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This year\u2019s music director \u2013 in recent years this chair has included Salonen, Kent Nagano, Dawn Upshaw and Leif Ove Andsnes \u2013 is choreographer Mark Morris. He\u2019s selected a schedule heavy on work by West Coast mavericks, including Cage, Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, Alaskan John Luther Adams and that Connecticut Yankee Charles Ives, whose radicalism and searching spirit make him for me an honorary West Coaster. (Disclosure: My ardor for Ojai predates the brief stint I did for the festival writing a newsletter essay for last year\u2019s bash.)<\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/3.bp.blogspot.com\/-cXO78QzWNjk\/Ua458LunTdI\/AAAAAAAACSc\/CVbzfC9tVb4\/s320\/InC.jpg\")
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A concert we\u2019re especially excited about here at the Misread City is In C<\/i>, the 1964 piece by Bay Area composer Terry Riley which is sometimes described as the first important work of minimalism.\u00a0<\/span>
<\/span>In the mid-\u201870s, the late great music critic Robert Palmer called the piece \u201cthe single most influential post-1960 composition by an American,\u201d describing its impact on not just Philip Glass and Steve Reich, but John Cale, Brian Eno, and jazz as well. I\u2019ll let Palmer describe the piece here:<\/p>\n
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<\/a><\/div>\nA concert we\u2019re especially excited about here at the Misread City is In C<\/i>, the 1964 piece by Bay Area composer Terry Riley which is sometimes described as the first important work of minimalism.\u00a0<\/span>
<\/span>In the mid-\u201870s, the late great music critic Robert Palmer called the piece \u201cthe single most influential post-1960 composition by an American,\u201d describing its impact on not just Philip Glass and Steve Reich, but John Cale, Brian Eno, and jazz as well. I\u2019ll let Palmer describe the piece here:<\/p>\n
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\u201c\u2019In C\u2019 consists of 52 melodic\/rhythmic motives, most of them as short and simple as a whole note or a group of six or eight sixteenths. It can be played by an ensemble of any composition and size. The musicians begin by playing the figures consecutively, but each one proceeds at his own speed, so that the melodic kernels soon begin to overlap in wild profusion, forming constantly shifting prismatic relationships with each other.\u201d<\/p>\n
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<\/a>The piece, then, as wildly new (and hippie-ish) as it would have seen in the \u201860s, also echoes the collective improvisation of early New Orleans, and opens up some possibilities that musicians are still pursuing in the 21st<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n
<\/a>The piece, then, as wildly new (and hippie-ish) as it would have seen in the \u201860s, also echoes the collective improvisation of early New Orleans, and opens up some possibilities that musicians are still pursuing in the 21st<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n<\/span><\/div>\n
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Despite having seen performances of Riley\u2019s work, and knowing a New Albion recording of In C<\/i> about as well as one can know such an elusive piece, I\u2019ve never seen this one live. So I spoke to Dustin Donahue, part of the San Diego percussion ensemble red fish blue fish<\/a>, about the Ojai performance his group will be a part of on Saturday morning.<\/p>\n
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\u201cThis one is pretty special,\u201d he said, \u201cbecause these groups from all over the country will come together to play this piece,\u201d including members of Morris\u2019s group and the jazz trio The Bad Plus. \u201cWith string and brass players, it\u2019ll take on a whole new identity \u2013 we can\u2019t really predict what it\u2019ll sound like.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Since all the musicians need to play \u2013 whatever their instrument \u2013 in the key of C, red fish blue fish will have to pick instruments that make sense. \u201cWe have to focus ourselves in the pitched percussion world \u2013 vibraphones, xylophones, glockenspiels, celestes. And there this particular part, where people are repeating a tone in C: We find idiosyncratic objects tuned to C \u2013 gongs, pipes, found objects\u201d<\/p>\n
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