Terry Riley interview: “Every decade of my life has had a different focus”

Terry Riley appears at the other end of my Zoom call, white beard bundled up in a neat little bun, sporting a woollen beanie and bright orange bodywarmer as defence against a chilly Japanese early evening. The sprightly Californian composer tells me he’s “sensitive to the cold.” Now 87 years old, he’s enjoyed a long and eventful career. Along with his friend and fellow composer La Monte Young, he’s one of the undisputed originators of American minimalism and a pioneer of the use of tape loops and repetition, as documented on timeless albums such as In C (1968) and A Rainbow in Curved Air (1969). Drawing on jazz, Indian raga and non-Western tunings, the musical aesthetic he’s developed since the late 50s has influenced contemporary classical and electronic music as well as rock groups from Soft Machine to The Who.

For almost three years, Riley has been living in Japan. What, I wonder, brought him there? “Fate,” he states simply. “I was on a three-month world tour when COVID hit. I was in Japan when everything was cancelled. I just stayed here. I’m kind of living a little bit like a hermit, alone in a little apartment in the mountains of central Japan. I have a lot of time to compose music, think about music, practise music.” He’s still performing as much as he can – when we speak, he’s just about to begin a short tour of Japan – and he’s writing too. “I’ve gotten a lot of work done,” he says, “and gotten a lot of insights into music. I think it’s coming out in the new work I’m doing.” Is the serenity of his new mountain home affecting his writing? “That and the general calmness of people here,” he says. “They treat each other so differently from anyplace else I’ve been in the world. It’s really refreshing to live in an atmosphere where people are respectful to each other, and demonstrate it.”

It’s not, of course, the first time Riley has been drawn to an Asian culture. He was among the wave of American artists and intellectuals smitten by North Indian classical music from the late 50s onwards. Though unable to recall the initial recordings he heard, he can pinpoint his first encounter with a live performance: “I heard Ravi Shankar and [tabla player] Alla Rakha playing at the University of California in Berkeley. I was probably in my late 20s, or even close to 30. It was late in life to encounter something so wonderful.” 

“It was not happening much in the US before Ravi Shankar came and started doing his tours,” he continues, “so people didn’t know what it was. To me it didn’t sound strange at all, but it did sound joyful and the musicians were really enjoying playing together. It reminded me of really good jazz interactions on stage. When I saw the Indian musicians I thought, ‘Wow, these guys have an amazing music that’s so complex and challenging and interesting to listen to, and they’re having fun and joking around while they’re doing it.’ I really had never encountered anything quite like that – and that’s when I realised that was the direction I wanted my music to go into.”

In 1970, aged 35, Riley went to India for the first time, to become a student and disciple of the revered North Indian classical vocalist Pandit Pran Nath. “I’d already had quite a bit of music experience,” he recalls. “I was in mid-life, so to speak. So it was really interesting to become a student again and find a master who held all kinds of secrets that I was learning as fast as I could take them. He was really fearsome. People were often frightened of him because he exuded such an energy that put a force field around him. He was such a gentle person most of the time, really very modest, but could be fierce too.”

Throughout the early 70s, Riley, together with La Monte Young and composer Marian Zazeela, would spend half the year in India, returning to Europe and the US for the other half to arrange concerts for Pran Nath. One of the maestro’s most memorable engagements is captured on a pair of essential albums Riley released on his own Sri Moonshine label – Raga Cycle and Sings Ragas Bheempalasi & Puriyaa Dhanaashree – which document a series of concerts at the Palace Theatre in Paris in 1972, significant for being the first time Western audiences were able to hear an Indian classical vocalist singing ragas at the appropriate time of day. “Pandit Pran Nath loved to do morning concerts,” says Riley, “so that he could show people the difference in the feeling of a morning raga or a noon raga or a mid-afternoon raga – how the notes work to create the effect for different times of day. He was probably the most knowledgeable person of his times about these pitch shades that make up raga.”

During these Paris performances, Pran Nath was accompanied by disciples Young and Zazeela on tambura and Riley on tabla. “I had to be really careful watching him and making sure I wasn’t missing something that would make him displeased with my performance,” Riley chuckles. It was, by any standards, an extraordinary learning experience. “I was noticing how his performance unfolds,” he remembers. “He had certain ways of developing the ragas and I got to observe those while I was accompanying him.” Riley’s intense apprenticeship lasted right up until the master’s death in 1996. “After he passed away and I started singing in concerts, I had that experience of how he’d conducted a performance and could apply it to my own work then. Even the work I do with keyboards has been influenced so much by that way of performing.”

Indeed, Riley’s solo keyboard albums show the profound and lasting influence of Pran Nath in the unhurried unfolding of their forms, in Riley’s commitment to improvisation, and in his use of unusual tunings such as just intonation to investigate microtonal melodic possibilities. If you’re lucky enough to catch him performing live today, you’ll witness a mercurial intelligence alchemising seven decades of musical research into genuinely thrilling spontaneous compositions for voice and keyboard. “My career has had a trajectory of different levels of awareness about how music can work,” he reflects. “As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found different ways of working and every decade of my life has had a different focus, pushing the music from a different angle – not only from Indian music or jazz or classical music or any kind of ethnic music – it’s really an awareness of how music is working in all these and, as a composer, trying to be consciously aware of that as you’re making your selections about what is musical composition.” 

This article originally appeared in the January/February 2023 issue of Songlines magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today