Catching Up with Riley

Terry Riley performed here at Bard last night. I hadn't heard him play piano in over a decade, and I had forgotten, if I had ever realized it, how superb his piano technique is. Maurizio Pollini would have had to work hard to duplicate that performance. A few hours before the concert I asked Terry what he was going to play, and he replied thoughtfully, "I don't know... haven't decided yet." And he hadn't. He didn't announce all the pieces either, though he played a new one called Pagoda and a Requiem for Wally in honor of the man who taught him to play ragtime back at the Gold Street Saloon in San Fran in the '60s.

In a stage talk afterward with David Rosenboom, Riley talked about his learning early that he wasn't good at playing a piece from a score and getting all the notes right - it's why he turned to improvisation. And yet the pieces he played sounded very set, very composed, and could easily be transcribed. You can tell there's some looseness in the playing, some give and take about where themes enter, yet there were also some difficult-looking double arpeggios that had to have been pretty well practiced. It makes you wonder if the printed versions of Beethoven's sonatas, Mozart's concertos, were just kind of an average version of what they ended up playing live. And I agree with Terry. I love playing classical piano, but you put so much concentration into getting every little note right. How great it must feel to have all the harmonic motion, all the themes, composed, yet be able to take liberties here and there. Of course, you need a style conducive to improvisation, and Riley does use a fair amount of repetition and ostinato - but not all that much, you realize when you listen carefully.

The discussion afterward centered mostly around politics. In response to a question, Riley said that while he was pretty famous in the '70s and could draw crowds of thousands (at least in Europe), the audience has since "moved on to other things." He has a sense, I gather, that the political atmosphere of the '80s and '90s shifted the trajectory of his career and pushed him into the margins of the music business - as it has marginalized new music in general. There was a day when Riley could record on Columbia, get played on the radio, draw huge audiences, and be big news. His phenomenal piano playing, the consistent dazzling quality of his inspiration, made it very clear that it's not Riley who's changed.

June 8, 2004 4:24 PM |

Categories:

Sites To See

Postclassic Radio! - Kyle Gann's internet radio station that accompanies the blog; see the playlist at kylegann.com

American Mavericks - the Minnesota Public radio program about American music (scripted by Kyle Gann with Tom Voegeli)

Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar - a cornucopia of music, interviews, information by, with, and on hundreds of intriguing composers who are not the Usual Suspects

Iridian Radio - an intelligently mellow new-music station

New Music Box - the premiere site for keeping up with what American composers are doing and thinking

The Rest Is Noise - The fine blog of critic Alex Ross

William Duckworth's Cathedral - the first interactive web composition and home page of a great postminimalist composer

Mikel Rouse's Home Page - the greatest opera composer of my generation

Eve Beglarian's Home Page - great Downtown composer

Just Intonation Network - a meeting place for people interested in alternative tunings

Erling Wold's Web Site - a fine San Francisco composer of deceptively simple-seeming music, and a model web site

The Dane Rudhyar Archive - the complete site for the music, poetry, painting, and ideas of a greatly underrated composer who became America's greatest astrologer

Utopian Turtletop, John Shaw's thoughtful blog about new music and other issues

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by PostClassic published on June 8, 2004 4:24 PM.

All Is Illusion was the previous entry in this blog.

Death Needs a Holiday is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

AJ Ads

Introducing
AJ Arts Blog Ads

Now you can reach the most discerning arts blog readers on the internet. Target individual blogs or topics in the ArtsJournal ad network.

Advertise Here

AJ Blogs

AJBlogCentral | rss

culture
About Last Night
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Artful Manager
Andrew Taylor on the business of arts & culture
blog riley
rock culture approximately
CultureGulf
Rebuilding Gulf Culture after Katrina
Dewey21C
Richard Kessler on arts education
diacritical
Douglas McLennan's blog
Flyover
Art from the American Outback
Life's a Pitch
For immediate release: the arts are marketable
Mind the Gap
No genre is the new genre
Rockwell Matters
John Rockwell on the arts
Straight Up |
Jan Herman - arts, media & culture with 'tude

dance
Foot in Mouth
Apollinaire Scherr talks about dance
Seeing Things
Tobi Tobias on dance et al...

jazz
Jazz Beyond Jazz
Howard Mandel's freelance Urban Improvisation
ListenGood
Focus on New Orleans. Jazz and Other Sounds
Rifftides
Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

media
Out There
Jeff Weinstein's Cultural Mixology
Serious Popcorn
Martha Bayles on Film...

classical music
The Future of Classical Music?
Greg Sandow performs a book-in-progress
On the Record
Exploring Orchestras w/ Henry Fogel
Overflow
Harvey Sachs on music, and various digressions
PostClassic
Kyle Gann on music after the fact
Sandow
Greg Sandow on the future of Classical Music
Slipped Disc
Norman Lebrecht on Shifting Sound Worlds

publishing
book/daddy
Jerome Weeks on Books
Quick Study
Scott McLemee on books, ideas & trash-culture ephemera

theatre
Drama Queen
Wendy Rosenfield: covering drama, onstage and off
lies like truth
Chloe Veltman on how culture will save the world
Stage Write
Elizabeth Zimmer on time-based art forms

visual
Aesthetic Grounds
Public Art, Public Space
Artopia
John Perreault's art diary
CultureGrrl
Lee Rosenbaum's Cultural Commentary
Modern Art Notes
Tyler Green's modern & contemporary art blog
Creative Commons License
This weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.