Terry Riley

Bio

Terry Riley, born in 1935, is an American composer recognized as the founding father of minimalism. Riley’s compositions were able to cross six decades of vanguard music, creating procedures and structures so flexible that they were able to resist through time and influenced a wide range of sounds that were apparently far removed and incompatible.

Terry began his career during the Fifties playing piano professionally and influenced by legendary artists like John Coltrane and John Cage, he began to move closer to improvisational and vanguard music. Thus, his first album Mescalin Mix was born in 1960.

In 1964, after having published Music for the Gift the year before, was released the project that consecrated Terry Riley as the biggest and best exponent of minimalist music, “In C”. The peculiarity of the track derived from the fifty-three musical phrasing that composed it which could be repeated and arranged to the discretion of any musician who took on the interpretation of the song. The composition was born with the intention to have infinite interpretational possibilities and was confirmed as a composition’s milestone, conceiving a new musical style composed of mixed and repeated phrases.

In 1972 Riley published Persian Surgery Dervishes, an album composed of the recording of two performances, one in Los Angeles and one in Paris. During the Seventies, he began to collaborate with David Harrington, the iconic founder and first violin of the Kronos Quartet, with whom he performed in a series of concerts and with whom he recorded Salome Dances for Peace in 1989, which was nominated at the Grammy Awards.

In 1990, in honor of the 25th anniversary of its first publication, Terry decided to stage a celebratory performance of “In C” e for the remainder of the Nineties he dedicated himself to the republishing of his historic works or to the collaboration with artists of the caliber of Stefano Scodanibbio and the poet Michael McClure.

2008 and 2010 saw the release of two original projects: “Cusp of Magic” for the Kronos Quartet, a track commissioned by the quartet in honor of Riley’s 75th birthday, and Terry Riley: Autodreamographical Tales, an audio collage composed of music, digital sampling, and the voice of the American artist himself reading his dream diary.

In 2015, twenty-five years from the re-release of “In C”, Riley worked once again on the iconic composition and published In C Mali. The album was born from the collaboration of the artist with Africa Express which saw an ensemble of seventeen musicians hailing from Western Africa give their interpretation of the composition. it was with two of the artists of the ensemble, Lansiné Kouyaté (balafon and drums) and Moussa Sanou (kora), with whom Terry Riley took the stage of the Triennale Teatro Milano in 2019. The performance, also accompanied by Riley’s son Gyan and the Blonde Redhead’s Amedeo Pace, was breathtaking and remained one of the most extraordinary nights of the city of Milan.

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