in c

I just performed this great piece by Terry Riley with a very special incarnation of the New York City Pop Band at the Yippie Museum last night. It went extremely well, especially for not having been rehearsed at all (one of my parameters for doing the piece). All of the people who played in the ensemble were great at free improvisation (across many styles) and that helped tremendously with this piece.

I brazenly disregarded some of Riley's suggestions for performing the piece, which is of course well within the right of the performer. I think here that Riley probably gets over-specific to a certain extent because classical players (here meaning people who only play classical music and never improvise) might feel a little lost without some measure of stipulation beyond the cells that make up the score.

Here are the two main things we did that I feel make the piece more interesting:

1. It was a small ensemble of 6 performers. Of course this work sounds great with a large number of players (I think Riley recommends something in the neighborhood of 35, can't really remember) but with a small ensemble the material is really easy to process for the listener. For example it was very obvious -- and quite hypnotic -- when some of the players would lock into a pattern and keep it going for a long period of time.

2. A steady pulse was only more-or-less maintained. In addition to augmenting the rhythms of the cells (i.e. converting 16th notes to 8ths, 8ths to quarters and so on) we would deliberately phase the rhythms when we happened to land on the same material. This was to me extremely cool, added some excitement to sections of the piece, and worth exploring more and more...


The performers pictured above are (from left to right): Tom Blatt, Robyn Siwula, Charles Ramsey, Leslie Purcell Upchurch, Ken Silverman and Blaise Siwula.