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  1. What Does It Sound Like?

    A surprise. I listen to a lot of Terry Riley, and this is something quite different. Two pianists (Eva-Marie Zimmerman and Keisuke Nakgoshi – heavyweight talents) on one piano playing Riley compositions for four-handed piano. There’s no trance-inducing modal loops here, nothing spacey. It’s chamber music, of a sort. I’m not a big fan of piano music (nor really of piano players, with a couple of exceptions), but this is just such gorgeous music, full of melody and harmony and dynamics. Nothing artily challenging here (Riley was never a snob), just playful, beautiful music.

    Some of these pieces should be familiar from the Kronos Quartet’s versions, but they’re not. ZOFO (a playful shorthand for 20 Finger Orchestra) makes them sound very different, and they’re obviously having a great time, as the pictures in the booklet show.

    What Does It All Mean?

    Riley, at 80, is still a huge creative force. He’s been bothering ivories since 1960. He changed the course of music. He’s bigger than all of us.

    Goes Well With …

    Life. Feeling good.

    Might Suit People Who Like:

    Surprises. Even if you have an aversion to the actual sound a piano makes, you should still give this a try. It’s genuinely unclassifiable; hints of jazz, of chamber …

    File under: MUSIC

    *Odd format of post due to WordPress balking at the size of my piece (@moose-the-mooche)

  4. Oh, lordy lordy.

    Isn’t Terry And His Magic Beard dead? Two pianists playing one piano – kill me now.

    Fire up Spotify and listen whilst making a late breakfast.

    Mrs S enters. “That’s very pleasant”.

    I bite into my croissant and mumble ” it is, isn’t it?”

    For lunch I am preparing a pie of very lowly origin, I am sure it will be delicious.

  6. Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll give it a listen. I have heard some of his piano pieces and a couple of his string quartets, but found them pleasant but not much more. I think it might be the comparison with In C and A Rainbow in Curved Air, which were so innovative that anything less seems disappointing. Everything that came later in minimalism seems to be in those two pieces – in C in particular seems to have been as influential in classical music as The Rite of Spring was fifty years before. Discussions of minimalism often seem to downplay Riley’s role, maybe because he moved on, whereas Reich and Glass kept going on the same path for longer.

    • Yup. He was never as cossetted by the “avant garde” as the other minimalists because of his relative eclecticism (☜ word for hen, pet) and popularity. There’s a whole school of sniffy criticism that dismisses him as “messy” and even “embarrassing”. I don’t suppose he’s too worried about it.

      • Hey,watch it, I knows what eclectic means. It’s the stuff that makes the lights come on.

        And just for good measure – that “You’re No Good” thing below is bollox of the highest order and I can safely say that after an exhaustive and exhausting listen of almost five minutes. That’s more like the Magic Beard stuff I know and hate.

        • Something is happenin an you dont know what it is, hen, pet! The times they are a changin. Get with the Now generation, man! Wake up ans smell my shoes! Walk a mile in my coffee! It’s hip, it’s happening and its 19767!

          you and the rest of them Afterword grandads better stay out of the kitchen if you cant take the acid, man.

          i pity you.

          peace and love,

  7. Thanks for the heads up HP. I still have my Japanese import LP of Shri Camel which I bought as a painfully hip teenager into Eno’s ambient ouevre. In C and Rainbow came later. Gonna listen to this on your recommendation. No doubt it will be wondrous.

  8. I heard some of those pieces lives a few years ago. Riley was playing ‘In C ‘ at the Festival (excellent) and the 4-handed piano pieces were a sort of support act. Been looking out for them ever since without actually knowing what I was looking for – now I do!

  10. Worth mentioning, perhaps, that amongst his achievements he invented the DJ mash-up. Kwide lidrally. This is just astonishing:

    It says 1968 here but I think it was ’67. Some good comments, unusually for YouTube.

  11. I’m, like, hip to what’s not goin’
    down here, daddy-o’s

    Afterword = Squaresville

    Yr trip is
    yr trip, but how can I respect that
    when your children are starving open-mouthed
    in the
    death-blast of yr unholy dreams?
    You don’t dig Terry because he is
    a mirror to yr twisted suburban souls
    yr whitebread ambitions stillborn
    yr bellies full of rotten dreams

    run scared, old men, straight men
    run scared into th’ night
    of yr own making
    run as fast as yr korporate suits will allow
    run away from th’ light

    Terry Riley is the soundtrack to
    yr karmic disintegration
    in th’ howlin’ night
    of false platitudes, broken
    promises
    and to his children he is rainbow prophet
    burnin’ light you will never see
    thru blinkers of yesterday’s newspapers

    Afterword = Squaresville
    I am hip

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