I don’t have much of a relationship to… what should we call it? Modern classical music? That’s the term commonly used by ignoramuses like me, but it’s a silly one, contradictory on its face. The practitioners themselves call it “new music,” which is even worse, since it implies that all that other music out there that’s new is not really music. Steve Reich has the best term: notated music. It’s accurate and non-judgmental, and it encompasses the vast range of styles currently being explored by composers. Anyway, I don’t have much of a relationship to notated music. Terry Riley is a name that people in my circle throw around, but I hadn’t listened closely to him until I read an amazing New Music Box post about him. More on that below.
Terry Riley’s most salient influence on my musical life comes from A Rainbow In Curved Air. Fans of The Who will immediately recognize it as the template for the intro to “Baba O’Riley.”
Riley’s pattern-sequenced organ also inspired a ton of prog rock and ambient electronica. However, this post is not about A Rainbow In Curved Air. It’s about the piece that cemented Riley’s place in the High Culture Canon: In C.
The Steve Reich influence is obvious — if you told me that In C was a Reich piece, I’d believe you. He and Riley are friends, and he appears on the recording above. Reich is also the one who suggested that the piece have a high C repeating constantly on top of everything else to tie it all together.
In C is, in theory, the kind of music that should appeal to me. It incorporates repetition and improvisation, which are features common to the music I like. The score consists of fifty-three short loops. Performers play each loop as many times as they want before moving to the next one in the sequence. When everyone has arrived at the fifty-third loop and synced up, the piece ends. In C can be performed by any combination of instruments, so it’s a favorite of non-traditional ensembles like rock bands.
So why does In C bum me out more than inspire me? I don’t find it sonically objectionable, but it doesn’t seize my imagination the way you might expect. On the one hand, I appreciate that Riley is getting the classical tribe to improvise. On the other hand, Riley places a stifling set of restrictions on his improvisers. The only choice that the performers have is whether or not to continue the loop that they’re playing, and how loud they’re playing it. Riley is an admirer of jazz, but In C is far removed from even the most constrained jazz styles.
A year or so before Riley composed In C, John Coltrane recorded a tune called “India” with Eric Dolphy.
Like In C, “India” has the musicians improvise within tight constraints — a medium swing feel, 4/4 time, and a G pedal in the basses (there are two of them!) Coltrane could easily have titled his tune In G. The result is an explosion of emotion covering the full span from joy to rage. I’ve listened to this recording approximately a thousand times and I keep finding new layers in it.
Of course, Riley’s piece isn’t jazz, and no one is as emotionally intense as Coltrane. But why does In C leave me so cold? In his amazing New Music Box article, “This Year’s Model (or, That’s What They Don’t See),” Matthew Guerreri gets at the root of my discomfort.
It’s possible to hear In C as a triumph of industrial efficiency. A single page of short, simple, repetitive actions resulting in a complex, added-value final product. The individual workers have room for initiative—repeat each phrase as many times as you want!—but, at the end of the day, that sense of freedom is subsumed into the larger task: the ultimate trajectory of the music remains unchanged, the template producing another In C performance to add to the stockpile. Frederick Winslow Taylor would have loved this piece.
No, of course that’s not what Terry Riley intended. Nor is that how most performers and listeners have chosen to hear In C. But that’s at least partially because, for so many years, In C was perceived as a countercultural artifact. Before the canon caught up with it, it was easy to hear In C as a celebration of community and cooperation, of easygoing anarchy producing a temporarily harmonious society. But, going forward, there may never be another generation that doesn’t hear In C outside the canon. Why wouldn’t In C, now situated inside the establishment, start to sound different? What’s to stop those future listeners from hearing the piece as an ingenious aesthetic rationalization of one of the most common human conditions of late-capitalist life—the sense that one is only a cog in the machine?
Guerreri’s article mentions the In C iPad app. At first blush, it might seem inappropriate to reduce Riley’s communitarian jam session to a computer program for a solitary user. But I look at the underlying algorithmic structure of In C and ask, why not? The human performers are just sitting there executing fifty-three while loops. The point of improvisation in music is to liberate the idiosyncratic individual voices of the performers. But how much difference does it make who the performers of In C are if their scope for expression is so limited? Why not swap out the ensemble for one person with an iPad?
This is where Taylor Swift enters the picture. The joyless assembly-line quality of In C might be subtle, but in Swift’s music it’s overt, especially now that she’s deliberately moved from country into the pop mainstream.
You could read this track as a totally cynical by-the-numbers mass-market pop song. You could also take a more generous attitude and hear it a genuine expression of Swift’s innermost soul. I’d believe either explanation, and it hardly makes a difference either way. At the surface level, this is a reasonable approximation of joyous Afrocentric pop music, but when you dig deeper, there’s nothing in there. There’s no funk, and without that, the music is empty calories.
I am in no way trying to equate Terry Riley and Taylor Swift as artists. But the emotions I feel in reaction to In C are more similar than different to the ones I feel from “Shake It Off.” They gesture in the direction of fun and spontaneity, but without really meaning it; the actual music is about tight and disciplined control. I prefer A Rainbow In Curved Air to In C because in the former, Riley isn’t pretending that anyone involved gets a voice other than him. If I want to hear spontaneous group interaction, I have jazz for that. Hearing people executing an algorithm is a poor substitute.
Boo! In C isn’t “gesturing toward fun and spontaneity.” It’s a loosening of the rigidity of notated orchestral classical music. Notes at the speed you choose. Moving through the cells at the pace you choose in the register you choose. No hierarchy (except for the time keeper). And no matter how you move, it sounds beautiful. All those individual choices adding to a harmonious, ever-shifting whole is not the same as cogs in a machine. Cogs in a machine make a product. In C makes an experience, a communal experience, not a product. If the way you hear it makes you feel empty and joyless, maybe you’re not experiencing it from the performers’ perspective, which is revelatory.
In C loosens the bonds of a culture that is mostly bound extremely tightly. It doesn’t come close to the freedom afforded jazz or rock musicians. I agree that it sounds good; a lot of classical music does. But as an act of liberation, it’s weak sauce. It’s great that the performers enjoy themselves, but the test of great music is in what the listener feels, not the musicians.
Amen! (not the “Amend” break)
Pretty much this. I got that recording of In C on the strength of having enjoyed Rainbow, and was also disappointed at how much less fun it was. I’d be curious to hear your take on Stockhausen’s Stimmung, which is also a 1-hour-plus semi-improvisational piece with unchanging tonality, with slightly over fifty loops of repeated material, but which has a bit more decision-making allocated to the performers.
I had never heard (or heard of) Stimmung until this very moment. Listening to it now. I dig it! Much less terrifying than the Stockhausen I had to listen to in music school. Would wish for more long notes and less chanting the name of random deities, but whatever, I’m on board with the general concept.
It is probably his most accessible piece (though some versions of Tierkreis are pretty tuneful too). Though he came up with it when he independently discovered it was possible to sing in a way that emphasizes particular overtones (albeit with a technique that still leaves the fundamental pretty audible). One can only wonder what would have happened if he had discovered the Mongolian/Tuvan overtone singing tradition back in the 70s.