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Riley Entertains Musica Viva by Laura Gibb | April 2006 |
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When you get a chance to work with one of the lynchpins in the development of modern music, you take it. So when Musica Viva found an opening in Terry Riley's current Australian tour, they seized the opportunity with both hands. The protégé of pioneering composer La Monte Young and the contemporary of Steve Reich, Riley’s work with in Paris in 1963 led him to further develop his experiments with tape-loop manipulation, and soon Riley composed the groundbreaking and still-loved work ‘In C’ which seemed to embody a new genre. As reporter Mitch Myers found when he interviewed Riley for ‘This American Life’ in Magnet, May 2001, the iconic composer is not so easy to get hold of these days, just one of the reasons why Musica Viva is so thrilled to be in his company. Riley, lives quietly on his Sri Moonshine ranch in California and is not exactly into self-promotion. Even his bubblegum-pink website is a testament to this. "‘Pran Nath said, 'Just enough fame to keep doing your work is enough,' Riley told Myers, ‘and I thought that was good advice." Riley has also worked for NASA, composing music based on radio waves collected by the Voyager space shuttle and in 2004 he released the album I Like Your Eyes Liberty with the poet Michael McClure. On the topic of his own career development, Riley told Myers that his fruitful and ongoing collaborations with the Kronos quartet "brought me out of an isolated solo performance career. I also started writing for other groups and ended up getting orchestral commissions." Of emerging composers, he went on to say, "What really makes me sad is to see young musicians who are hopeless about their situations. My advice is to put it all into the music. That’s the only thing you can do, because you don’t know what kind of hand fate is going to deal you. At least your own soul is going to be getting some feedback." Terry Riley’s Melbourne performance is at the Australian National Academy of Music on 2 May, presented by Musica Viva.
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