Keyboard Studies nos. 1 & 2: For Piano, and: The Walrus in Memoriam: For Piano Solo, and: Be Kind to One Another (Rag): For Piano Solo (review)

The keyboard has long held a central position in the music of Terry Riley. In addition to the role it plays in his compositions, Riley supported himself financially throughout much of his early career by playing ragtime, blues, and jazz standards at the piano in various clubs. Though many of Riley's works—especially those from the late 1960s and 1970s—use electronic keyboards, there are an increasing number of his works for acoustic piano that are becoming more readily available in printed form. Examining keyboard pieces from various stages of Riley's career provides useful insight into how his style has evolved, and points us to some constant threads as well. Keith Potter notes that while Riley is still best known for his 1964 composition In C and the role it played in the development and proliferation of musical minimalism, it can be argued that Riley's interest in minimalist ideas per se ended around 1975, and that changes in his compositional style can already be observed in the works following In C (Keith Potter, Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Music in the Twentieth Century, 11 [Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000], 92-93). Early works such as the Keyboard Studies nos. 1 & 2 have many consistencies with the style of In C for which Riley is renowned, however, and thus serve as a relevant point of departure for this review.

Riley's compositions are especially difficult to date because his music and his life philosophy both revolve around the notion of being in the moment, an approach that is at odds with keeping accurate records of the past. Potter recounts an enlightening anecdote in which Riley had decided to throw out a lot of his old tapes and scores, but his wife persuaded him at the last moment to keep them when she suddenly realized what he was up to (p. 93). An early version of Keyboard Study no. 1 was premiered in the same November 1964 concerts as In C, implying that the ideas for these works originated at virtually the same time; Riley now dates the whole set of Keyboard Studies from 1965 (pp. 122-23). Keyboard Studies nos. 1 & 2 serve a valuable purpose for music historians and librarians as representations of Riley's early style. The printed versions of these two Keyboard Studies that have recently become available for on-demand printing from Schirmer/Associated Music Publishers are facsimiles of handwritten scores "re-copied" by Riley in December 2005 (which seems to imply that the original copies of the pieces have been lost).

In a vein similar to In C, Keyboard Study no. 1 is made up of a series of modules to be played in sequential order. The sixteen modules that comprise Keyboard Study no. 1 divide the piece into three sections, each of which has one "continuum figure" (figures 1, 7, and 11) that is combined with a series of "repeating figures" (figures 2-6, 8-10, and 12-16) in a way that creates a rhythmic interlock between the two parts as the continuum and repeating figures are consistently notated on offbeats from each other. Other notable similarities to In C include constant pulsation, a long list of performance instructions that accompany the score (the score and performance...