Terry Riley

In C

Terrence Mitchell Riley was born on June 24, 1935 in Colfax, California, and raised in Redding. He studied at San Francisco State University, the San Francisco Conservatory and UC Berkeley, where his composition teachers were Seymour Shifrin and Robert Erickson, and received an honorary doctorate from Chapman University in 2007. In 1959 and 1960 he made Concert for Two Pianists and Tape Recorders with La Monte Young, and in 1963 composed Music for the Gift in Paris, with Chet Baker on trumpet, where he conceived the time-lag accumulator. In C, with 53 modules, was first played in 1964, with Steve Reich, Jon Gibson, Pauline Oliveros and Morton Subotnick among the players. He moved to New York in 1965, spent eight months in La Monte Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, and In C came out on Columbia in 1968 in its Music of Our Time series.

From 1970 he studied with the Indian classical singer Pandit Pran Nath, and in 1971 joined the faculty of Mills College and made Church of Anthrax with John Cale. Shri Camel (1980) followed, and from about 1980 a long association with the Kronos Quartet, for whom he wrote 13 quartets. The Harp of New Albion (1986), Jade Palace (1991, his first orchestral work), The Cusp of Magic (2004), Banana Humberto (2008), and Autodreamographical Tales (2010, Tzadik) are among his later records. He moved to Yamanashi, Japan, in 2020 and turned 90 in June 2025; Sony Classical issued The Columbia Recordings, a four-disc box of In C, A Rainbow in Curved Air, Church of Anthrax and Shri Camel, with a 50-page booklet, in 2025.

Influence

His influences include Indian classical music, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Bill Evans, Art Tatum, John Cage and La Monte Young. Wikipedia credits his organ and tape-loop approach with shaping Pete Townshend's parts on "Won't Get Fooled Again" and "Baba O'Riley", which honors him in its title, and links the album to Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells and Soft Machine's "Out-Bloody-Rageous". The band Curved Air took its name from the album, and Synthtopia says the album influenced Townshend and Steve Reich.