Happy 90th birthday, Terry Riley! Pete Townshend hails the minimalist maestro’s enduring influence…
Happy 90th birthday, Terry Riley! Pete Townshend hails the minimalist maestro’s enduring influence…
“The first time I heard Terry Riley would’ve been A Rainbow In Curved Air, when it first came out in 1969. I wasn’t particularly studying minimalist or electronic music, but I was experimenting and finding new stuff, and I happened upon him. I was playing with tape machines, which were central to Terry Riley’s method. It was how he got his delay loops. I also had two tape machines, but I used to bounce from machine to machine, rather than use them as a delay system.
“‘Baba O’Riley’ was an accident. It came out of the Lifehouse project, where I was working on creating music using computers. But I couldn’t get my hands on a music computer that was up to the job, and ended up drifting into synthesisers. I was working with the Lowrey Berkshire, which had a repetitive kind of arpeggio setting. Instead of precise mathematical beats, it had drop beats in between, with drop rhythms and repeated rhythms, so you got the effect of layering. And when I listened back, I went into a kind of meditative trance. I think I’d experienced some of that while listening to A Rainbow In Curved Air – a sense of being raised up and lifted, lost in the moment. So I just felt it was right to name it in honour of Terry Riley.
“After A Rainbow In Curved Air, I think everybody was hoping that he would do more, but he didn’t do anything like it. I think the closest he came was working with John Cale on Church Of Anthrax [1971]. I met him later on – it might’ve been the late ’70s/early ’80s – when he came to a Who gig in San Francisco. Terry was an experimenter. He wasn’t interested in [making] friends, he wasn’t interested in having hits – although he did say to me when we met, ‘I wish I’d made something out of my work as you have.’
“I think what a lot of people don’t know about Terry Riley is that he’s also a reed player. He plays saxophone on In C and did an album called Reed Streams [1966], which is really interesting because it demonstrates that he was drifting into more classical Indian modality scales. He also worked with the Kronos Quartet [1984’s Cadenza On The Night Plain and 1989’s Salome Dances For Peace] and that actually sounds like baroque music. So when you hear his diversions – his experiments, his adventures in tonal fields other than electronic music or organ music – you hear his baroque and Indian influences more clearly. But they’re actually there in everything that he does. He’s quite clearly an ascetic, he’s quite clearly an inheritor of the sincere San Francisco hippie movement of spirituality and Indian and Vedantic meditation and Buddhism and so on. “To be honest, I don’t know quite what I’m doing yet for the Barbican performance. I know that they’re doing In C, which I’ve performed myself when I did Lifehouse Chronicles at Sadler’s Wells in 2000. I also did an orchestral version of ‘Baba O’Riley’, which I might like to put up if I can gather the musicians. But I’m now in the process of getting out my old organs and tape loop systems and seeing if I can come up with something. It should be interesting.”
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