Happy 81st Birthday, Terry Riley! - "Salome Dances for Peace" for String Quartet (2 CDs) - Kronos Quartet - Nonesuch, 1989

As far as contemporary string quartets go, Terry Riley's "Salome Dances for Peace" (which technically is a cycle of 5 string quartets) is like no other quartet. It is of epic proportions, clocking in at 2 hours; stylistically it explores practically every musical avenue and genre, which keeps this masterpiece of quartet literature in a class by itself. Whilst it commands complete and uninterrupted attention, I think one must listen to the work in it's entirety to attempt to grasp it (and that can take multiple listenings trust me - there is just so much that happens during the journey - it can be a tad perplexing, which I think is due to its size plus its patchwork brilliance - musically but also ethnically; the quartet interweaves Far-Eastern/Near-Eastern modes with spiky Bartokian counterpoint, bluesy accents, jazzy syncopations and yes.. even some minimalist leanings. It is a seamless, magical integration and really quite intoxicating and beautiful - from the moment bows are raised.

"Salome Dances.." was composed for the Kronos Quartet, whom Riley has been working with for 36 years now. "Cadenza on the Night Plain" was the first full-length album of Riley's music that the Kronos Quartet recorded back in 1985. I posted it in honor of his 80th birthday, here:

http://nocturna-artificialia.blogspot.com/2015/06/happy-80th-birthday-terry-riley-cadenza.html

Originally conceived as a ballet in which Salome, reincarnated 2,000 years after her run-in with John the Baptist, would use her ''alluring powers to actually create peace in the world,'' as Terry Riley puts it in the liner notes, ''Salome Dances for Peace'' grew into a loosely programmatic string quartet based largely on native American mythology.

According to the composer, such multicultural evocations arise in an entirely natural way: ''It's not something I attempt to do. I guess because I've listened to a lot of music from all over the world for 30 years, these things just seem to come through.''

David Harrington of the Kronos has an even simpler explanation: ''All the kinds of music Terry loves are in that piece.''

Terry Riley on "Salome Dances for Peace":

"The idea for Salome Dances for Peace came out of improvisation
theme from The Harp of New Albion. I realized this was potentially
a whole new piece. Around that time, David Harrington called
me and asked me to write another string quartet.
I thought that it should be a ballet about Salome using
her alluring powers to actually create peace in the world. So
Salome in this case becomes like a goddess who—drawn out of
antiquity, having done evil kinds of deeds—reincarnates and is
trained as a sorceress, as a shaman. And through her dancing,
she is able to become both a warrior and an influence on the
world leaders’ actions.
What I do is to make many, many minute sketches of ideas
and file them away, and at some point as I’m writing, one of
those ideas will be the right one for the time. I trust the fact
that anything that occurs to me is related to whatever occurred
to me before.
All of the kinds of music that appear in my string
quartets are the kinds of music that I personally love, and I
don’t necessarily keep them in separate cabinets. One of the
challenges, in fact, is to bring things you love together to
live harmoniously. It also creates an understanding of how
the notes work. These styles all have their particular flavors
and expressions but they can be united. Notes all work under
certain universal laws, they observe laws just like everything
else in the universe does.
To me it’s all a unified field. It’s the general search we’re
going through now in physics, trying to find a unified theory.
I think for a musician that is also relevant and works towards
evolving new, deeper and richer musical traditions.
I’m always trying to find ways that I can, besides doing
music, contribute to world peace, or maybe neighborhood
peace or home peace. I told David that when we first started
that I thought we ought to create a piece that can be played at
the United Nations on special holidays. It would not be just a
concert piece but a piece that could be played as a rite."


—Terry Riley, from a conversation with Mark Swed

Terry Riley (or possibly my great grandfather back in Ukraine??)

Haha, great photo: Terry Riley celebrates his 50th birthday with the Kronos Quartet

"Salome Dances for Peace for String Quartet"

Anthem of the Great Spirit       33:00
Conquest of the War Demons   34.47
The Gift                                    15:24
The Ecstacy                              18:21
Good Medicine                         13:25


Disc 1

1) I. Anthem of the Great Spirit: 'The Summons' (4:55)
2) I. Anthem of the Great Spirit: 'Peace Dance' (10:57)
3) I. Anthem of the Great Spirit: 'Fanfare in the Minimal Kingdom' (4:29)
4) I. Anthem of the Great Spirit: 'Ceremonial Night Race' (4:42)
5) I. Anthem of the Great Spirit: 'At the Ancient Aztec Corn Races Salome Meets Wild Talker'(2:02
6) I. Anthem of the Great Spirit: 'More Ceremonial Races' (0:50)
7) I. Anthem of the Great Spirit: 'Oldtimers at the Races' (3:48)
8) I. Anthem of the Great Spirit: 'Half Wolf Dances Mad in Moonlight' (8:12)
9) II. Conquest of the War Demons: 'Way of the Warrior' (5:08)
10) II. Conquest of the War Demons: 'Salome and Half Wolf Descend Through the Gates to the Underworld' (4:35)
11) II. Conquest of the War Demons: 'Breakthrough to the Realm of the War Demons' (2:37)
12) II. Conquest of the War Demons: 'Combat Dance' (3:52)
13) II. Conquest of the War Demons: 'Victory: Salome Re-enacts for Half Wolf Her Deeds of Valor' (0:43)
14) II. Conquest of the War Demons: 'Discovery of Peace' (3:36)
15) II. Conquest of the War Demons: 'The Underworld Arising' (10:08)

Disc 2

1) III. The Gift: 'Echoes of Primordial Time' (11:13)
2) III. The Gift: 'Mongolian Winds' (4:12)
3) IV. The Ecstasy: 'Processional' (2:09)
4) IV. The Ecstasy: 'Seduction of the Bear Father' (3:11)
5) IV. The Ecstasy: 'The Gathering' (5:40)
6) IV. The Ecstasy: 'At the Summit' (5:22)
7) IV. The Ecstasy: 'Recessional' (2:02)
8) V. Good Medicine: 'Good Medicine Dance' (13:25)

Enjoy!!

Disc 1:

Terry_Riley_Salome_Dances(1)-Tzadik.zip

http://www74.zippyshare.com/v/5aOhNVuG/file.html

Disc 2:

Terry_Riley_Salome_Dances(2)-Tzadik.zip

http://www116.zippyshare.com/v/YoHFE4YF/file.html

Happy 80th Birthday Terry Riley - "The Book Of Abbeyozzud" - Cantos Desiertos - Zamorra - Dias de los Muertos - Barabas - Ascencion - Tracy Siverman, Violin - David Tanenbaum, Guitar - Gyan Riley, Guitar - William Winant - Percussion - New Albion 1999

Here we have Terry Riley in a more lyrical, less minimalist mode. If you are only familiar with early masterworks such as "In C" and "A Rainbow in Curved Air", you might be perplexed by the angularity and chromaticism of these pieces from the 1990s. It's often hard to follow where Riley is going when he wanders so freely over the harmonic and stylistic map-which makes things all the more interesting. Composed over six years, each of the 28 pieces (here we get 10) has a title that starts with a different letter of the Spanish alphabet, and Riley evokes Spanish guitar music with intricate passagework, Latin dances, and flamenco strumming. The excellent guitarist David Tanenbaum, who commissioned these works, gives them articulate and poetic readings even at their most unwieldy. He teams up for stunning duos with violinist Tracy Silverman in one suite, and percussionist William Winant joins him in another on tabla, marimba, Peking opera gongs, and other instruments. Riley's talented son Gyan, who ultimately led his father to the guitar, joins Tanenbaum on "Zamorra".  This is beautiful music, however I also enjoy Riley's pure minimalism and trance-like works just as much. Needless to say this is a much more accessible side of Riley's output and many listeners will likely prefer this.

Terry Riley did an interesting thing after writing "In C": he essentially went back to being a student, spending years working in India with the vocal master Pandit Pran Nath. It was not until the early 1980s that the groundbreaking Kronos Quartet convinced him to sit down, be a 'Western composer', and write some string quartets. As often happens with composers, the guitar felt too alien to Riley initially when he contemplated writing for it, but in the early 1990s, his son Gyan won a guitar and some lessons in a raffle, and so the guitar and its music filled the Riley home. Soon thereafter Terry Riley was ready to write. The late Rose Augustine, former head of Augustine Strings who was ever at the ready to bring fine composers to the guitar, jumped at the chance to commission him, and "The Book of Abbeyozzud" was born.

"The Book of Abbeyozzud" (ah-BYE-ah-ZOOD) is a word invented by Riley, without any apparent meaning. Riley writes "....these works are indebted to great Spanish music traditions and to those traditions upon which Spanish music owes its heritage". This is evident throughout the recording, and to wonderful effect Riley-style. 

Enjoy

Terry_Riley-Book_Of_Abbeyozzud-Tzadik.zip

http://www33.zippyshare.com/v/bcr4ZdFR/file.html

Happy 80th Birthday Terry Riley - "Cadenza on the Night Plain" - The Kronos Quartet - Rykodisc/Gramavision 1988

The maverick composer and musician Terry Riley turns 80 today, June 24th, and is still going strong.
Going to start off now with a classic recording of four of Riley's works for string quartet, played by the Kronos Quartet (also going strong after several innovative decades).

The Kronos Quartet violinist, founder, and artistic director David Harrington says of the Quartet's remarkably fruitful relationship with Terry Riley, which began in the late 1970s at Mills College in Oakland, California: "There is no other composer who has added so many new musical words to our vocabulary, words from so many corners of the musical world. Terry introduced Kronos to Pandit Pran Nath, Zakir Hussain, Bruce Connor, La Monte Young, Anna Halprin, Hamza El Din, Jon Hassell, and Gil Evans". He continues, "In a crazed world laced with violence and destruction he has consistently been a force for peace. Through his gentle leadership a path forward has emerged. Terry sets the standard for what it means to be a musician in our time".

Riley says of his 35 years of working with Kronos: "Each of our projects together was launched by conversations with both David and me riffing on ideas. I always came away from these planning sessions feeling exhilarated, and these energies would soon get my pen moving toward a melody or a rhythmic pattern-or, in the case of Salome Dances for Peace, a five-quartet cycle. David has this gift, a unique catalytic effect on so many collaborators. Because of this gift, we have this astounding body of work created for Kronos over the past four decades".

Composer and performer Terry Riley is one of the founders (arguably THE founder) of music's Minimalist movement. His early works, notably In C (1964), pioneered a form in Western music based on structured interlocking repetitive patterns. The influence of Riley's hypnotic, multi-layered, polymetric, brightly orchestrated Eastern-flavored improvisations and compositions is heard across the span of contemporary and popular music. Performers who have commissioned and/or played his works include: Kronos Quartet, Rova Saxophone Quartet, ARTE Quartet, Array Music, Zeitgeist, Steven Scott Bowed Piano Ensemble, John Zorn, Sarah Cahill, California E.A.R. Unit, guitarist David Tanenbaum, electric violinist Tracy Silverman, drummer George Marsh, bassist Bill Douglass, the Assad brothers, cello octet Conjunto Ibérico, Crash Ensemble, Abel Steinberg-Winant Trio, pianists Werner Bartschi and Gloria Cheng, Calder Quartet, Arditti Quartet, Amati Quartet, Alter Ego, Sounds Bazaar, Paul Dresher, singer Amelia Cuni, Bang-on-a-Can All Stars, and guitarist Gyan Riley among others.

Terry Riley looking 60 at age 80

To save myself time I am including scans of the brief but informative booklet notes.

Enjoy all

Terry_Riley-CadenzaOnTheNightPlain-Tzadik.zip

http://www35.zippyshare.com/v/N3YcA8h0/file.html

Piano Music of John Adams and Terry Riley - Riley, The Walrus in Memorium - Adams, China Gates - Riley, The Heaven Ladder, Book 7 - Adams, Phrygian Gates - Gloria Cheng, Piano - Telarc 1998

Well here is irony; I am giving myself time to post, and my wifi keeps dropping every few minutes. Due to this it's now 4 in the morning, so I am going to attempt once more to post this disc, which is a rather unplanned post (I have it in a folder next to Riley's freshly posted The Harp of Albion, the only motivation really). I bought this disc for Terry Riley's "The Heaven Ladder, Book 7" as it was a world premiere and I was pretty excited about that. As far as the John Adams works go, I have always liked his piano music, and "Phrygian Gates" is quite enjoyable. This performance I find to be decent, but my version of choice is a recording on RCA with Hermann Kretzschmar playing the piano. The rest of that disc features Ensemble Modern playing Adam's kinetic and fun "Shaker Loops" as well as his Chamber Symphony. Adam's "China Gates" is brief and lovely, and to my ears has always sounded as if it could have been written by the brilliant songstress Tori Amos, especially during her early years (most of the songs on her early albums were for voice and piano only, or her voice accompanied by her piano and harpsichord playing, which was the case on her third album). In fact I will make a mental note, as I have a rare recording of a solo piano suite by Tori Amos that would be worth sharing.  

This is (a brief version) of what Terry Riley had to say about this program:

The Heaven Ladder Book 7 was commissioned by a group of pianists including Gloria Cheng and Kathy Supove. These 1994 pieces are the first totally written out piano works I have written since the late 50"s. Here the 5 pieces Misha's Bear Dance, Venus in 94, Ragtempus Fugatis, Fandango on the Heaven Ladder and Simone's Lullaby are brilliantly performed by one of new music's great pianists. The Walrus In Memorium was written for pianist Aki Takahashi.

This disc was a winner of the Gramophone editor's choice and "recording of the year". Here is a brief
review from Gramophone:

The multifarious pulsings of Adams’s Phrygian Gates (all 26 minutes of it) are more palatable here than on some rival versions, and the relatively brief China Gates (just five minutes) are well worth visiting. Terry Riley’s pieces are more varied in colour and rhythm, less obviously ‘minimalist’, than you might have expected, with the worlds of jazz remaining well within earshot. Gloria Cheng-Cochran seems fully absorbed in the tasks to hand, and the sound is superb.'

I'm going to end here as I'm getting errors now as I type about blogger not saving the draft.. ughh

Enjoy

Terry_Riley_John_Adams_Piano_Works-Tzadik.zip

http://www13.zippyshare.com/v/YQ8AUVdN/file.html

Terry Riley - The Harp of New Albion - Terry Riley, Piano (tuned, just intonation) - Celestial Harmonies 1992

Terry Riley's important "The Harp of New Albion" is one of my favorite piano works employing "just intonation". One of the most transfixing solo piano recordings, Riley's inspiration for this work came from a legendary harp left behind in the New World in 1579, on the shores of Nova Albion, which is now called San Francisco Bay. (A Native American medicine man is 'said' to have found the harp and placed it on a cliff where the westerly winds played upon it and temperature and humidity changes created an ever-shifting set of tonalities) Riley bases the ten movements of The Harp of New Albion on the concept of tonalities. The liner notes explain the complicated ratios Riley devised for tuning his octaves. He says: "The idea of piano as harp influences my method of playing, as does the tuning from which the particular consonances and dissonances determine the emerging energies that flow through both instrument and performer." Although Riley improvises throughout The Harp of New Albion, each movement is defined by structural or composed elements. Astonishingly, the halo of harmonics drifting above his solo piano creates an orchestral sound, complete with horns, reeds, strings and voices. At times, the melodic interplay is ethereal, the micro-tonal relationships within the standing waves of sounds creating a haunting spectrum. Special note should be taken of the majestic Bösendorfer Imperial grand piano, especially tuned for Riley to play in the acoustically-fabulous Academy of Music in München, Germany. The entire recording was accomplished during one incredible night of inspired piano performance. This is music to get lost in, yet also music where every singular tone is of extreme significance. Personally I think Riley creates a world that is ethereal and like an island onto itself; in "The Harp of New Albion" the listener either 'gets it' and feels that they "belong" here, or, perhaps that they have been capsized at sea; "The Harp.." being the only place to swim to, an island of strange sounds.. For me it is certainly the former!

Track listing:

Disc 1: (Total Time: 53'43")

1)The New Albion Chorale/The Discovery  21'31"
2)The Orchestra of Tao 15'30"
3)Riding the Westerleys 16'40"  (I think most listeners will find this mvt especially enchanting!)

Disc 2: (Total Time: 56'22")

1)Cadence on the Wind 5'02"
2)Premonition Rag 6'37"
3)Return of the Ancestors 10'00"
4)Ascending Whale Dreams 8'30"
5)The Magic Knot Waltz 9'25"
6)Circle of Wolves 9'46"
7)Land's End 6'51"

Enjoy!

Terry_Riley_Harp_of_New_Albion-Tzadik.zip

http://www38.zippyshare.com/v/ZJG1HcZ2/file.html


Here's quite a bit of info on The Harp for anyone interested

Among major American minimalist composers, Terry Riley stands as a unique figure. Unlike his contemporaries with whom he is often associated - Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and perhaps John Adams - Riley’s work is notable for its improvisational element and also - since the late 1970s - for its employment of just intonation rather than equal temperament. Ironically, it is these unique aspects of Riley's music that have caused it to have been less studied; the music of his minimalist contemporaries Glass, Reich, and Adams has received more analytical attention. In addition, while Riley's extensive study of North Indian raga with the late Kirana singer Pandit Pran Nath has been frequently mentioned in the literature, the specific influence of Indian classical music on Riley’s compositional process and improvisational technique has not been addressed.

At the core of Riley’s music is the keyboard. The high-C pulse that holds together the composition for which he is best known, In C (1964), is played on a piano. In the late 1960s such extended cumulative tape-loop/delay works as A Rainbow in Curved Air and Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band made extensive use of electronic organs (supplemented, in the case of Poppy Nogood, with soprano saxophone). Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, Riley extensively performed works for multiple layers of electronic organs, such as Persian Surgery Dervishes (1971-72), performed solo through cumulative tape loops and delays. By the release of 1980’s Shri Camel album, Riley was using keyboards modified to play in just intonation, a result of his longtime friendship with La Monte Young and his studies with Pandit Pran Nath.

Then Riley returned to the piano. As he related in an interview, “Around 1980 I bought an old upright and started to play and develop music on piano again. Of course, I’d been aware of La Monte [Young]’s Well-Tuned Piano since ’64, but I’d also been playing both Indian music and electronic keyboards in just intonation. So I decided to tune the piano that way rather than in equal temperament.” Because of the way that the overtones of piano strings resonate sympathetically with other strings, working in just intonation turned out to be a powerful expressive tool for Riley: “I was able to give the music a different shape. The piano has a much greater scope of expressive possibilities than electronic instruments.”

Riley’s piano cycle The Harp of New Albion (1984) is therefore significant in the Riley canon; it not only remains his largest solo-piano work, but it “gives us an unusual insight into his improvisational process.”  The Harp of New Albion that draw upon practices of Indian classical music such as tala, gamak, and jhala.

Tuning

The Harp of New Albion is tuned to a five-limit chromatic scale with C# as its tuning center. This pitch class was a tuning constant for Riley through much of his work from the mid-80s to mid-90s. In a 1986 interview for Keyboard magazine Riley explained:

For many years I played electronic organ and synthesizers. While I was playing the synthesizers, I got together with Krishna Bhatt, who’s a sitar master living in Berkeley. Krishna played in C#, so I started redoing all my pieces in C#. During that period I also started playing more and more piano. At that time I wrote the one piece that was the beginning of all the pieces I’ve done lately, called The Medicine Wheel. It was the first time I did this just tuning in C#, and I’ve kept the piano in that tuning to do both The Harp of New Albion and Salome Dances for Peace. They’re all done in the same tuning.

However, none of the eleven movements of The Harp of New Albion are in the key of C#, making it necessary to distinguish here between tuning center and tonal center. For each movement Riley chooses a tonal center in varying degrees of relationship to the C# tuning center, exploiting the intervallic differences that result from choosing different tonal centers and employing different modes based on those tonal centers. The fact that just intonation does not transpose equally to any key was, of course, historically one of the reasons for the adoption of equal temperament. Riley's music, on the other hand, celebrates the differences in quality that result from transposition.

Pitch  interval  Deviation
  (ratio) (in cents from equal temperment)

C# 1:1 0
D 16:15 +11.7
D# 9:8 +3.9
E 6:5 +15.6
E# 5:4 +13.7
F# 4:3 -2.0
G 64:45 +9.8
G# 3:2 +2.0
A 8:5 +13.7
A# 5:3 -15.6
B 16:9 -3.9
B# 15:8 -11.7

Figure 1: Tuning in The Harp of New Albion, compared with equal temperament.


A: Cadence of the Wind (8:5 from C#)
A#: The New Albion Chorale (5:3 from C#)
  The Orchestra of Tao
B: Land's End (16:9 from C#)
B#: Ascending Whale Dreams (15:8 from C#)
        Circle of Wolves
D: Riding the Westerleys (16:15 from C#) DE F# G# AB C
Premonition Rag DE F AB (C)
  Return of the Ancestors DE F# G# AB C(#)
  The Magic Knot Waltz DEb F# G# A C


Figure 2: Tonal Centers in The Harp of New Albion.


The aesthetic behind Riley’s use of just intonation, "from which the particular consonances and dissonances determine the emerging energies that flow through both instrument and performer," is similar to the Indian concept of raga. For example, not only does Riley choose different tonal centers from movement to movement, much in the fashion of a romantic-era multi-movement work, but each of the four pieces that share D as their tonal center employ a different scale (Figure 2).  For Riley, music in just intonation is a kind of yogic practice: “You know, the idea of yoga is union, union with God. And tuning means atonement, or trying to make two things one, right? So, just intonation has a lot to do with achieving the correct proportional balances of notes in order to create one.”He goes on to say in the same interview:

the effect of music is heightened by being in tune. Resonant vibration that is perfectly in tune has a very powerful effect. If it’s out of tune, the analogy would be like looking at an image that is out of focus. That can be interesting too, but when you bring it into focus you suddenly see details that you hadn’t seen before. What happens when a note is correctly tuned is that it has a detail and a landscape that is very vibrant.

Of course, the reverse axiom is also true; the effect of music is heightened in a different way by being “out of tune” (by equal tempered standards). A particularly striking example in The Harp of New Albion is the piece “Circle of Wolves.”

As a result of Riley’s just intonation tuning, three “fifths” are identifiable as so-called “wolf fifths” - 40/27 (D#-A# and E-B) and 1024/675 (B#-G). It was the “out of tune” quality of these intervals that led to certain keys historically being considered unsuitable for modulation. Of these “wolf fifths,” the most complex (therefore “out of tune”) ratio is 1024/675, heard in this tuning only between the pitch classes B# (C) and G. As a result, B-sharp - the tonal center of “Circle of Wolves” - is the key “most distant” from the C-sharp tuning center. The B-sharp/G dyad (or C-G) makes up the tonic and “fifth” scale degree of the pitch collection that characterizes “Circle of Wolves”; the other pitches in the collection are the two 40/27 fifths. The resulting sonority is as “out of tune” as possible within the tuning system, and Riley explores its unusual quality deliberately by making it the main sonority of his improvisation. The title is a punning reference not only to the “wolf” quality of these fifths but to the classical “circle of fifths” that results from equal temperament.

Riley and Indian Classical Music

Riley recalls first hearing the music of Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan “sometime in the early sixties” but was not interested in studying it at that time. It was not until 1970 that he began studying as a disciple of the North Indian kirana vocalist, Pandit Pran Nath, and making numerous trips to India to study with the Master. Riley appeared frequently in concert with the legendary singer as tamboura, tabla, and vocal accompanist until Pran Nath’s death in 1996.

In spite of this lengthy tutelage, Riley is careful to distinguish his work from raga in the traditional sense of the word:

The purest form of music that I’ve ever heard is raga. I wouldn’t try to create anything different if I were singing a concert of raga, for instance. I would try to sing it exactly as I’ve been taught to sing it. But the other work, the work that is outside of raga, that’s definitely a different category in my mind. I don’t feel like that’s doing a disservice to raga, because it’s not raga.

The Belgian minimalist composer Wim Mertens similarly observes, “one cannot find any real influence [of study with Pandit Pran Nath], since he [Riley] came to Indian music more by thinking through his own musical ideas.” Nevertheless, certain techniques of raga have their counterparts in Riley’s improvisational practice. For example, each raga in North Indian music belongs to one of ten parental scales called thats. Each that has a definite set of seven scale degrees or swaras. While Indian theorists usually acknowledge the existence of 22 srutis - musical tones - within a saptaka (octave), the srutis are nevertheless grouped into seven swaras for each that - and hence for each raga. Individual ragas may omit a particular swara, but the same swara would not be found in two different forms (F and F#, for example, in Western terms). Swarup lists the intervals between the suddha (“pure”) swaras in Indian tuning as, in ascending order: 9/8, 10/9, 16/15, 9/8, 9/8, 10/9, 16/15. The European equivalents, he claims, are 9/8, 10/9, 16/15, 9/8, 10/9, 9/8, 16/15.[17] This corresponds to Riley’s C# major scale.

The scale of “Magic Knot Waltz” is made up of six pitches: D, Eb, F#, G#, A, and C; in Indian terminology this would correspond to Sa, komal (“soft” or “flat”) Ri, Ga, tivra (raised) Ma, Pa, and komal Ni (the sixth swara, Dha, is silent). The combination of komal ni (D) with tivra ma (G#) does not occur in North Indian ragas (unless borrowed from the south), because the combination is not acknowledged among the thats. Riley’s scale, therefore, is not one of the traditional North Indian ragas. His performances of “Magic Knot Waltz” are, however, consistent with raga practice in their virtual exclusion of all pitches foreign to the scale. Also, Ma is the only interval that is raised in North Indian theory, so Riley’s use of G# is consistent with tradition in that regard.

Another parallel with North Indian classical practice can be found in Riley’s application of tala, the rhythmic cycles that are characteristic of a raga performance. The “live” performance, recorded in 1986 but not released until 1992 as part of The Padova Concert, fits quite well into a thirteen-beat tala, the left-hand 3:2 ostinato also analogous to the repeating lahara in Indian performance. A lahara is a short melodic ostinato that is usually used in accompanying a tabla, particularly in tabla solos. It is often used as the equivalent of a metronome when a student is working on any fixed composition.

The “studio” Celestial Harmonies performance, recorded at the Academy of Music in Munich, is actually edited together from two live performances on January 3 and 4, 1986.  Despite Riley’s assurances that “all the takes here were recorded as I performed them with only a few minor cuts and all the breakthroughs and unplanned moments intact, the impact that such edits make on the final product is nevertheless difficult to ascertain. Possibly because of their assembled nature, the cyclic aspect of the Munich “Magic Knot Waltz” is irregular - ostinato lengths tend to fit into 12- or 13-beat cycles, with cadenza-like interjections of varying lengths.

The Munich performance, however, contains a striking moment that is entirely absent from the more cyclical Padova recording: an alternation of a hoedown-like theme with a section that is strikingly similar to Indian jhala. As David Courtney defines jhala:

Jhala is undoubtedly the most characteristic of the instrumental styles. Indian stringed instruments are noted by [sic] a few special purpose drone strings called chikari. These strings are never fretted but are struck whenever the tonic needs to be emphasized (i.e., Sa and Pa). The jhala is a fast paced alternation of main melody string and chikari. This lends itself to interesting permutations of both rag and tal simultaneously.[23]

The construction of the piano, of course, does not allow for special drone strings. Riley’s jhala passages, however, always emphasize A3 and C4 (Pa and komal Ni). Although there is not a literal “rapid alternation” of the drone notes with a melody, Riley does pit the drones against an oscillating pair of dyads (see Example 4). In the first two of the three jhala sections, these dyads have attack points between the attack points of the drone stream, possibly allowing for an “alternating” interpretation.

Another aspect of Indian classical music, all the more striking in Riley’s case because it is found in Indian vocal (rather than instrumental) style, is a technique of ornamentation called gamak. Peter Manuel describes gamak as “a technique in which every note in a passage is approached from its lower neighbor,” and notes that the practice has “crossed over” from Indian classical music to popular genres such as film music. Riley’s improvised passages in “Magic Knot Waltz,” especially the long rhapsodic lines that come at cadential points, employ the same “lower neighbor” ascending-step contour cited by Manuel as essential to gamak.

This vocal orientation in Riley’s music (incorporating a technique such as gamak in an instrumental context, for example) explains the fundamentally melodic character of Riley’s music. Like his minimalist counterpart Philip Glass, Riley downplays Western harmony in favor of developing other parameters. But whereas Glass, in his early work, chose to develop the rhythmic element,[25] Riley’s music is more melodically focused. This emphasis on melodic development perhaps derives from his vocal study with Pandit Pran Nath, although it may also result from his saxophone improvisation technique on pieces such as Poppy NoGood and the Phantom Band (1969), which predate his formal study of Indian classical music. Today, however, Riley clearly attributes this interest in melody to non-Western sources:

Melodic complexity is inversely proportional to the amount of harmonic or polyphonic movement or density of parts. What you have in Eastern or Renaissance music or Gregorian Chant is very ornate melody, but if anything starts to compete with that, it cancels out the effects of the melody. So in the West we opted for the drama, the harmonic and polyphonic complexity. That’s great, but we’re a little bit stuck at this point.

Motives in The Harp of New Albion

More important to me than the Minimalist theme in my work is the interrelationship of motives. Both In C and the later works have a really strong developmental quality, a lot of variation and permutation of motives. This isn’t theoretical; it’s the way I hear.

Most of Riley’s keyboard music through the 1970s was improvised to particular raga-like scale patterns. (It was not until his “G Song,” composed in 1980 for the Kronos Quartet, that Riley returned to fully notated composition.) Riley’s involvement in improvisation goes back to childhood:

One of my cousins played really well by ear, so I would listen to him and try to play what he played. He would make up copies of pieces like Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto. You know, he’d start out with the theme and then improvise on it. I thought that was really neat, so I tried to do that kind of stuff, too.

In fact, Riley was first attracted to Indian classical music through its improvisational aspects: “I’d always been interested in improvised music, and here was an improvised music that had such precision that it was a classical music, too. That idea, I thought, was quite a stunning one: to be able to develop improvisation to the degree that it sounded like it was all composed.”

The goal of tightly structured improvisation is evident throughout The Harp of New Albion. Much of the work is improvised, but improvised passages are found side-by-side with composed ideas. A performance of a movement from The Harp of New Albion can perhaps be compared to a jazz improvisation, in which the theme or “head” is followed by solos over the chord structure before concluding with a return to the “head.” The interchange between “composed” and “improvised,” however, is much more fluid in Riley’s music; John Schaefer describes the piece as having a “spiral form.” As Riley explains it, “Something spins off a little motif¼and gets larger and more arpeggiated, more embroidered. It cycles back to a certain note, but it’s very irregular; it takes a circuitous route.”

Conclusion

The Harp of New Albion as a whole is an important transitional piece among Riley’s compositions, crystallizing the keyboard-oriented improvisations of the previous fifteen years while pointing toward his more formally notated works for acoustic ensembles. Riley’s compositions prior to the release of The Harp of New Albion tended to involve electronic keyboards, in which “tape loops and studio processing often melted Riley’s organ and synthesizer lines into a larger, more liquid context.” The acoustic medium, therefore, allows the listener to focus more on the musical line, and on ideas as they emerge, rather than to be seduced by textures and ambience. In addition, this piece differs from some of Riley’s later recordings - such as Chanting the Light of Foresight, written for the ROVA Saxophone Quartet - in that we hear Riley as his own interpreter. It is this piece’s clarity of texture, combined with its unmediated performance, that makes it faithful to his philosophical and aesthetic aims.

When asked by an interviewer whether “being in tune really does have a profound meaning,” Riley’s response was “Yes, that’s Pandit Pran Nath’s main philosophy. It’s called surma, being in tune. That recognition, that appreciation of the subtle frequencies, is an insight into music [that] we need¼. Being in tune, putting total being and concentration in each note, living through each moment in music as a divine link in the ecstatic experience: These things are important to me now.”

One can find throughout The Harp of New Albion eloquent evidence of these aesthetic concerns. The importance Riley places on “being in tune,” for instance, manifests itself in the careful intricacies of Riley’s tuning system, in which the arrangement of semitone sizes is virtually symmetrical with the exception of F-sharp/G and G/G-sharp (see Figure 3). The ramifications of just intonation, in which tuning is not homogenized by temperament but instead results in differing shades of consonance or dissonance, lead to a listening mode that is conducive to appreciating such nuances. For example, in the “Ascending Whale Dreams” movement, Riley employs a whole-tone scale over a B-sharp tonal center (which, in just intonation, actually features three different types of “whole step” - see Figure 3). This scale dictates the pitch material until nearly halfway into Riley’s eight-and-a-half minute recorded performance, when he abruptly shifts to the other whole-tone collection at [3:54]. The effect of this change is dramatic, in a way that could not be possible using equal tempezrament.

In just intonation, allowing for pitch-class permutation, more than two whole-tone scales are possible, but in “Ascending Whale Dreams” Riley limits himself to two. This self-imposed limitation, and Riley’s extensive development of such limited materials (also discussed earlier in reference to “Circle of Wolves”), is what Riley means by “putting total being and concentration in each note.” According to Wim Mertens, “Riley examines only a small amount of material intensively, and only when the material is exhausted does he add something new to it.” Although Mertens was chiefly referring to earlier keyboard works, such as Persian Surgery Dervishes (1972) or the Keyboard Studies (1964), one can certainly hear evidence of Riley’s exhaustive concentration on the smallest of materials in some movements of The Harp of New Albion. While listening to the “Riding the Westerleys” movement, for example, the listener becomes aware of how Riley’s subtle pedal technique and choice of notes that reinforce the overtones of the D tonal center create a subtly shifting wash of sympathetic resonance. This allows for a listening experience that shifts from foreground to background and back again.

“Living through each moment in music as a divine link in the ecstatic experience” not only refers to Riley’s improvisational style but also his raga-inspired aesthetics. “The Magic Knot Waltz,” among other movements, offers an excellent realization of these aims; “Magic Knot Waltz” is a particularly fine example for study since one can compare the two recorded versions. One is struck not only by Riley’s considerable dexterity but by the fecundity of his ideas.

Nevertheless, Riley’s emphasis on the “moment” in performance means that to fully grasp his art in an analytical fashion, one must go to the recorded artifact. This means that Riley’s music may indeed have more in common with John Coltrane or Ravi Shankar than it does with that of composers such as Philip Glass or Steve Reich. It is also for this reason that Riley’s music has not enjoyed the same scholarly attention that the music of Reich or Glass has. Much of Riley’s music, therefore, remains largely unexplored by music analysts; but careful study of the recorded performances of his music may well lead to a new aural-based theory, in which Western analytical technique is linked with centuries-old traditions.

David Tanenbaum - Guitar Recital - Alan Hovhaness - Terry Riley - Aaron Jay Kernis - Steve Reich - Lew Richmond - Frank Zappa - New Albion 1997

This is one of my all-time favorite solo guitar recordings, with the great guitarist David Tanenbaum.

An earlier post also featuring David Tanenbaum (and also on New Albion) playing the music of Lou Harrison with William Winant and guests is of equal importance to me, it's a disc entitled "The Perilous Chapel" and I urge everyone who has not checked it out yet to do so, it's a rather special disc full of the most wonderful sounds (everything from bells, percussion, Tibetan water bowls, and of course guitar, among other instruments). It is here:

http://nocturna-artificialia.blogspot.com/2014/08/lou-harrison-perilous-chapel.html

I originally bought this disc, like I have with many other compilations-for the two Guitar Sonatas

by Alan Hovhaness. Almost everything on the program is great listening in my opinion, my favorites being Reich's "Nagoya Guitars" (which is actually a translation by Tanenbaum of the original composition, "Nagoya Marimbas" for two marimbas. I like the original however I like the guitar version played here even more), Lew Richmond's "Three Preludes", and of course the Hovhaness Sonatas. The Kernis "Partita" is quite nice as well. The 39 second "Waltz" by Zappa is forgettable and while I love Terry Riley, "Barabas" doesn't really do it for me.

David Tanenbaum received a phone call from his friend the composer Aaron Jay Kernis long after this recording project was already underway. "I went to Steve Reich's concert last night" Aaron told Tanenbaum, "and heard a piece that I think could work for guitars." David Tanenbaum apparently called up Reich right away and got a copy of Nagoya Marimbas, which was commissioned by the Nagoya College of Music in Japan. Tanenbaum found the piece to be sight readable on two guitars, and after a period of playing it and consulting with Reich, he lowered the original pitch a fifth but everything else was left the same. Then Tanenbaum added a few slurs, harmonics as well as fingerings to exploit the guitar's possibilities. 

Lew Richmond is the least known of the composers here; in fact he's virtually unknown and seems to have no problem with that. An amateur musician, Zen-priest and software specialist, Richmond's "Three Preludes" are inspired by the guitar playing of Alex de Grassi. Like Hovhaness or Kernis, he chose to cloak an old form in a new language. These pieces arrived unsolicited in the guitarist's mail one day during the 90's.

The Aaron Jay Kernis "Partita" is based on Baroque forms, hence the name, and came about gradually after Kernis and Tanenbaum discussed and argued about the piece (which was initially written as a three movement solo guitar suite in 1981) which lead (in 1995) to the addition of a new movement, "Echo", and to a modification of the opening movement "Ciacona" to include Echo's low C tuning of the bass string.

The two Hovhaness sonatas have been virtually neglected, never recorded and rarely played, but happily they are favorite works of the guitarist who plays them both with magic. They are also played with faster tempos than Hovhaness indicates; Tanenbaum found the original tempos often too slow for the guitar to uphold and most movements are therefore faster.

*I'd like to point out that I have been posting many discs with Apple Lossless encoding lately, which still uses m4a files-but lossless quality. As Zshare can only host 200mb, I have to split it into 2 parts. In this case, the second upload is the last two tracks plus the album art. Just add the last two tracks from the part 2 upload to the part 1 folder to make it the complete disc. I mention this only because there was a bit of confusion about this, I received a few emails from folks.

Enjoy!

First Part:

David_Tanenbaum_Guitar_Recital(1)-Tzadik.zip

http://www90.zippyshare.com/v/izJVlwB5/file.html

Second Part (last 5 tracks, the Hovhaness Sonata)

David_Tanenbaum_Guitar_Recital(2)-Tzadik.zip


http://www64.zippyshare.com/v/8q4KNJqv/file.html

Lou Harrison-Seven Pastorales (and music of Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Terry Riley)

This Music Masters disc has long been a favorite of mine, to be exact when it came out in 1992.
Lou Harrison's Seven Pastorales is a piece that I hold dear, it is beautiful and poignant on many
levels. I met Lou Harrison at the 80th Bday celebration concert in his honor, an all Harrison program.
When I mentioned to him how very moving I found the Seven Pastorales to be, and that It was
one of my favorite compositions-he put a firm and kindly hand on my shoulder and whispered to me
"it's one of my favorites too!". He was one of the sweetest and kindest persons I have ever met.

The Estruscan Concerto of Peggy Glanville-Hicks is also a wonderful piece, full of life and brimming
with lovely ideas, oft Eastern exotic (in a Lou Harrison, Alan Hovhaness vein), but always in her own
idiosyncratic and inventive voice. Her opera "The Transposed Heads" is perhaps her most popular
work, and one of my favorites as well.

"June Buddhas" by Terry Riley is a setting of four choruses from The Mexico City Blues of
Jack Kerouac. For those who instantly think of the extremely important composition "In C",
when hearing Riley's name, this piece will seem quite the surprise. Imo this piece is a tad
under-inspired but perhaps you will feel differently. Enjoy this very special disc.

http://www37.zippyshare.com/v/17387933/file.html