An Audience with Terry Riley at Cafe Oto, November 1st 2010

"I only have a favourite colour when it's next to another colour that I like - I'm contrapuntal."

"You have in the past been called a 'visionary' composer," I began, not without a certain pluck, "So how do you imagine the music of the future?"

Laughter, both from the stage and from the audience.

"You're trying to put me on the spot!" chuckles Riley. "All I can say, is that I hope that there is a future."

Terry Riley was in London earlier this week rounding of his 75th birthday tour of Europe, in celebration of Pandit Pran Nath's Californian legacy. The legendary composer and improviser, who, with his plaited rat's tail emerging from a fluffy white beard, resembles a cross between an off-duty Santa Claus and a Native American shaman, dropped into Cafe Oto's monthly Wire Salon to discuss his life and work - anything, that is, bar 'In C'.

If Riley was uncomfortable mulling over the piece for which he is most renowned (Tony Herrington, Riley's interviewer, claimed he had been informed in advance that "the last thing [Riley] wanted to talk about was 'In C'."), he was much happier discussing his history of collaborations. "I'm very relational," he claims. Indeed, LaMonte Young, claims Riley, called him, "the best harmonic musician - because he can't get along with anybody else!"

He recalls his first meeting with Young, back at Berkeley College in the late fifties, as "like, woah! Somebody left their spaceship behind." The two formed an "immediate bond," with Riley playing the "straight guy." At Berkeley, the pair would sit at a piano play "very primitive blues for hours on end." It was at this time that they developed between them the foundations for what would become known around the world as 'minimalist' music.

Though they would work together off and on into the seventies, Riley claims it wasn't long before they each started to develop their "own idea of what we wanted to do with stasis." For Riley, it was the experience of working with tape loops in France, while preparing the music for Ken Dewey's play, The Gift, that made him "aware of the value of stasis," the sense of motion even an (almost) unchanging loop.

"What fascinated me with tape was the degeneration of the sound... The grainy noise quality."

Herrington plays a sample of Riley's 'Bird of Paradise' over Oto's PA system ...

Created in 1965, 'Bird of Paradise' transforms a sample from 'Shotgun', Junior Walker and the All Stars' number one hit from the same year, into a pulsing, pummeling sonic weapon worthy of the Daleks, and equally terrifying.

At the end of the sixties (a time Riley refers to as "a kind of renaissance"), after 'In C' and 'A Rainbow in Curved Air' had rendered the boundary between classical composer and rock musician distinctly blurry, Riley felt he had "completed a cycle" and was looking for his next mode of music-making. Curiously, before meeting Pandit Pran Nath, he already had in his mind this image of a figure, both a mystic and a great singer, "living in a cave somewhere" in India. It wasn't long before Pran Nath appeared in his life, fitting just perfectly the preconcieved idea he had already formed.

Riley was immediately drawn to the power of the man's voice, "I'd never experienced such a powerful sound coming out of someone's body - not only powerful in volume, but also in effect." And soon set off to India to study under the Master, and become his apprentice. His first trip to New Delhi lasted six months, during which time, spent singing and training his body, he felt "like being psychoanalysed twenty-four hours a day."

Riley is keen to emphasise Pran Nath's eclecticism and openness, the way he always "encouraged you to do your own thing but use this tradition [of Indian classical music] for your musical growth." When LaMonte Young played a record of John Coltrane to Pran Nath, he replied, "This is like me." And Riley compares listening to Coltrane to "going to church." Riley quotes Pran Nath,"'What you worship that's you will become' - and he worshipped music." Pran Nath's intention was to literally become pure vibration.

In the middle of his first sojourn in India, Riley still contracted to CBS Masterworks, received a telegram instructing him to report to their studios forthwith. "I was ten or twelve years late with that record." He claims the principle effect of his studies in Indian music was to make his music more melodic. Throughout the seventies, Riley toured extensively, trying, as he says, "to develop through the keyboard a singing style."

The loud volumes of some of his concerts, along with the nature of some of his collaborations, only furthering to enhance this idea of Riley as a rock star composer. "The appeal of the loud frequencies used by rock groups," he says, "is that it approximates the sound of just intonation." But at the end of the decade, he found himself looking for ways to translate this language into something more "intimate."

It was at this time that Riley bought himself a piano and started playing piano again for the first time in as much as two decades, leading him to explore the similarities between piano strings and the strings of a tambour. The end of the seventies also marked the beginning of a series of collaborations with David Harrington's Kronos Quartet. Harrington apparently told Riley that he could already hear strings in his works for keyboard, so the first couple of string quartets he wrote for them were fairly straight transpositions of prior works.

Though Riley claims it took him a while to get used to putting notes on paper again "and making them feel alive," it wasn't long before his youthful obsession with Bartok's string quartets came back to him, and the collaboration began to flow more freely.

Despite his reluctance in the face of my (only slightly facetious) question about the future, Riley did respond to a member of the audience who asked if had an MP3 player by admitting to using iTunes ("Is that an MP3 player?" he asked nervously) on his laptop. "I don't think I'd be writing any orchestral music today if it wasn't for computers," he claims, comparing the use of notation software to sculpture, and the magnetic tape he used half a century ago.

One of the last questions from the floor asks about our changing sense of time, both between generations, and as one gets older, eliciting a noise form the crowd that implied shock at the suggestion that the septuagenarian before us could possibly associated with anything like age. "When you exist in the world of sound and music, I think that's a kind of equalizer for what you're talking about," he replies, "as the passage of time becomes irrelevant."

There's a curious mix of the avuncular and the innocent, even childlike in Riley, in everything from his distinctly Californian, soft-spoken voice to his wide-eyed enthusiasm and gentle requests, every time a piece of his music was played, to turn down the volume just a little bit. It's as though five decades in the "world of sound" had truly allowed him to "escape time bondage." Let's hope, for good.

Reflections on 'In C' following yesterday's performance at the Queen Elizabeth Hall

It is tempting to wonder if Pierre Schaeffer, Luc Ferrari and the other members of the Groupe Reserches Musicales were aware of the presence in 1963 of an American named Terry Riley at one of the studios owned and operated by the French national broadcaster, Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française. Riley apparently described the engineer from the RTF who helped him to record Chet Baker, Luis Fuentes, Luigi Trussardi, and George Solano jamming around the theme from Miles Davis's 'So What', as "a very straight guy in a white coat." Riley recorded the group, first altogether, and then individually on separate tracks. Allowing these tapes to go out of phase with each other, looping parts, and creating recurring delays, Riley created the music for The Gift, a play by the influential 'maker' of 'Happenings' Ken Dewey, with members of the Living Theatre and Anna Halprin's dance company.

When, on November 8th of the following year, the audience filed into the San Francisco Tape Music Center, its door held open to conceal a notice from the fire department declaring the building off limits, it was this music from The Gift that was playing on as background music. It is important to locate Terry Riley's 'In C' - the very piece said audience were attending the first performance of - within the history of electronic music, because in a way it is the first piece of music whose performance relies on human instrumentalists imitating the behaviour of tape recorders, as opposed to the serial music of Stockhausen and Boulez which essentially used machines as a kind of perfection of human fallibility, its basic concepts nonetheless derived from instrumental music. Playing the same thing, in the same way, over and over again, gradually phasing and going out of time with the other players around you is actually something very difficult for a human musician to do. For a tape machine, it is just what comes naturally.

This was the curious thing about the performance of 'In C' yesterday at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Recorded for Radio 3's Discovering Music series, the performance featured seventeen members of the BBC Concert Orchestra playing glockenspiel, vibraphone, marimba, xylophone, piano, and harp plus two flutes, two clarinets, two trumpets, and a string quintet. They just couldn't quite leave it alone. The pulse kept rotating between the different pitched percussionists, losing its gnawing insistence, players would show off by playing some of the piece's fifty-three reiterative motifs in octaves or in double time, flautists were flutter-tonguing, trumpeters fanning their mutes suggestively. The beat was considerably slower than usual, and much more sparse. Instruments would drop in and out an awful lot, playing a phrase just once or twice very delicately and then keeping quiet for a bit, not at all like the kind of frenetic hammering away one hears on early recordings. This was very much an 'In C' to contemplate and appreciate, rather than an ecstatic, trancelike 'In C', and as such it stood as a marker of the piece's newfound acceptance as the 'Rite of Spring' of the late twentieth century, a fully integrated part of the canon of great western classical works.

Warner Jepson was one of the performers playing 'In C' that night in November 1964. A few years later he would leave the Tape Music Center for the National Centre for Experiments in Television (NCET), but not before creating an extraordinary electronic score for Carlos Carvajal's dance-drama, Totentanz, based, like Franz Lizst's Totentanz, on the 'Dies Irae'. The piece was created using a combination of concrete sounds and sounds from a Buchla Box, the first ever electronic sequencer, designed by Donald Buchla at the Tape Music Center while Terry Riley was in France. The period in the early to mid-seventies, with Jepson as composer-in-residence was one of the most productive in the history of NCET. Jepson was interested in the full integration of sound and vision, creating images in much the same way that he had created music, by feeding into a variety of processors a combination of found images and raw electronic signal. It was around this time that Stephen Beck invented the Direct Video Synthesizer.

Jepson was far from the only member of Riley's group that night to go on to interesting things. Ramon Sender and Morton Subotnick had started the Tape Music Center in 1962, and Subotnick's (1967) piece, Silver Apples on the Moon was the first piece of electronic music commissioned by a record label (Nonesuch), and thus, in a way, the first piece of music conceived specifically for a record and not a performance. In the seventies, Subotnick began composing pieces for live instruments processed through what he called a 'ghost score'. The ghost score is a series of predetermined control voltages that effectively patch the live instrument through the audio processing modules of an analogue synthesizer, creating an entirely new means for the performance of electronic music. The instrumentalist plays, and their performance is haunted by, and filtered through, this variable virtual mesh.

The composers Pauline Oliveros and Steve Reich were also present, and it was apparently Reich's idea to include the eighth note pulse to keep everyone together. As was the multi-wind instrumentalist, Jon Gibson, who has since gone on to play in the first performance of practically every major minimalist work by LaMonte Young, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Gibson also played on the recordings of Arthur Russell's Instrumentals. Phil Winsor, a composer whose graphic scores were part of the groundbreaking (1986/87) Eye Music touring exhibition, has more recently been composing using fractal and stochastic algorithms in order to create music based on the universe's "own rhythms" for the sake of its possible healing powers. Tony Martin, also part of the group, went from designing light shows to accompany concerts by Oliveros and Subotnick to creating lighting effects for the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo '70 in Osaka. Stan Schaap, on the other hand, teaches a "practical spirituality" promoted through his Power to Share website, and Mel Weitzman has become the abbot of Berkeley Zen Centre.

I think in some way the sensibility of that first performance of 'In C' might be summed up by a sort of imagined triangulation point between the varied interests of its players, many of which seem to circle around the idea of the concert as a profoundly immersive and encompassing event, and around ideas of multi-media experimentation and interactivity. Terry Riley has described his initial conception of the piece as "a kind of cosmic vision of patterns that were gradually transforming and changing." This oh-so-Californian 'cosmic vision' was notable for its absence from the QEH on Thursday afternoon.