Terry
Riley

When Terry Riley (b. 1935 in Colfax, California) started his three-month DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program (BKP) fellowship in the second half of 1978, he was already a well-known musician and composer in Europe. Many saw him as a crossover figure who not only utilized the expanded-time concepts of the American post-war avant-garde, but also, with his turn to Indian music, served the yearnings of the hippie generation that sought alternatives to the American way of life. Riley’s concerts as a composer-performer had an unconventional feel and created an almost messianic aura. Moreover, to an audience familiar with the psychedelic rock of the time, his music was significantly more relatable than the results of the rigorous, microtonal investigations his friend La Monte Young was presenting then. Incidentally, Riley had wanted to come to Berlin with La Monte, his wife Marian Zazeela, and the Indian singer Pandit Pran Nath, with whom Riley and Young began studying in the early 1970s, but this plan fell through.

In his application, Riley outlined his intention of continuing to work musically with the electric organ, a practice he had started in the mid-1960s. He achieved fame with A Rainbow in Curved Air, a work he also released as a record in 1969. The decisive breakthrough—especially in Europe—came with the double LP Persian Surgery Dervishes, which was released in France in 1972. In 1976 Riley began working on Shri Camel, a new piece played on his combo Yamaha organ tuned in just intonation. The 1980 record release of the work is expanded sonically to include up to sixteen organs, made possible with the aid of a digital delay system.

Part of Terry Riley’s impact when playing live was that he gave the impression of essentially being a one-man orchestra. While his American colleagues Philip Glass and Steve Reich usually toured Europe with a costly ensemble in the 1970s, Riley traveled alone. However, a significant amount of electronic equipment had to be transported for him, including—in addition to the organ—two tape recorders, a mixer, and an amplifier system. This equipment provided the “time-lag accumulation” that Riley spoke of. His tape-delay system made it possible to present various musical sequences simultaneously and in successive shifting of the counting units. This resulted in a dense but simultaneously transparent fabric of sounds based on short motifs which, through their linking and incessant repetition, condensed into meandering sequences. Riley played live to this texture of sounds, making every concert an unrepeatable event for audiences.

After opening the first Metamusik Festival at the Neue Nationalgalerie in September 1974 with his composition Descending Moonshine Derwishes, Terry Riley was a guest with Shri Camel at the third and final edition of the event, curated by radio director and concert organizer Walter Bachauer in October 1978, during Riley’s Berlin fellowship.

During his time in Berlin in 1978, Riley also had contact with Edgar Froese, the founder of the rock band Tangerine Dream. Froese encouraged Riley to use other keyboard instruments besides the organ, and loaned him his Korg synthesizer; this had a lasting effect on Riley because, in the years that followed, he began transferring his conception of organ music to synthesizers.

The year 1978 was also important for Terry Riley in another respect: it was then that he met the Kronos Quartet, with whom he continues to collaborate to this day.

Text: Thomas Groetz

Translation: Erik Smith