Terry Riley

A pioneer of the American minimalist movement, composer and multi-instrumentalist Terry Riley was born in Colfax, California, on June 24, 1935. Trained on piano and saxophone, he studied at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and then at the University of California at Berkeley, where he became friends with La Monte Young, Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnick and Steve Reich. He composed for the stage and worked on repetitive sequences with magnetic tapes. In 1964, after a stay in Paris, he took part in the Theatre of Eternal Music experiments created by Young, alongside John Cale and Tony Conrad. That same year, he unveiled In C, a piece based on some fifty motifs played by a variable-size ensemble, laying the foundations for repetitive music and minimalism. Breaking with academicism and contemporary European trends, Riley attracted the attention of younger generations and developed his method by combining organ or electric piano improvisations and tape loops for Rainbow in Curved Air (1969), whose influence reached rock musicians and bands such as Pete Townshend (The Who), Soft Machine and... Curved Air. Active on stage too, he composed Keyboard Studies and Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band, and in 1970 met the Indian master Pandit Pran Nath, who taught him the art of raga and singing, which he used on several recordings such as Persian Surgery Dervishes (1972) and Shri Camel (1978). Over the following decade, he began a long collaboration with the Kronos Quartet, for whom he composed Cadenza on the Night Plain (1984), Salome Dances for Peace (1989), The Sands (1991) and Requiem for Adam (2001). This period also saw him produce The Harp of New Albion (1984) and Chanting the Light of Foresight (1987), amid a host of live albums and collaborations with Stefano Scodanibbio, the Arte Quartett, Amelia Cuni, Francesco D'Orazio and Bang on a Can. Since the 1990s, he has been performing and improvising with his son, guitarist Gyan Riley. He also gives solo piano and organ recitals. The 4-CD retrospective The Columbia Recordings was released in 2025.