The music of Terry Riley seems to exert a powerful influence on its audience, as witness the network of interactions still pulsating through Stockholm after his few weeks here during March and April of 1967.

Cafe Mejan is a freewheeling adjunct to the Stockholm Academy of Art and it was here that as many as a dozen jazz and rock musicians gathered many times to blow circles and ellipses on the "In C" charts. Riley's music tends frequently to accommodate a complete environment and at Mejan it became street theatre, amid scenes of wild abandon. During one evening performance a violin was savagely and utterly wrecked over the piano. Drunks would wander in from the street, eyeing the proceedings with that special glazed look amid the regular throngs of beautiful people. Sometimes in the afternoons a boy alone would blow Riley figures to the accompaniment of Mejan's echo, on a dervish flute of his own manufacture. This was during autumn 1969, but shortly before midsummer there had been an amazing scene at Vitabergspark in Stockholm, where Bo-Anders Persson and the 'International Harvester' were laying down some heavy Riley sounds to an excited pop audience. Guitarist Persson was part of the Royal Academy of Music group which recorded "In C" with Riley at Swedish Radio in 1967 and since then he has given organ recitals of Riley's music around Scandinavia. 'International Harvester' used a bowed electric bass to generate a powerful ground tone, over which guitar, flute, drums and chant cycled hypnotically before a crowd overflowing joyously in silhouettes along the rooftops. The music was very loud and sounded dangerous, against the writhing of those swaying crowds. My mind's eye could hear Riley speaking, "Most of my musicial experience has been in the jazz hall, or places where musicians are actually on top of the notes they're playing, every note is danger. I think that music has to have danger, you have to be right on the precipice to really be interested, not gliding along playing something that you know. If you never get on the brink you're never going to learn what excitement you can rise to. You can only rise to great heights by danger and no great man has ever been safe."

Whilst Riley was rehearsing his composition, "Olsson III", with the teenage students at Nacka School of Music, both he and the students were subjected to fierce musico-political blockading. The final concert which was held on April 27th at Nacka, was absolutely tremendous and the upproar at the end was a clear indication of the excitement that the teenagers discovered in the music. After Riley had left Sweden for home, the students petitioned quite angrily to have their orchestra director fired, but a compromise was struck on account of the director's age and the students allowed him to stay. There was little doubt however, that Terry Riley's music had gained a substantial number of enthusiasts.

Riley himself feels that confrontations such as this are being attempted on more fronts in Sweden than elsewhere in Europe. For him this seems to reflect a little of the situation in New York where, as he put it, "There's only the present, the stark, brutal, beautiful, screaming present. In New York there's no past to hide in because it's all destroyed as soon as it's built. As soon as the city gets to where it's at, things have moved on. This is real time, timeless time for those who can hang onto its pulse, but probably hell for those who can't keep up or who have been sucked up its exhaust pipes."

Typical of Riley's more recent concerts is one performed in the late spring of 1969 by 'Poppy Nogood and the Persian Surgery Band' in which, to quote Riley, "We played from midnight to sun-up with the Moog chugging out patterns which we played against -drums, vibes, strings, keyboards and Moog synthesizer." Other concerts have featured the 'Daughters of Destruction' and at New York's Steinway Hall, 'Poppy Nogood's Phantom Band' performed a 'live tape' using the 'time-lag, looping and phasing accumulator', which is essentialy a roll of recording tape and two tape-recorders.

As might be expected, Riley is extremely interested in tuning and on this subject he says, "I've worked out a few pieces in just intonation, one technique is to use voltage-controlled electronic sound generating equipment. I've spent a lot of time studying the frequency relationships of various intervals and I have a Vox organ on which I can tune different scales. There are whole worlds down there in those intervals when you get into it.

"Still I also like tempered tuning and will probably continue working on it from time to time. Lamonte Young has pointed out that the reason why you never get tired of listening to the blues is that the pitches in the Dorian blues, the sad moaning blues, are in perfect agreement with the overtone series of the fundamental pitch. You can keep singing the blues for ever because it's one of the few scales that are built absolutely on a chord of nature. So in my 'Keyboard Studies' I play only on the pitches that are in the blues and that's why people think they're hearing bluesy dances and things going.

"I've been thinking a lot about constants, which is the oriental idea of being able to get far out. You can get as far out as you want if you relate to a constant. Working with time in this way you really get to know the constant and you find yourself in an entirely new area. Finding the right pulse rate is like finding the tuning which is perfect and settled. We always found that if we started a little bit too slow, automatically everybody would get into the time, because at one pulse rate everything works perfectly. Finding this at the beginning, this tuning up to time, sometimes takes as much as half an hour. I've been working essentially with time and a lot with pitch, the pitch is very important.

"I composed a tape in November 1966 for the 'World' (a long Island club) but the 'World' closed before the tape was finished and this was intended to be danced to. I've got an idea about getting a dance company that I could play for, no choreography, just pattern dancing with people, this is what I'm doing and this is exactly what the orchestra at Nacka was playing. Working with tape is more like composing, which I never enjoyed, sitting at a desk and writing music. That's why I put my music down on a tiny sheet of paper and spend all my time playing. I like working with tape but I don't want to work without live musicians. I still think that 'live tape' has a lot of possibilities and there's a lot I can do with it still.

"People are going to learn new ways to play music in the next twenty years, they're going to learn a lot from the orient and a lot more about pitch. When it all comes together it will be a very basic, although perhaps a complicated music."

Two recorded albums have been released in the Columbia masterworks series since I wrote an introduction to Riley's music a few years ago (Jazz Monthly, July 1967). "In C" (Columbia MS-7178) was recorded early in March 1968, with Riley leading a group of avant-garde composers and performers from the State University of New York at Buffalo, in a session with which Riley was extremely happy.

The group featured Margaret Hassell (pulse, piano), Jon Hassell (trumpet), Terry Riley (soprano saxophone), Edward Burnhan (vibraphone), Jan Williams (marimbaphone), Stuart Dempster (trombone), Lawrence Singer (oboe), David Rosenboom (viola) and David Shostac (flute). The score is reproduced in the album notes and is no more than a starting framework for improvisation, comprising 53 figures which are played sequentially by all the performers apart from the pulse. The pulse consists of even eighth notes struck throughout the performance on the top two Cs of the piano. Each performer takes his time from the pulse but exactly where he places his downbeat, when and for how long he takes his rests and when he chooses to move on to the next figure, is entirely up to him. The performance continues until every member of the group has reached the fifty third figure. A complete performance usually lasts between 40 and 90 minutes and this particular one lasts for 43 minutes. The recording was put together in three additive takes which were all mixed together, firstly with all the eleven instruments, secondly with all the instruments apart from the pulse, and thirdly with just trumpet, saxophone, vibes, trombone, oboe, viola and flute. Earphones were used by each musician to synchronise to the earlier recording. As the piece progresses, its modality moves from C to E to C to G.

"In C" begins right on the start pulse and the group takes several minutes to really get tuned for time. Tremendous tensions are built up in a particular way but the whole is very restful, timeless. It indicates the delicate balance between chaos and love, between birth and death. Suddenly there is a birth - you can see it from the score - which becomes a universe of sound and you can hear the progress of its existence within the sound into which it was born. The grooviest parts are those which are most extended, parts with those ringing concurrences of so many possibilities of the theme, all swinging together. And finally the figure dies, to be reborn at some other time. It always comes as a surprise to experience this view of time, but for those who know this experience, Riley's music has a great deal to give. It is interesting to consider the direction in which Terry Riley's music is pointing. This timelessness exists in all kinds of music, Lester Young had it, so had Bach and, on one level so had acid rock. Riley's music focuses on that timeless constant, where time is not merely duration but the content of events. It is highly eventful music and goes through all the scenes imaginable. The performers can change the figures line by line, displacing the notes from light to dark, displacing the pulses from light to heavy. There is no 'loud' or 'soft', there is no tempo, but there is the pulse. There is something rather metronomic and insistently regular about the piano pulse in the "In C" album, which sometimes irritates, but I find new things every time I listen to the record because there are so many events, there really is so much happening.

The second album (Columbia MS-7315) is titled after a poem by Riley, "A Rainbow in Curved Air", which appears in the liner notes:

"And then all wars ended. Arms of every kind were outlawed and the masses gladly contributed them to giant foundries in which they were melted down and the metal poured back into the earth. The Pentagon was turned on its side and painted purple, yellow and green. All boundaries were dissolved. The slaughter of animals was forbidden. The whole of Lower Manhattan became a meadow in which unfortunates from the Bowery were allowed to live out their fantasies in the sunshine and were cured. People swam in the sparkling rivers under blue skies streaked only with incense pouring from the new factories. The energy from dismantled nuclear weapons provided free heat and light. World health was restored. An abundance of organic vegetables, fruits and grains was growing wild along the discarded highways. National flags were sewn together into brightly coloured circus tents under which politicians were allowed to perform harmless theatrical games. The concept of work was forgotten."

"A Rainbow in Curved Air" itself is in strict 14-beat rhythm cycles but each beat can become the downbeat in varying combinations with itself. Here Riley plays electric organ, electric harpsichord, rocksichord, dombeck (a one-faced Persian drum) and tambourine. There is a lot of improvisation on the mode and some pleasing melodic material is introduced. The first Columbia disc was almost boring but the sound was so refined and this reduced the shock. "In C" still had connections with the decadent remnants of an eighteen century beauty culture and the coordinates of the actual sound were almost square for much of the time. We know the music is repeating itself as we listen, going round in eternal cycles just as everything does, but it is more of a surface phenomenon. Picture an ant climbing round on a multi-dimensional balloon, trying to find the edge. The art, if you're looking for that, lies in the interesting distortions produced in the balloon surface. How far can it be stretched? How long is the path taken by the ant and what kind of landscape can it see? How many abysses are encountered? Riley's "Rainbow" is in effect a fluid light system.

The time signatures, pulse-groupings and pulse-rates can be considered as vectors with their common origin in the void, or null-point of the matrix. Strictly speaking a vector is a two-dimensional extension and the concepts are easy, but push it further out to become a tensor function and the pulse-rates and pulse-groupings define the shape or time of the balloon surface. "A Rainbow in Curved Air" is a lightscape which you can hear.

The balance is demonstrated between the topography of our habits as the rigid, mechanical hypersphere of what we assume to be familiar even if we don't understand, set against the convolutions of hypersurfaces extending far out from the same centre. The hypersphere comes and goes, appearing and disappearing with every shade of ambiguity and uncertainty, so that we are able only to feel where we're at. The pivot never changes, it just wobbles very slightly. Time is not a continuous function and, unlike many functions of our familiar existence, cannot be reduced to a circular representation in Fourier terms. So many of our conceptual and everyday functions are continuous that we grossly overlook the fact that time is not like this. "It is only abstract thinking that takes phenomena out of their dynamic continuity and isolates them as static units, whereas the Chinese concept of change, which fills this category of time with content, has been formed by the observation of natural events and especially procreation. It is in constant change and growth alone that life can be grasped at all and if it is interrupted the result is not death, which is really only an aspect of life, but life's reversal, its perversion. The opposite of change is growth of what ought to decrease, the downfall of what ought to rule. Change is not simply movement as such, for its opposite is also movement. The state of absolute immobility is such an abstraction that the Chinese of the period which produced the 'I Ching' could not conceive it. Change rather is natural, a development that can only reverse itself by going against nature." (paraphrased from page 18 of "Change" by Helmut Wilhelm; Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1960). Riley's music nurtures the heavenly heart by causing the circulation of the light, it is revolutionary music. "A Rainbow in Curved Air" turns the Pentagon on its side and paints it purple, yellow and green; it destroys what went before and does that very prettily.

The second side, "Poppy Nogood & the Phantom Band", is in three parts, an organ introduction with some electronics, a continuation by soprano saxophone with the 'time-lag, looping and phasing accumulator' and an organ continuum to close. Riley's Phantom Band produces very abrasive music which has the effect, for a while at least, of destroying all music even including Riley's own. This is what is properly meant by revolutionary music, it destroys the past and can be judged only on its own terms, so that it becomes either some kind of absolute music or a mindless cacophony of machinery and turkey-farm noises. Riley introduces more effects and variety here than I would expect from absolute music, whatever that is. The particular feature of Glen Kolotkin's 'spacially separated mirror images' which slowly fade into the beginning of the Phantom Band side is that they sound as if the tape is playing backwards. If however this section is re-recorded and actually played backwards, it still sounds as if the tape is being played backwards. That's a very difficult effect to achieve and speaks of Kolotkin's talents in this direction. Kolotkin's raw material is organ and as the liner note states, "all the music on this recording is played by Terry Riley". The pulse-rate and drone are quite unsubmerged by the elegance of the electronic processing and after some minutes Riley enters with several repeated organ chords which pick up perfectly the swell of the pulse-rate drone. The sound is very dense and pulsates slowly like a heart-beat until it finally reduces to a drone of held organ notes. The saxophone appears and builds up patterns of looping and phasing multiplicity, which here and there recall Coltrane, mainly due to the modal basis of the music. There is more of a pastoral feeling than I've heard previously in Riley's music, but there are also many more effects used. With the simplest of materials Riley produces some choice patterns and textures, with the marked advantage over his earlier "Reed Streams" recording (Mass Art M-131), of greatly superior tape techniques. The saxophone fades down to leave an organ drone, which echoes metallic and hollow for awhile and suddenly disappears to nothing!

- Keith and Rita Knox

Stockholm, January 15th, 1970