed to be one person, the music enveloping and flowing through her so deeply and naturally that it was like experiencing a dialogue between the two, all through absolutely gorgeous sounds. This was also a vivid reminder of just how much energy is in Riley’s music. His shamanistic ideas are not candles-and-sandals clichés, but the vigorous physicality of music-making that can lift the performer and listener to another plane. Twenty minutes of The Holy Liftoff was not nearly enough, but it had to do, with In C waiting in the wings.

In C is one of the most important compositions since WWII, and also, in an important way, is an outlier in Riley’s career. It is the first minimalist piece, but Riley never thought of it as such. For him it was a shamanistic device for an ensemble, and his own composing and performing quickly moved into mesmerizing, exalted, dervish-like repetition. It is a single statement that has had an immeasurable impact.

The music is in 53 segments of music, some as small as a single note, for open instrumentation. With a constant downbeat pulse that Reich suggested, the musician play through each segment in order, with an open number of repeats. Duration and also complexity are open, one of the key features is that the musicians can play each segment in unison or canonically, so different ideas of counterpoint and structure appear during a performance.

For this event, Darmstadt assembled over three dozen musicians (Riley suggests around 35 is ideal), mixing winds, brass, keyboards, strings, percussion, and even electronics and vocalists, who sat up front. Their own physicality, and the consonants they used, added an even deeper humanism to a work that is one of the greatest examples of how musicians cooperate with each other.

In technical terms, this was not the most ideal performance of In C. Despite the excitement of the event, the tempo was on the moderate side, and while that may have created some nice open space, the sheer density of the instruments filled up every moment, swamping the listening that Riley asks each musician to take care with. 

The percussionists also were often out of balance. He allows “improvised percussion in strict rhythm…if it is carefully done and doesn’t overpower the ensemble,” but the players’ rhythms were frequently nowhere near strict, and the drummer constantly overpowered the ensemble, especially at the end, when he continued playing briefly after the final downbeat.

But still this was a large group filled with the joy of channeling Riley, and that in turn filled the hall. At the end, with the singers linking hands and raising and lowering their arms in parallel with crescendoes and decrescendos, the spirit of celebration and the pleasures of working together lifted everyone.