Riley's 'In C' Offers New Music Challenges

Terry Riley’s “In C,” a 1964 composition that uses a couple of underlying rules as guidance for any number of performers playing repeated short sections of music, but not in unison, makes its Sarasota debut as part of New Music New College next weekend.
“The piece is just so cool,” said Ron Silver, who is directing a group of about two dozen musicians drawn from the New College community and surrounding schools, including Booker High School’s VPA program, Booker Middle School, State College of Florida, University of South Florida, the Venice Community Orchestra and the community at large.
The piece includes 53 short patterns played in synchronization to an eighth-note pulse. The catch is that each musician is an independent agent who can play each section of music for as long as he or she desires.
“Every individual instrument chooses when to start pattern one, how long to repeat pattern one, and when to stop,” said Silver. “There is a common melodic framework but the piece is never the same twice.”
YouTube videos of “In C” range from melodic to cacaphonous.
Silver’s hoping to come in at the melodic end, with instruments ranging from cello to bass clarinet to acoustic and electric guitar and “at least three, maybe four, intrepid vocalists.” Silver himself will play the synthesizer.
The eighth-note pulse, of C notes, which in Riley’s performance directions should be laid down by “a beautiful girl” at a piano or marimba, will in this case come from a metronome on an iPad.
“As a player, the pulse is your friend,” said Silver.
The various patterns among the 53 range in complexity from a half beat to 32 beats.
“The first thing I do with all the new players is go through all the patterns,” said Silver, “one through 53. Some of them are very, very simple; some are one note, some are rhythmically quite a challenge to do. Some are not short; one’s the entire width of the page.”
When the players begin to play the patterns and make their own choices, it creates “some incredible sonoroties, sometimes rhythmic tensions,” said Silver. “It’s great when you start to hear yourself sometimes in perfect synch with another player, sometimes out of synch.”
Because there are few rules attached to “In C,” every performance of it is different, and while Silver hesitated to use the word “unique,” the New Music performance will “add the element of space,” he said. It will be performed in the campus’s outdoor PepsiCo Arcade, with musicians on three or four sides, the audience in the center.
“The audience will be able to choose his or her own experience,” said Silver. “Choose to sit in a chair and take in the totality in one space; you can wander around, you can go up and down the rows. It’ll sound different from different areas. In a way, that, I think, really suits this piece much better than it being on a stage with a fixed listening position.”