Terry Riley

Terry Riley

Hello.

Joseph Ghosn

Hello. Bonsoir.

Terry Riley

Welcome. Bienvenue.

Joseph Ghosn

We’re going to have a discussion with Terry Riley, and we’re going to listen to some music and talk about what we’re going to listen to, if that is okay with you.

Terry Riley

Yes.

Joseph Ghosn

OK. I was wondering, just to start, about music actually. What are your earliest musical memories?

Terry Riley

Listening to the radio, pop songs on the radio, the 1940s, late 1930s. I was born in 1935, so before television. I lived in a... It wasn’t even a town, it was by the railroad tracks because my grandfather took care of the railroad tracks. So the only contact I had with the outside world was the radio.

Joseph Ghosn

Do you have any specific memories of what you were listening to and what you liked, about what you heard?

Terry Riley

The only thing I remember liking, really, was a song called “South of the Border (Down Mexico Way).” I was about three years old, I think. I thought that was a great musical experience in my life up to that point.

Joseph Ghosn

And as you grew up, were there things that caught your ear and mind, and heart actually? With music? Were there other things that you were attracted to?

Terry Riley

Well I began to study piano, I started learning about classical music. So then I became interested in classical, like Bach.

Joseph Ghosn

Actually you mentioned the piano, and you had lessons in piano quite early on, I think. Could you tell us a bit about that? About that instrument and what attracted you to it? And how you fell in love with it, if you did?

Terry Riley

Yeah, briefly because it isn’t really too important. I took, like any child, I took piano lessons. It wasn’t until... I think I was in high school, I was about 15 or 16, that I started to play more and more. I liked to play by ear, I didn’t like to read music when I was young. So I would learn songs on the radio and stuff, and try to figure them out and play them by ear and I think that’s why I’m interested now in improvisation, because I always had an oral approach to music.

Joseph Ghosn

Talking about improvisation I would like to listen to a track of someone who is, I think, important to you, or that you liked.

(music: John Coltrane – “A Love Supreme”)

So that was John Coltrane.

Terry Riley

Yes, of course.

Joseph Ghosn

Of course. I think he was someone whose music you liked very much.

Terry Riley

Right. I was probably going to graduate school before I heard John Coltrane. I was probably about 19 or 20. I was hanging out with La Monte Young, a good friend who was also in graduate school, another composer. We went to hear John Coltrane in San Francisco play with his quintet. He was different because, as you heard by this... This is A Love Supreme example... There’s an interesting thing he discovered as an improvisor, was to work with chord clusters in different parts of tetrachords, which is to say, the first part of the scale, the first four notes, and maybe the next four notes of the scale. He would use permutation combinations on those notes instead of playing up and down the scale like a lot of jazz musicians were doing. He was interested in a stasis. Building this block of sound, that wasn’t necessarily always forward moving, it would take a while before it would gather momentum and go forward. And I think it was this combination that really interested me also as a composer.

Later on when I started studying Indian classical music, I found out that this was a prime technique of improvising in Indian classical music as well.

Joseph Ghosn

Have you listened to Coltrane for a few years after you first heard him?

Terry Riley

Oh yeah. I followed him, I followed his career. When I was in New York I got to hear what I think was his last public concert. By that time he had changed a lot, he was playing with a whole orchestra of his colleagues. He had two drummers, he had two bass players, he had all his saxophone colleagues like Pharoah Sanders, and Don Cherry was playing in it. Many different people, so it was a big orchestra of improvising jazz musicians. By this time he had developed this concept of just a big wall of sound that it was hard to differentiate melodies out of.

Joseph Ghosn

Yeah. So was it something that truly inspired you for your own music, at the time?

Terry Riley

I think I liked what he was doing at that point because I like anybody that is willing to take chances and move on from their established style and not worry that the audience would follow. So I very much appreciated what he was doing, but as far as the actual musical ideas, I still was very much enamored by what he did with his quintet.

Joseph Ghosn

Right. You mentioned you discovered him with La Monte Young? So that was around the early ’60s?

Terry Riley

Yeah about 1961.

Joseph Ghosn

Could you tell us about those years, that you spent at Berkeley?

Terry Riley

Yeah I was going to the University of California. La Monte was my closest friend during those years, and kind of a mentor for me too, because he had done some early experiments with what would be called minimalism. That is, creating pieces out of just long tones, with no melodies, no rhythms. He wrote a piece in 1957 called... When he was still pretty young, probably about 17 or 18... called “For Brass,” and it was all brass instruments, with just long tones. So that concept for his teachers was overwhelming, they wouldn’t accept his as a musician because they felt this was not... If it didn’t have rhythm and melody it wasn’t music.

Joseph Ghosn

So at that time, what were you working on? What kind of music were you working on? Did you get into repetition at that point or was it something else?

Terry Riley

I used to improvise with La Monte a lot. We liked to play two-piano music together. He was a jazz musician too and had played in LA with many musicians that later became well known. I was starting to discover jazz at that time, myself. Although I’d been hearing Coltrane, I didn’t consider myself a jazz pianist.

Joseph Ghosn

Did you ever want to become a jazz player?

Terry Riley

I wanted to become one but I realized it wasn’t me. I had to choose another kind of path because jazz... I mean, in a sense, I think I am a jazz musician because jazz, in its broader concept, is a kind of improvisation, where you take an idea and develop it through improvisation. It isn’t jazz in the sense of the Afrocentric music, but it’s jazz in the sense of its basic soulfulness.

Joseph Ghosn

Right. I would like to listen to your first record.

(music: Terry Riley – “Untitled Organ”)

This is course way longer, it’s about 20 minutes, it’s called “Untitled Organ.” It’s on the first LP you released. How do you feel about that now and can you tell us about that recording and how it came?

Terry Riley

I couldn’t tell you how I feel about it now, but I could say how it came about.

Joseph Ghosn

Yes please.

Terry Riley

I had just moved to New York, and I didn’t have any keyboard instruments. I was very poor and there was a friend named George Maciunas, he’s the founder of this group called Fluxus. He was a friend and he had this old harmonium that was driven by a vacuum cleaner motor, pushing air through it. He gave it me, so I started playing it and I became fascinated with the noises of the keyboard and by playing a repeated pattern the noises would change, and so it was like looking at a very slowly moving picture, very slowly moving picture. I decided that this was something I should pursue. There was also... One of the other ideas about it is, I wanted to develop an improvisational technique, and I thought if I could play one pattern really well, then I could expand out from that pattern, which is actually what has happened during my life. It was kind of a starting point, of a concept in music.

Joseph Ghosn

So a starting point of the repetition?

Terry Riley

Yeah, at the beginning I was working a lot with tape loops as well. Tapes loops are, of course, a form of repetition. Applying that to live performance... This particular recording is after... I had also been living in Paris before that, and made a recording with Chet Baker, who was a wonderful jazz musician who probably many of you know. I started making tape loops of Chet Baker for a theater performance. We were going to do at the Théâtre Récamier here in Paris.

Joseph Ghosn

Théâtre de Récamier, yes.

Terry Riley

So this “Untitled Organ” piece is actually a way to continue that idea without using loops.

Joseph Ghosn

I have an excerpt of “The Gift,” we can listen to it, if you want.

(music: Terry Riley – “Music for the Gift”)

Terry Riley

Yeah so it would take a long time to really explain how this all came about, but we were working with some actors from The Living Theatre, and also some Italian actors here in Paris that do this theatre piece. So one of the, “Sheemooshe” was one of the... “She moves, she follows,” was one of the lines from the play. So I just looped it and so all you hear is, “Sheemooshe.” It became a rhythm for the counterpoint to the music. For the musical idea I asked Chet Baker and his quartet to play, Miles Davis’s “So What.” I don’t know if any of you... You must know this piece. It was...

Joseph Ghosn

Why this piece in particular?

Terry Riley

Because it’s a model piece that moves between a dorian mode, moves between D and E flat. So when you move between D and E flat, as you’re improvising you get a model wash of no man’s land of tonality. I thought it would be an interesting idea to create a completely different, almost orchestral piece out of this improvisation. So I had each player in the quartet solo separately and I recorded them all separately and then I cut them up into loops.

Joseph Ghosn

You were editing what they were doing.

Terry Riley

Yeah I was working with an engineer at the Florence Bernhart Theatre, the french radio. So, it was like taking these as raw materials to create a completely different effect in the music.

Joseph Ghosn

Actually why did you move to Paris? It was 1962?

Terry Riley

I moved to Paris because probably all my friends had been moving to Paris. All my musician friends were moving to Paris. Except for La Monte, he went to New York. Paris was a legendary place that a lot of music history had happened, and I wanted to experience the atmosphere of Paris.

Joseph Ghosn

What was your life like in Paris then?

Terry Riley

I did all kinds of odd jobs to survive here, but mainly I played a piano at a bar on Rue Pigalle called Fred Payne’s Artist Bar, where Cole Porter actually had played, I think in the ’30s or ’20s. So I played all night there. I’d start about ten at night and finish about four in the morning. It stayed open late. Then I also got a job playing for floor shows. Playing with some jazz musicians at floor shows. Playing for novelty acts, like dancers and acrobats.

Joseph Ghosn

OK, so you were living the life.

Terry Riley

It was an interesting life because I was meeting all kinds of... I met Daevid Allen right away after I came to Paris. Daevid Allen who is part of the Soft Machine and also Gong, he formed this band Gong. Daevid and I became close friends and would do performances in bars here in Paris.

Joseph Ghosn

You played together?

Terry Riley

I played piano and he would read his poetry.

Joseph Ghosn

What kind of piano were you playing at the time, were you playing jazz, improvising, or was it...?

Terry Riley

No, it was a combination of just trying to improvise in the spirit of the poetry. It had some jazz in it but it would depend on really what... Daevid had a great voice and a great ability to read his poetry in a very rhythmic and interesting way. He was Australian, he had that Australian accent so it wasn’t like your ordinary poetry. It was quite unusual.

Joseph Ghosn

And you traveled through Europe at the time? You didn’t stay only in Paris?

Terry Riley

Yeah, I traveled through Scandinavia doing happenings, street music and happenings with this actor and play write, Ken Dewey. Then we went to Russia and did some happenings in Saint Petersburg. Yeah, I did a bit of traveling before I came back to the States.

Joseph Ghosn

And did the idea of the music that you wanted to make, was it taking place during this trip? Did you have help...

Terry Riley

Well it was really formative doing the piece with Chet Baker because then I realized that I was on to something that I could develop, using tape loops as a lead-in to writing music for live musicians. So the first thing that happened to me when I came back to the States was I wrote “In C,” which was a piece... Kind of like tape loops for live players.

Joseph Ghosn

So when you came back to the States you went to New York?

Terry Riley

No, I came to San Francisco.

Joseph Ghosn

San Francisco, and this is where you worked on “In C,” and...

Terry Riley

I didn’t work on it, I wrote it in one night.

Joseph Ghosn

One night. Right.

Terry Riley

It wasn’t any work, it just came to me as an idea.

Joseph Ghosn

What was the first reception like? How did people respond to it the first time you played it?

Terry Riley

It was premiered at the San Francisco Tape Music Center which was an independent place for a bunch of hippie musicians. Beatnik musicians too and people who were in experimental avant-garde dance and music and visual arts. So yeah, it got a very good reception and there were many notable musicians in the first performance.

Joseph Ghosn

And did you quickly have the idea of doing a record of it, and releasing it?

Terry Riley

No, I didn’t. I left for Mexico after I wrote “In C.” I spent three months just traveling around in a bus, in Mexico, trying to figure out what the next step would be. I went all through Mexico and I ended up running out of money again and going to New York, and trading in my bus for a loft to work in.

Joseph Ghosn

So in New York you met up again with La Monte Young?

Terry Riley

Yeah, I reconnected with La Monte in New York and I started singing in the Theatre Of Eternal Music with Tony Conrad and John Cale.

Joseph Ghosn

Just maybe listening to a piece of La Monte Young, just a few minutes.

Terry Riley

What’s that?

Joseph Ghosn

We’re going to listen to a piece of La Monte Young.

Terry Riley

Oh, OK.

(music: La Monte Young – extract from the Tortoise, his Dreams and Journeys)

Joseph Ghosn

What was the impact of playing with La Monte Young at that time for you?

Terry Riley

Well, as you hear in the music, La Monte’s music, for a long time and up until recently, consisted of just the harmonic series up to the ninth harmonic. Essentially, if it was in the key of C, you have C, G, B flat, D in that chord. Again, it was a static chord like he began with in 1957, but now it was in just intonation, that they were tuned to the harmonic series. This was due to the impact of Tony Conrad who brought just intonation into the band and said, “Well, if we’re singing these intervals, we should be singing them in tune.”

Joseph Ghosn

What do you think you took from playing with that band, with Tony Conrad, John Cale, La Monte Young? How influential was it on your own music playing?

Terry Riley

I became very interested in just intonation myself. After I left the band, I got an electronic organ and I started tuning my electronic organ to just intonation. I think the general concept of La Monte’s music has a very strong spiritual base, that it tries to awaken people to other realities in music than just entertainment. That was also something I was interested in and eventually took me to India.

Joseph Ghosn

What year did you go to India?

Terry Riley

I went to India in 1970, to study with Pandit Pran Nath, who was also La Monte’s teacher.

Joseph Ghosn

Of course. Before that, you started playing these all-night concerts.

Terry Riley

Oh yeah, that was another part of it, is the long durations. Trying to create experiences, psychological experiences in music of long duration. It started at 10 PM and then ended at sunrise.

Joseph Ghosn

So you played the whole night? It was a very psychedelic experience.

Terry Riley

I didn’t play the whole night. What I’d do is I’d play a set of an hour and then I’d play that set back, recorded, to the audience, and then I’d play the next set and then play the recording of that. So I played every other hour.

Joseph Ghosn

Alright. Can we listen to one of those sets?

Terry Riley

Do we have it?

Joseph Ghosn

We have one.

(music: Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band – Live at SUNY)

This was New York, March 22nd 1968. Just an extract. It’s credited to Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band. Could you tell us a bit about the system you created to do these concerts? Because these are solo.

Terry Riley

Right, solo concert. There’s a lot to talk about here in a short time, but essentially there’s several streams of ideas that emerge in this recording, or this concert, and in the others, all night concerts. First I’d start playing saxophone due to the influence of Coltrane, soprano saxophone. And the other thing was, while I was in Paris working with Chet Baker, I discovered this time lag accumulator technique, where one tape recorder would feed into a second one to create an endless kind of looping technique, and I could do it live so it would gradually change over a period of time.

Joseph Ghosn

It’s a sort of an echo.

Terry Riley

Yeah, it’s a feedback echo. Instead of doing a “bomp-bomp,” it’s taking a long phrase, about a three second echo, and that three seconds is gradually looping like this. When I was playing, I was trying to play with that rhythm to make it do different things.

Joseph Ghosn

So you’re playing with yourself, in a way. [laughs] Sorry. You’re playing with what you were playing before.

Terry Riley

Yeah.

Joseph Ghosn

That’s the idea of the Phantom Band.

Terry Riley

That’s the idea of the Phantom Band. I didn’t have band members, they were all phantoms.

Joseph Ghosn

It was very much in the spirit of those times, wasn’t it? The psychedelic...

Terry Riley

Very much, yeah.

Joseph Ghosn

... And the happenings...

Terry Riley

A lot of musicians were taking their first LSD trips or peyote or whatever. And that was changing the way people were constructing and listening to music.

Joseph Ghosn

Really. Yourself, there’s a recording called “Mescalin Mix.” Was it a way of acknowledging the times and what was happening?

Terry Riley

Right. My first psychedelic experiences were with peyote, which is sacred to the Native Americans.

Joseph Ghosn

Of course. For how long did you do these performances? Did you do them...

Terry Riley

It wasn’t long. I think I did the first one in 1967, and I did the last all night... I did this kind of piece for a long time but the all night concerts I only did for about a year and a half.

Joseph Ghosn

And did your trip to India change things, because that happened two years after that?

Terry Riley

Yeah. I mean, going to India was like going back to school in a way. I was learning an old tradition. I had to learn an oral tradition, that is there was nothing written down. My master, Pandit Pran Nath, would sing phrases to me and I would sing them back. There’s the process of re-educating myself about sound and microtonality, which is what Indian music was based on. I had to learn to discern very fine pitches that were used in the ragas.

Joseph Ghosn

At the time, you had quite a major success with the releases of “In C,” as an LP. What was the need for you to go to India? Was there a need of rediscovering music or was it something else?

Terry Riley

In Indian music I thought, “Why try to invent something that’s already an old tradition, something I was headed towards already?” I waned to know the sources, the spiritual sources of what was happening inside of me as a musician. I felt India would have the answer, especially Pandit Pran Nath, who was this old master who had so many ancient compositions and techniques to teach me.

Joseph Ghosn

How did you meet him actually? Was it La Monte Young?

Terry Riley

I met him through La Monte, yeah. La Monte brought him to the United States in 19... Let’s see, it was 1970, January. Then he came to California and I arranged some concerts for him in California. And then the following September, I went back to India with him.

Joseph Ghosn

Right. We’re going to listen to a recording of Pandit Pran Nath. It was recorded in Paris at Le Palace Théâtre.

Terry Riley

Right, Palace Théâtre in Paris. That still exists?

Joseph Ghosn

Yes, it does exist.

Terry Riley

This was with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela are playing tamburas. We were touring with him. And I’m playing the tabla, the drum.

(music: Pandit Pran Nath – Raga cycle 1972)

Joseph Ghosn

This was 1972 in Paris. What memories do you have of playing with him and being in sort of a band?

Terry Riley

I was very fortunate because I was able to study in the way music was taught centuries ago, and very few teachers would let their students live with them and teach them at all hours of the day and night. I was getting lessons all the time because I was staying with him in his house. Whenever he would feel inspired, he would give me a lesson. Ragas are, as many of you probably know, they relate to the times of day, they relate to the seasons, so if you’re with your teacher all the time, he’s singing when he’s inspired by that time of day or that season. He won’t sing just for singing. Something is inspiring him to...

Joseph Ghosn

Just for the moment...

Terry Riley

So if you’re a student, you’re around, you’re listening to them at those times of day. I felt extremely fortunate that I was getting this experience. It was hard work to do. That meant waking up sometimes at three in the morning and getting a lesson if that’s when he wanted to teach me.

Joseph Ghosn

What attracted you to it? Was it the duration, the droning? Because there’s a familiarity with what you were doing before that, before meeting him. You said you were attracted to that music.

Terry Riley

The ragas themselves and the compositions in the ragas, I found very, very beautiful, and he was able to express, just with the voice, things that I felt that sometimes orchestras could not express in terms of just sheer beauty and changes in tonality and subtle changes in timbre of his voice. It’s hard to convey this to someone unless you’ve actually experienced it. But sitting next to him, I could actually feel my body vibrating with his voice.

Joseph Ghosn

Right. Going back to something different, you also worked for films, music for films. You did some music for some films, which is different duration.

Terry Riley

Yeah. Well, I was in India studying with Pandit Pran Nath when I got a telegram from... In those days we had telegrams before the internet... [laughs] From Joël Santoni who was a French filmmaker, asking me to come to Paris to make music. He had heard my CBS recordings and really liked them and wanted me to score his first film called Les Yeux Fermés. I came to Paris, took a little break from India and came to Paris and did that. Joël’s film was very long, it was three hours long, and so I was able to do really long segments of music, almost like Indian music. And it would play continuously, not like they usually do in films, just a theme will come in for a couple of minutes and go. I think the final scene in Les Yeux Fermés is 20 minutes of continuous music, which was a great opportunity for...

Joseph Ghosn

Were you playing while you were watching the movie or ...

Terry Riley

No.

Joseph Ghosn

No?

Terry Riley

No. Joel showed me the movie and then we went to... I’m trying to remember the name of studio. Strawberry Studios I think it was called. North of Paris. So I lived out there for a while, in the studio, and was able to record... Almost like in India, I recorded sometimes at night and sometimes during the day, whenever I felt like recording, the engineer was there and he would turn on the recorder.

Joseph Ghosn

It was in Hérouville, Strawberry Studios.

Terry Riley

Yeah, Strawberry Studios.

Joseph Ghosn

It was engineered by Dominique Blanc-Francard.

Terry Riley

Yeah.

Joseph Ghosn

And produced by...

Terry Riley

Beautiful, beautiful old place.

Joseph Ghosn

A castle. It was produced by Igor Wakevich.

Terry Riley

Yeah, Igor Wakevich was the... yeah.

Joseph Ghosn

I have an extract of Les Yeux Fermés.

(music: Terry Riley – extract from the score of Les Yeux Fermés)

You did another movie, Lifespan?

Terry Riley

Yes. That was after.

Joseph Ghosn

After.

Terry Riley

With Sandy Whitelaw, another director, filmmaker.

Joseph Ghosn

Did those experiences take your music on another path or was it just...

Terry Riley

Well it was just an opportunity to go in the studio and do multitrack recordings. I started doing that... My first one was with CBS, with A Rainbow In Curved Air. This track you just played is actually a kind of minor key A Rainbow In Curved Air. It has the same 14-beat rhythmic pattern except it’s in a minor mode instead of major and themes, of course, are different. You have to remember that in 1971, ’72 were the early days of multitrack recording. A Rainbow In Curved Air, which I recorded in 1968, was the first recording in CBS on an eight-track, which we thought was amazing, to have eight tracks. Now you have as many tracks as you want.

Joseph Ghosn

I want to go back to something just for a few minutes. It’s a particular piece, it’s a tape loop. It’s quite different from what we have heard here. It’s “You’re No Good.” Maybe just listen to it first and you can tell us about it.

Terry Riley

You might want to start...

Joseph Ghosn

Do you want it to start...

Terry Riley

Let me tell you, it’s a rhythm & blues tune that I recorded off the radio in New York. Just had my tape recorder running when I was playing on the radio with the Harvey Averne Dozen, which is a rhythm & blues tune. I think it's one of the first examples of plunderphonics, or taking a tune and cutting it up and redoing it.

Joseph Ghosn

It’s an edit. It’s editing something that exists and doing...

Terry Riley

Sampling. I did it with just two tape recorders.

Joseph Ghosn

And you added some stuff in there?

Terry Riley

I had a Moog synthesizer which I added in to it. You’re gonna have a hard time, these are such short examples, like just looking at the eye of a portrait or something.

(music: Terry Riley – “You’re No Good”)

So you did that piece for a club, for a nightclub?

Terry Riley

I did that it for a club in Philadelphia, and I when I brought it into the club, nobody could dance to it, [laughs] so it was a failure.

Joseph Ghosn

Because it’s a... We just listened to it.

Terry Riley

It keeps jumping, yeah, the rhythm keeps jumping ahead when the loops pop in. It’s very primitive, it isn’t done with any sophisticated equipment. But I kinda like the primitive quality of it, just things start and stop and whenever...

Joseph Ghosn

Did you do some other experiments with other rhythm & blues or pop tracks?

Terry Riley

Oh, yeah. I did many other subsequent... I did “Shotgun,” of Jr. Walker, which is called “The Bird of Paradise.” I think it’s also been published in my archives. Yeah, I kept working with that for several years, cutting up rhythm & blues tunes.

Joseph Ghosn

Do you have a particular fondness for rhythm & blues or was it just because it was out on the radio?

Terry Riley

Well, yeah, it’s great music and it’s American music, which I grew up with. And it also, it worked very well with, because of its repetitive nature, it worked very well to cut up and make loops from.

Joseph Ghosn

But at some point, you just stopped working with tape loops because...

Terry Riley

Yeah, I stopped because I started becoming more interested in live performance, and trying to get the effect as a performer.

Joseph Ghosn

And at what point did you really start using your voice? Was it after meeting Pandit Pran Nath?

Terry Riley

I mean I was shy about singing at the beginning, and I felt I was just a beginner learning from him. But then I gradually started writing songs for myself. I think I started about 1974 or something, ’75, something like that, writing songs for myself.

Joseph Ghosn

I would like to listen to a song that I... Quite long one, but I really liked it. It’s an excerpt, it’s called “Embroidery.”

Terry Riley

“Embroidery,” yeah.

Joseph Ghosn

“Embroidery.”

(music: Terry Riley – “Embroidery”)

When I listen to this track, I hear bits of that first track we heard, “Untitled Organ,” a bit of Poppy Nogood, and also something else in the voice, something maybe more pop, as in the songwriting. Do you remember that particular song and what you were trying to sing about, and what you were conveying?

Terry Riley

Well, the words are... When I was living in San Francisco, I was living hear Chinatown, I spent a lot of time walking through Chinatown and imagining what the culture was like for these people. And that was kind of the inspiration for writing it. But it brings together Indian classical singing, it brings together just intonation for two Prophet synthesizers, which I was playing in it.

Joseph Ghosn

Yes.

Terry Riley

It was just a continuation of that way of performing.

Joseph Ghosn

Do you feel you have always been searching for this one particular song, and that you were always working on that, a particular sound or a particular tone that you were always pursuing and still doing that?

Terry Riley

Well, as you go through life, your interests change a bit, you get interested in other things, they enter the stream of your music. I would say that some things fall off, you don’t use them anymore. Other things are added.

Joseph Ghosn

We’re, of course, running out of time, but I know we’ve been through a lot, I think, of your music. But I want to listen to something that’s quite recent, that you just told me about. You’ve been playing with your son, and there is a new recording with your son, under the name of the Rileys. And of course, you’re playing together tomorrow night in Paris.

Terry Riley

Right.

Joseph Ghosn

Maybe we can listen to one track. It’s called “The Lake,” and maybe you can tell us about it after.

Terry Riley

OK.

(music: The Rileys – “The Lake”)

Joseph Ghosn

At what point did music become a family affair?

Terry Riley

Well, Gyan and I have been playing together 20, I think 22 years, something like that now, professionally on stage.

Joseph Ghosn

Of course.

Terry Riley

Yeah, it’s been a while.

Joseph Ghosn

What did it change in the way you approach music, playing with your son?

Terry Riley

Well, what’s exciting to me is, over this period of time, we’ve become very intuitive in the way we play together, and we almost never plan anything anymore. When we do a concert, we don’t talk about it, we don’t rehearse for it. We try to live it on stage just like life. When problems come up, you just deal with them, and when good things happen, you smile.

Joseph Ghosn

Playing with your son is one thing, but what do you see of the music you have recorded in other artists, in younger artists, artists of other generations? Do you see your music being taken further ahead or somewhere else by other artists? Do you listen to current minimalism, for instance? Or to electronic music that was inspired by what you did?

Terry Riley

Well, mainly when I’m listening, I’m not listening so much to my contemporaries in the Western world. I’ll listen to people from Africa, India, Indonesia, South America. I’m not as interested in the way that Western academic music has developed, so I’ve sort of dropped out of that scene.

Joseph Ghosn

Are you interested in your own legacy, or not at all?

Terry Riley

Not particularly, no. [laughs]

Joseph Ghosn

OK.

Terry Riley

That’s for other people to decide.

Joseph Ghosn

Right, OK. Thank you. [applause]

Terry Riley

You’re welcome.