THOMAS LARSON

(Quadrant December 28, 2025)

1 / I’ve been listening to Terry’s Riley’s In C, the minimalist wonder of variable creation first performed at the San Francisco Tape Center in 1964, all my adult life. I began with the 1968 Columbia multi-tracked recording (remastered here), which, in my solipsistic years, failed to stir me, though the dexterity it takes to play it in ensemble, the original, a sprightly clip of 42 minutes, I found impressive. I also found In C static, void of emotion, a bit soulless, and not fully improvisatory since its repeating patterns were set and you, the musician, decided when and when not and how much to play, though you had to remain linked to the group’s progression, never getting too far ahead or behind. Cleverly ordained by Riley to be free and restrained, like an indoor cat in a three-bedroom apartment.

Later, after hearing Ali Akbar Khan, a sarod master of the North Indian style of gat, I discovered that the turbulent exchange of improvised melodic phrases with a tabla player, for example, widened my sense of music’s ritual language. Eventually, the hypnotic effect of pulse or trance music captured me as did its inner paradox, namely, that musical depth arises out of a seemingly minimal surface. Such was reminiscent of what Thoreau says of Walden Pond, his lake-effect mistress during the 1840s: “The water is so transparent that [from the surface] the bottom can easily be discerned at the depth of twenty-five to thirty feet.”

In C is now—the composer turned 90 last year—a worldwide phenomenon. Even the modest Riley asserts that it’s likely somewhere on the planet a cohort of performers rehearses and plays the piece every day. One critic equated its arrival in musical history to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, a work of rhythmic asymmetry and hatchet dissonances. And yet Riley’s is unlike Stravinsky’s; the former’s piece is a wobbly-geared machine and requires some synchronous assembly as it goes. Comprising the score are 53 modules, played and repeated in succession by any size melodic grouping—a band of marimbas or a Klezmer ensemble. (Other added timbres include the Sousaphone, guitars with wah-wahs and fuzz tones, a toy piano, and Native American tonal chanting.) Riley’s two pages of instructions apply equally to every player and signal a gentle openness to personal choice: You may repeat patterns between 45 and 90 seconds; you should “listen very carefully to one another . . . occasionally drop out and listen”; when you “reenter” be aware that your entrance will affect the “music’s flow”: you need to emphasize but not overindulgently the “polyrhythmic combinations” that come to life during the music’s course; and, in due time, when you arrive at module #53, let everyone catch up, let the coming together “crescendo and diminuendo,” so that “each player drops out as he or she wishes.”

Such limited freewheeling echoes John Cage’s playful, at times, random structures that undermine the expectations of performers and listeners. In Western classical music, the score and its instructions are precisely instrumented; more important, they headline tonal development and eventual resolution. Such a score is a blueprint for executing the work. Alternately, as Cage and Riley demonstrate (as do jazz musicians), music can be a “live” experiment aligned with a group consensus whose adhesive parameters mutate sonically from performance to performance.

2 / An earful of In C recordings reveal differences with instrumentation, the ensemble size (8 to more than 100), tone and energy ranging from stilted to spirited; most versions reach a midpoint muddle, typically rescued when the sense of the ending drives the players’ fatiguing workout into the final modules. YouTube versions abound as do a slew of recordings over the last 60 years, placid lakes and turbulent streams:

A videotaped performance at Millenium Park in Chicago in 2015 with more than 100 players;

A spirited online version recorded at the onset of the pandemic in Sweden with musicians performing remotely and together with some lovely vocal glissandi and chants;

A half-speed ambient, solo electronic rendition by Laurence Stevenson, which feels a bit A.I., more gluey wallpaper than bouncy romp;

A Ghanan/African version by Damon Albarn’s Mali ensemble, recorded at the Tate Modern in 2015, during which the group freely alters the original, rephrasing many of the modules’ melodies, a singer leading the fest. Albarn comments that “In C” “is friendly music, and a lot of music that challenges compositional traditions is not”;

A French documentary of three players (including a rock drummer) who call themselves “The Young Gods” and who shape a super-techno synthesis of live group performance with virtuoso tape loop additions;

The 25^th Anniversary Recording from 1989 on New Albion Records featuring Riley on keyboards, his son, Gavin, on guitar, and 32 other musicians in a 76-minute percussively fanatical performance;

A Bang on the Can recording from 2001 (released on September 11^th!) for eleven musicians whose rich timbres and deep immersion of the players seems to achieve a definitive reading;

A favorite of mine for its propulsive relentlessness over 52 minutes—the eighth note clocks at 220 beats per minute—was achieved by select players from the Barcelona Symphony and Catalonia National Orchestra and conducted by Brad Lubman from 2018; the bootleg is very hard to find.

There are A.I. or auto-generated renderings. There are a few for solo piano, with and without overdubbing. There are live funfests for guitar orchestra, a flute cohort, and voice and percussion groups. There’s a 7:04 instructional YouTube video that teaches musicians how to play the 53 modules.

After I heard new versions of In C over the decades, the playfulness of its static current became familiar, calming, welcoming. The piece hadn’t changed; I had. I got comfortable with the cyclic nature of pulse music, the ecstacy of the raga, the Balinese Gamelan, and the Sufi devotional singer who gets lost in the qawwali, sung verses of mystical poetry. The critic George Grella described the piece as a “shamanistic device for an ensemble,” which, he says, set Riley to writing and performing “mesmerizing, exalted, dervish-like” music. I followed the composer with the Merlin beard and the colorful kufis into the woods, fascinated by the work’s magical construction, which, surprisingly, lay bare a subtle tension. While reading the score (it’s fun to anticipate the onset of each coming module), I realized the players and audience knows neither how nor when the group’s vernacular, so to speak, will shift. But when I cocked my ear closely, I was able to hear players on-the-spot decisions, that is, when to lead, follow, and drop out and when to come back in, follow, and lead.

3 / Several musicians answered my queries about performing In C, their memories vivid. They learned to play and sustain, briefly, the 53 modules (a few patterns have tricky syncopations and some feature more rests than notes) and understood the goal: to enter into the evolving fabric confidently and press on with their contrastive voice. They need not pass a tryout but did self-select, game for the commitment, ranging from high school bands, music conservatories, and community orchestras. Each felt elevated by his or her experience, the manic concentration required more formidable than they’d realized.

Nathan Cone, a San Antonio sax player, valued challenging himself, making new musical associates, and immersing himself in the work’s recess-like play. Roughly 15 minutes in, he recalls, its phase-shifting drive had bewitched him. While “digging on what was happening,” he had “lagged six modules behind everybody.” He curbed his “listening” as a participant and attended more to “executing” as a participant.

A pianist friend from Santa Fe, New Mexico, tells me that there can be no bad performance of In C because the thrust of its design is to engage a community of players “where their chops are,” which is code for degrees of musical skill. The piece welcomes amateurs, the musical equivalent of a rainbow coalition. It’s a piece, she goes on, of its time, the 1960s, of Haight-Ashbury, “hippie and egalitarian” to the core.

Eric Starr, a professor of trombone performance and brass chamber music at San Diego State University, and a director of a local New Music ensemble, says he first played the piece in 2004. Since then, he’s incorporated it into his teaching: It’s “simple and not overly specific.” Students trying on the experimental today have none of the “Berkeley mindset of the 1960s,” he says. So, In C provides entrée. Moreover, composition majors gravitate to Riley’s conceptual framework since their oft-strict backgrounds seldom show them “a rough way to organize something so it fits together. That I find really interesting. One student wrote a work where the meter had to be steady, but you could choose any bar you wanted to play, though you had to start [the bar] on its downbeat. Each measure, in turn, followed a specific chord progression and all [the players] went at their own pace,” a trick the student learned from Riley. “At a certain point someone enters with a preassigned pitch, a tritone away from the tonic.” The student piece ends with the tonic note and its tritone outlier settling into an arranged marriage.

Starr also likes the work’s approachability. Not much different from Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony,” In C draws people to the pleasure of its sound, which listeners these days require: They are very sensitive to sounds that “may offend them.” He notes that this non-offensiveness should be crucial to people who program concerts and try to figure out which of the unprogrammed works will attract an audience. Riley’s, he continues, is a rare New Music favorite since it helps overthrow the early and mid-century serialism of the atonal composers like Schoenberg and Boulez who, Starr says, “freed dissonance just [so they could write] more and more complex music.” Even if musicians like to perform unmelodic music, “the average concertgoer” won’t buy tickets if word gets out the program is more hurtful than harmonious to the ear.

4 / Among In C’s longest-serving veterans is Evan Ziporyn, a clarinetist and composer, who as a longtime member of Bang on the Can—he’s in the All-Star unit—has performed the piece for decades: touring with Riley in the 1990s and 2000s, playing bass clarinet on the 25^th anniversary New Albion recording, and organizing last year’s community concert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology honoring Riley’s ninetieth birthday. As a Yale undergraduate, he and an ensemble played contemporary works during yearly all-night festival; they would begin In C just before sunrise and animate the dawn with its harmonic light.

He calls the piece “structured improvisation, made by the performers and made in real time.” Its precondition is “musical competence and goodwill” whose shape changes “by who’s playing it.” Not as easy as it sounds for a single-movement work that may last more than an hour. In C requires “a certain sensibility,” he says. “You need attention to the collective rhythm and the collective vibe. If you can get people to do that, then all sorts of wonderful things happen.”

The piece is leaderless and needs no conductor. It does, however, require self-discipline. The most demanding part, usually on piano or marimba, is to pulse two octave C’s unceasingly, which, again, depending on the length, number between 6,000 and 15,000 beats. Wrist injuries to these ostinatists may ensue.

Ziporyn’s individual method is to “play a module until it doesn’t seem like it’s needed anymore, and then I’ll stop.” A well-played version, he says, makes “beautiful kaleidoscopic patterns,” which are best not to “think about.” A composer friend heard Ziporyn perform the work and asked, “‘Does your group know how complicated what they’re doing is?’ I said, no. And he said, ‘Don’t tell them.’”

Touring with the composer taught Ziporyn Riley’s musical acuity. In performance, he sought “absolute openness.” Most of all, he wanted everyone “to collaborate, to be aware of the overall metric sensibility—and just stick to it,” for the time of its passing. Don’t speed, don’t poke, which can happen when the hive-mind of the work bogs down. To demonstrate the work’s textural possibilities, Riley, a pianist, liked to sing the modules. This coloring pushed Ziporyn to sound bird-like tones, reminiscent of the clarinet solo in Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time.

Written scores are the means to control performances but there are levels of freedom within that control. Before the score became the composer’s “final word,” music in its folk and religious contexts was loose, variable, untutored; folk music typically avoids the expert technique that Bach and Ravel demand. In C breaks with the specialization of Western classical music whose professionalism and circus-like spectacle seems to defy human ability. Despite his own virtuosic piano scores (listen to the finger-busting ragtime madness of The Heaven Ladder Book 7), Riley’s been focused on a New Music, which as he told David Toop in Ocean of Sound (1995) allows players to reach altered states. “You can get high by getting in one groove. You can get high by staying on one note, there’s different ways but that’s definitely a way to ecstasy.” Ever the mystic, he also thought of himself as a “channel for the energy [of In C] that was coming in from space.”

This grip-loosening of the composer’s control leads, as Ziporyn discovered, to stress reduction, a kind of activist massage. One commented after an In C gig, “‘Life is so stressful now; everybody’s so freaked out about politics. It’s so great to have a portal into not needing to think about that stuff and just think about beauty and time and rhythm—and playing together.’” This musician wished someone would dedicate a room where the piece is always going, like a musical Zen Garden, and players and audiences might renew their energy and block out, for a time, our unshutupable media.

Such experience may be spiritual but it’s also aesthetically practical. Ziporyn says this is In C’s value. “There are a lot of pieces in Western music that require your best efforts and give something to the listener but they’re also taking something from me. Whereas In C is a much more balanced ecosystem—like I give it something and it really gives me something back. When you finish a performance, you feel on top of the world and ready to do it again.”

5 / More than a few enthusiasts want to enshrine In C as a paragon of ritual music for the New Age. But that seems off base to me. Generally, rituals, like the Catholic Mass and Mardi Gras, are designed as repeating events, once established, rarely varied, carrying over from Sunday to Sunday or from year to year. Solstice ceremonies often devolve into rubrics, sacraments or entreaties to things the ego or the greater good desires. Burning Man entreats a corporate nerd’s outlandishness, for one weekend a year. In religious contexts, the ritual tune (chant, carol, psalm) serves a host of supplicants—beseech the spirits to realign the group’s affairs. I sense Riley’s hour of ticking genius materializes something else. There’s a performative alchemy about it in which its tidiness is fixed and unfixed, comes apart and reassembles, a rickety span of time bridging creativity, chance, and community.

As well, there’s the work’s mystical side, the mystery of where it came from, its nativity, a kind of parthenogenesis. Music history possesses a handful of augural births in which the God of the Never Heard Before finds its composer. Stravinsky confessed that he was the “conduit” through which new rhythmic shoots and asymmetrical accents prompted The Rite of Spring from his fingers at the piano: “I was guided by no system whatever in Le Sacre du Printemps. I heard and wrote what I heard. I am the vessel through which Le Sacre passed.”

Riley’s augural electrification of In C, so to speak, occurred in 1964. In his 20s, having studied piano with the ragtime master Wally Rose, he gigged nightly at San Francisco’s Gold Street Saloon where the raucous crowd competed with his syncopations. He claims that on his way there one November evening, he heard In C “in his head,” fully formed, sound, shape, and span. He played his sets, walked home, and jotted down the one-page score. I find this anecdote juicily apocryphal—not that the minimalist genie crawled into his ear with the tune and its parts, but that he oscillated between refining the 53 modules, playing “Maple Leaf Rag,” and keeping the saloon noise at bay. The brevity of the score contains this chummy back-and-forth among captains and crews, hipsters and beats, barkeep and barmaid. What’s more, performing In C bears a kind of chattery quality no different from a pianist striding the ivories in a rowdy speakeasy until midnight.

For me that chattery quality is also linked to the limits of criticism. In this sense: Any symphony orchestra can give a great or a good or a shoddy rendering of, say, Brahms Symphony No. 4. But the qualitative outcome is not the same with In C. It’s a hallmark of some New Music, and some free jazz, that a Rileyesque piece relies on live assembly and neuters comparisons. Montage musical construction in time is ever new, ever young, each performance, potentially, great and good and shoddy—like integrating noise and music at the Gold Street Saloon. Sure, there are turgid versions of In C, and heavenly ones, too, say those who played it for the first time, lost and found in its timed wonder.

For performers, the substantive marker of Riley’s dare is your willingness to create, maintain, and check the work’s momentum—you play each module with gusto, you hone it a bit, you let it go, and you move on to the next one, and you repeat and alter the character of each coming and going as you reach for and achieve communion.