It’s one thing to master a genre, quite another to pioneer one. Terry Riley has succeeded at both. His long and winding career began in California in the 1960s, as he explored minimalism alongside his contemporaries Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnick and Steve Reich. The early influence of jazz greats such as John Coltrane and Miles Davis, as well as the work of his friend and peer La Monte Young, fueled his desire for experimentalism, resulting in pieces such as “In C,” a modular musical construction considered by many to be the first minimalist composition. His years spent crisscrossing the globe also fed directly into his work, and would eventually lead him to Pandit Pran Nath, the Indian classical teacher who would go on to have a profound impact on Riley’s life and music.
