An interesting trend in rhythmic improvised music seems to be appearing gradually, which faces squarely up to that difficulty of surprise-in-excess which I discusssed in my aesthetics article in the February issue.

As yet there are very few available recordings of the new music, but I imagine this situation will change. One example is by an American, Terry Riley, whose record "Reed Streams" is issued on the Mass Art label (number M-131, available from Mass Art Inc., 305 Canal Street, New York, NY 10013, U.S.A.). Other workers in the new idiom include Lamont Young (who has made no issued recordings), Jan Morthenson (an example is "Some of These", played at the organ by Karl-Erik Welin in the album "Swedish Music From the Sixties". The album is on the Artist label and is available from AB Nordiska Musikfšrlaget, Fack 8, Stockholm Tull, Sweden: Artist ALP 102), and in many ways the British group, the AMM (who have a recording in the can, when someone decides to issue it). Such music certainly represents a break with tradition, in that it makes significant use of parametric effects deriving from the basic material, and in Riley's case I propose to describe the way in which it is constructed.

The phrase "begin to begin to begin to begin to begin" is an example of a stanza that can be sung so that the first word follows directly and smoothly from the last. It can thus be rhythmically sung on a repeated basis so that the phrase becomes a circle, and there is a tempo at which the circle becomes quite hypnotic, falling into a drone in the Indian raga sense.

If now the pulse rate is maintained constant but the rhythmic emphasis is moved slightly, to for example, "begin TO begin TO begin TO begin TO begin", the circularity of the drone will change, becoming more lliptical. Make a further change of emphasis into say, "BEgin to BEgin to BEgin to Begin to Begin" and the elliptic axis of the drone will move.

For this to function properly, the actual pulse rate is of paramount importance and Riley's music seems (subjectively) to settle down, always at the same (medium bounce) pulse. Riley feels that the pulse probably does vary in different performances, but all the evidence points to this not being so.

Having worked towards and settled on the proper pulse rate, some really interesting things start to happen. The phrase begins to strobe with itself, so that a slow beat pattern emerges, in a similar way to the beat note which is produced by two slightly dissonant notes, when they are struck together. The beat rate can be changed from stationary (in tune) to very fast (an interval of a semitone), by varying one or both of the notes, and something similar is achieved by strobing the "begin to begin to begin to begin to begin" with itself. I'm a little doubtful if the strobe pattern can ever be made stationary but it can be made really quite slow, and it can be speeded up and altered in shape by subtle changes in phrase articulation provided the drone pulse holds constant.

Riley's basic instrument is the electric organ, on which the slightly sustained nature of the notes enables the drone effect to be achieved very clearly. Riley's real talent is to be able to hear the strobe patterns and work with them, manipulating them into exotic shapes, sometimes fast and light, sometimes slow and powerful. It is the simplest of drones which produces an ellipse, but some very strange patterns can be obtained by delicately moving the rhythmic details on the drone. Since the strobe pattern is a network of beat notes, the pitching of the notes in the drone is very important and striking a wrong note in one repetition of the drone causes the strobe pattern to collapse to an extent that may be disasterous.

If now the drone is changed to, for example, "begin to think, about how we are to begin to begin" (a stanza that is used in a fragmented manner in Riley's composition, Olsson III), there is a strange feeling of ambiguity as the old drone dies and the new drone establishes itself. Shifts of drone emphasis now produce a whole new range of strobe patterns.

Throughout the process, including the drone changeover, the pulse rate remains hypnotically constant and the eventual object is for the listener to stop listening to the drone, and concentrate purely on the strobe patterns, for it is here that the aesthetics of the music lie. Getting into this situation is what Riley as a performer describes as as "tuning up to time". Finding the right pulse can sometimes take half an hour and if the pulse is a little too slow or a little too fast, Riley finds that after awhile, even when a large number of musicians are involved, everybody automatically gets into it.

But to return to Riley's organ work, we soon begin to appreciate where his genius lies and that is in maintaining that hypnotic pulse whilst manipulating the drone, completely in terms of the strobe patterns produced. At times he works with two or more drones, or fragments of drones, in pattern juxtapositions, and the music produced is very strange, very strong and quite new. The shifting rhythms which generate the outlines of of the strobe patterns give a rhythmic impetus which is amazing, making the whole thing swing like hell. This music is not jazz but it is not classical or pop music in any accepted sense either. It is in fact a whole new area of music.

Among the jazz people who have heard Riley's music there is a fairly sharp division of opinion, but a reasonable proportion of them find it very exciting. There seems little doubt that Riley's basic concept will be used extensively by future jazzmen (indeed, on two recent performances in Stockholm, such attempts have been made by jazz groups, one by the Bengt Ernryd Septet and another under Bo-Anders Persson in a Pistol Theatre concert). The same division of opinion seems to hold true for the avant-garde of the straight music world.

Apart from being exciting, Riley's work at the organ seems to me to be in the nature of an exposition of possibilities and it is his compositions for orchestra that, at times, realise some of the potential power of his method. Here there are very real difficulties because Riley has had to show (teach?) his instrumentalists what was required. Speaking of this question of teaching his method to pupils at the Nacka School of Music, Sweden, Riley said,

"I never tell them how to do anything: I only give them the thing and tell them to find a way to use it, I don't conduct them. I give the musicians these figure contours and pitches and they know that they have to play them at their own rate. But I don't stand in front of the orchestra and keep them busy because that would be against the idea of what I'm trying to do, because they are all supposed to be phasing. I would have to have a thousand hands to conduct everybody there - and I'm just one. This music is not conductable, everybody has to join in it themselves. This is the orchestra of the future, it's not going to be conducted. It's not supposed to sound like anything you've ever heard before."

However, in spite of the problems associated with the orchestra, I have heard a couple of instrumental performances that were sufficient to inform me of the remarkable music that will be produced this way. Fifteen or twenty good musicians working on Riley's music and listening carefully to each other as they go their separate ways, produce a drone which can be startlingly fragmented and rich in tone colours, around which the strobe patterns swirl, leap and girate. The manipulation and projection of the strobe patterns is an act of very delicate balance and it is not uncommon to see Riley wince during an instrumental performance when some musicians hits a rhythm or a pitch which disturbs the pulse momentarily and collapses the parametric pattern structure.

As the instruments move around in time with respect to the pulse rate some very weird rhythmical feelings appear, urged on by the gradual phasing in and out of the various rhythmic figures. There is a disconcerting ambiguity as the rhythms move apart and an effect I can only describe as sensational as the rhythms glide amazingly into synchronism, and the slowly girating drone presents figures which peer in an easily recognisable manner through chaos akin to white noise. A performance can last for one or two hours and it is perhaps because of this that Riley has been described as the Andy Warhol of modern music.

The Mass Art disc "Reed Streams" is an excellent introduction to the music of Terry Riley. Untitled Organ plays for just over 20 minutes, starting with a fade-in entrance, presumably after a protracted period of "tuning up to time", and the strobe patterns are very clear and mobile. Towards the end, the multiple drones become engagingly fragmented and all the organ effects appear which have been earlier described.

The second side is rather different, although the strobe principle is basically the same, in that Riley uses soprano saxophone in a performance of Dorian Reeds which runs almost 15 minutes. He achieves the drone by using what he calls "the time-lag, looping and phasing accumulator", which is essentially a roll of tape and two tape recorders. This gives echoes of blown notes of fixed delays, with decremental amplitudes, which Riley controls at times for unison effects. This sounds like a band of around a dozen soprano saxophones, many of them being well away from the microphone. An interesting feature is that the piece is broken into sections, differing in what I can only call mood. There is a jazz feeling of a far-out kind that outdates jazz as we know it today by a galaxial decade. Riley is far from the greatest saxophonist in the world by conventional standards but his soprano has the right sound and his handling of the strobe patterns is so good as to be alarming at times, including a section which, I think successfully, strobes over two drone periods while maintaining the pulse. Some of the multiple strobe patterns can give a remarkable feeling of assurance, thereby imparting calm. I am sure there are many among the new wave jazz enthusiasts who will find the exciting Dorian Reeds very easy to like.

Both performances were recorded on November 4th and 5th, 1966, in New York City.

- Keith Knox.