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In 1967, Riley was named as a creative associate at the Center for Creative and Performing Arts at SUNY/Buffalo, and three years later returned to San Francisco, where he became interested in Asian music. Later that year, he went to India to study raga singing with Hindustani master singer Pandit Pran Nath, and the influence of that experience profoundly affected his creative work; Pran Nath remained Riley’s teacher and frequent performance partner until his death in 1996. From 1971 to 1981, Riley served on the faculty of Mills College in Oakland, where he initiated an Indian music program and studied North Indian vocal techniques and music; in 1979, he was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He later taught at the California Institute of the Arts, Nairopa Institute in Oakland and Christi Sabri School of Indian Classical Music in New Delhi, and served as composer-in-residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts and Arcosanti, Paolo Solera’s experimental town in Arizona’s high desert. Terry Riley has remained an active creator and participant in international music life, issuing his 51st recording in 2023.

In the late 1970s, during his tenure at Mills College, Riley met David Harrington, founder of the Kronos Quartet, then in residence at the school. Harrington persuaded Riley to write something for them, and in 1981 he created Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector, which began the decades-long collaboration between composer and ensemble that has since yielded more than two dozen works. Kronos premiered Sunrise with two other of Riley’s compositions at Town Hall in New York on September 25, 1982.

Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector ended the period in Riley’s career when he had not created a traditionally notated composition in 16 years, instead devoting himself to an intensive study of Hindustani music, exploring the rapidly expanding world of sound resources in the lab and studio in a series of influential recordings, and teaching at Mills. Riley’s long engagement with improvisation as well as with Indian ethos and melodic, rhythmic, tuning, and organizational musical elements led him to create a work for Kronos in which composer and performers are equal collaborators, in which the composer establishes a metric framework within which discrete music modules are arranged according to the players’ preferences. Kronos’ Harrington wrote that such a process “encourages each member of the group to think like a composer. We found pleasure in the communication required to make group decisions.”

Riley laid out the ground rules for performing Sunrise: “There are repeatable modules lettered A to Y. All but E, G, U, and Y are 14 beats long. However, all modules are some multiple of seven beats. 

“The performers are asked to design the overall flow of the progression from A to Y in advance. Any module may be repeated as many times as desired. Any module may be returned to from any other module. Any module may be played as a solo, duo, trio, or quartet. In specified instances, parts from different modules may be exchanged. 

“Octaves may be transposed up or down when possible. Bowings, phrasing, dynamics, and special string effects are left to the discretion of the performers. Tempo changes, accelerandi and ritardandi are permitted when they enforce musical continuity. The overall duration is left to the performers.”

Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector evokes a wide range of musical references, some insistently, some just as hints, all subject to the performers’ choices and the listener’s experiences—the rhythmic insistence of minimalism, bluegrass fiddling, jazz riffs, North Indian ragas (i.e., melodic patterns), folk dance, free improvisation. Despite its evocative title, however, it is not “about” anything capturable in mere words. In 1973, Riley had contributed some music to the soundtrack of French filmmaker Joël Santoni’s Lex Yeux Fermés (“Eyes Closed”) from which a few ideas found their way into Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector. “The title occurred to me,” Riley admitted, “one morning over breakfast during a conversation with Delphine Santoni, Joël’s seven-year-old daughter: we talked about how there might be a collector who came around every day and gathered up all the dreams so that they could be redistributed the next day.”

Silence is also the pervasive aural canvas upon which all music is “painted,” and maintaining it is necessary for the audience’s full appreciation of a work. (One celebrated American conductor recently stopped a performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony cold when a ringing cell phone shattered the deeply introspective mood; the same conductor had to break off another performance and start again when a medical emergency struck an audience member near the stage.) Among those who have considered the effect of this communal silence in our public musical life—essentially questioning the audience’s contribution to and awareness of the far-from-static environment in which music is received—was that most iconoclastic of all America’s musical mavericks, John Cage.

In a 1948 lecture titled “A Composer’s Confession” at Vassar College, Cage spoke of his desire “to compose a piece of uninterrupted silence and sell it to Muzak Co. It will be three or four and a half minutes long—those being the standard lengths of ‘canned’ music [i.e., a recorded pop song]—and its title will be Silent Prayer.” Cage did nothing further with his idea until 1952, when he was invited to visit an anechoic chamber (i.e., completely soundproof) at Harvard. He expected to hear his heartbeat and his breathing, of course, but David Nicholls, in his 2007 study of the composer, wrote that “Cage was surprised to hear two other sounds, one high, the other low; he described them to the engineer, who informed him that the first was his nervous system, the second the circulation of his blood.” Cage abandoned his “honest and naive thought that some actual silence existed,” and went on to realize his conception of a composition entirely of silence with 4’33”, which he allowed could be performed by “any instrument or combination of instruments;” the time span implicit in the title was divided precisely into three movements: 33”, 2’40”, and 1’20”.

Pianist and avant-garde composer David Tudor premiered 4’33” at a benefit performance on August 29, 1952 for the Artists Benevolent Fund at the appropriately named Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York. Cage’s fellow experimental composer Earle Brown recalled that it created “a hell of an uproar… it infuriated most of the audience.” The controversy has not subsided yet. Some say the piece was a joke and Cage just a publicity-seeking charlatan; others view it as a profound insight into, and an invaluable tool toward understanding, the world in which we are all immersed and the part our perception of music plays in it. Cage said it was the most important thing he ever did. This performance gives listeners a chance to decide for themselves.

What do you think?

Con Brio

Kishi Bashi 
Composer, singer, violinist, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter

International tours as violin soloist with electronic enhancements; his recordings evoke varied sound worlds with songs blending Japanese and English lyrics and a range of rock, pop, classical, and Japanese influences; a special affinity for film music, and wrote for the Peabody Award–winning animated children’s show Stillwater on Apple+; his 2019 “songfilm,” Omoiyari, deals with America’s confining Japanese-Americans to internment camps during World War II.

The Face of Past Regret

Billy Childs (b. 1957, Los Angeles)
composer, jazz pianist, arranger

Arranger for Sting, Yo-Yo Ma, Gladys Knight, Michael Bublé, Dianne Reeves, and other leading classical and jazz artists; commissions include Los Angeles Philharmonic, Detroit Symphony, American Brass Quintet, Imani Winds, Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra; President of Chamber Music America (2016-2022); Music Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Guggenheim Fellowship; 13 Grammy^® nominations and five Grammy Awards^®, including two for Best Instrumental Composition.

Build

Jessie Montgomery (b. 1981, New York City)
Composer, violinist, educator

Resident Composer at Bard College, Chicago Symphony Orchestra; Musical America’s “2023 Composer of the Year”; Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation, Sphinx Medal of Excellence; commissions from New York Philharmonic, Metropolitan Opera, National Symphony Orchestra, many others; former member of the Catalyst Quartet.

But, Just a Minute?!

Paquito D’Rivera (b. 1948, Havana)
Composer, clarinetist, saxophonist

Two-time Jazz Journalists Association “Clarinetist of the Year,” named Jazz Master by the NEA, National Medal for the Arts, Achievement in Music Award from the National Hispanic Academy of Media Arts and Sciences, Living Jazz Legend Award from the Kennedy Center; 16 Grammy Awards^® and the first artist to receive Grammys^® in both Classical and Latin Jazz categories; composer residencies with Caramoor Center and Orchestra of St. Luke’s; commissions from Jazz at Lincoln Center, Library of Congress, National Symphony Orchestra, others.

Presidio

Andy Akiho (b. 1979, Columbia, South Carolina)
Composer, percussionist, steel pannist

2022 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Seven Pillars; five Grammy Award^® nominations; Oregon Symphony 2022–2023 composer-in-residence; commissions include New York Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra, Shanghai Symphony, China Philharmonic, Guangzhou Symphony, American Composers Orchestra, Music@Menlo, LA Dance Project; Rome Prize, American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, Lili Boulanger Memorial Prize, Harvard University Fromm Commission, Barlow Endowment Grant.

Emerge

Kevin Puts (b. 1972, St. Louis)
Composer, educator

Peabody Institute of Music faculty and Director of the Minnesota Orchestra Composer’s Institute; Pulitzer Prize in Music for the opera Silent Night; commissions from Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall, Philadelphia Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra, many others; 2023 Grammy Award^® for Best Contemporary Classical Composition.

A Short Flight

Joan Tower (b. 1938, New Rochelle, New York)
Composer, pianist, educator

First woman to win the Grawemeyer Award from the University of Louisville; Gold Baton Award, the highest honor given by the League of American Orchestras; Richard J. Bogomolny National Service Award from Chamber Music America; Musical America’s 2020 “Composer of the Year”; Asher B. Edelman Professor of Music at Bard College; “Made in America” commission from the League of American Orchestras performed during the 2005–2006 season by orchestras in every state.

Lo Infinito

Angelica Negrón (b. 1981, San Juan, Puerto Rico)
composer, singer, multi-instrumentalist, impresario, educator, scholar

Singer and accordionist of the “tropical electro-acoustic dream-pop indie band” Balún; Teaching Artist with the New York Philharmonic Very Young Composers Program; co-author of Acopladitos (“being together in complete harmony”), an illustrated Spanish-language immersion music album for young children; commissions include Kronos Quartet, Dallas Symphony, National Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and New York Philharmonic’s “Project 19,” which commissioned new works from nineteen female composers in honor of the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920 granting women the right to vote.

Bittersweet Synonym

Caroline Shaw (b. 1982, Greenville, North Carolina)
composer, Baroque, folk and modern violinist, singer

2022 Grammy Award^® for Best Composition (Narrow Sea); Pulitzer Prize for Partita for 8 Voices at age 30, the youngest person ever to receive that award; inaugural musician-in-residence at Dumbarton Oaks and resident composer with Vancouver’s Music on Main; commissions from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Cincinnati Symphony, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, BBC, Guggenheim Museum, Folger Library, Carmel Bach Festival, Baltimore Symphony, many others; collaboration with rapper Kanye West.

Time Capsule

CQ Minute Competition Winners
Nick Revel (b. 1986, Wilton, Connecticut)

www.nickrevel.com: “Founding violist of PUBLIQuartet, whose 2019 album Freedom and Faith was nominated for a Grammy; Award^®–winning 2017 commission In DayDream premiered in Carnegie Hall in 2017 and recorded on Revel’s debut album, Letters to My Future Self; created the scale and arpeggio play-along method DragonScales; artistic and executive director of the Norwalk Youth Chamber Ensembles, co-creator of the New York String Studio, board member of the Seabury Academy of Music and the Arts in Norwalk, Connecticut.”

A Future in Process

Paul Mekailian (b. 1998, San Diego)

www.tuxpeoplesmusic.com: “L.A.-based composer, pianist, percussionist, and full-time student at UCLA; lived in the United Arab Emirates from the ages of five to 12, an experience that influenced his compositions; taught himself piano and began composing as a teenager; National Young Arts Honorable Mention Award and Merit Winner, Next Notes American Composers Forum Honorable Mention Award; completing his composition degree at UCLA and plans to pursue a career in film scoring.”