Terry Riley's In C (review)

Terry Riley's In C stands as the iconic work of American minimalism. With its reductive pitch content, emphasis on seemingly straightforward metrical patterns, and reliance on repetition at multiple levels of its design, In C established all the hallmarks of a new, compelling musical style that, implicitly or explicitly, critiqued then-common assumptions about the avant-garde tradition in Western concert music.

That avant-garde music was (thankfully) never completely dislodged by minimalism's ascendance in the late 1970s through the 1980s; the styles continue to coexist (in varying degrees of amicability) within a thoroughly hybridized artistic landscape that admits all manner of interactions between formal and vernacular traditions spanning the globe. Nevertheless, I cannot overemphasize minimalism's cultural importance: today's emerging performers, composers, and audiences are unthinkable without its advent.

Minimal music, of course, now boasts an extensive bibliography. Two well known volumes offered early critical impressions of the style (Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond [London: Studio Vista, 1974; 2d ed., New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999]; Wim Mertens, American Minimal Music, trans. J. Hautkiet [New York: Alexander Broude, 1983]). Later scholars have focused attention on specific composers of the movement, for example Steve Reich and Philip Glass (K. Robert Schwartz, "Steve Reich: Music as a Gradual Process: Part I," Perspectives of New Music 19, nos. 1/2 [Autumn 1980–Summer 1981]: 373–92 and Jeremy Grimshaw, "High, 'Low,' and Plastic Arts: Philip Glass and the Symphony in the Age of Postproduction," Musical Quarterly 86, no. 3 [Fall 2002]: 472–507). The history of the style in music and visual art has been ably documented by Edward Strickland (Minimalism: Origins [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993]), while Keith Potter has produced a detailed analytical overview of the music (Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000]). Most recently, Robert Fink published a provocative and startlingly original cultural critique of minimalism's underlying zeitgeist, viewed through hermeneutic lenses as varied as mass advertising, the pursuit of pleasure in disco, and Shinichi Suzuki's legendary string pedagogy based on myriad repetition (Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005]).

In contrast to the case for such composers as Reich, Glass, and John Adams, less comprehensive scholarship exists for La Monte Young and Terry Riley (but see Cecilia Jian-Xuan Sun, "Experiments in Musical Performance: Historiography, Politics, and the Post-Cageian Avant-Garde" [Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2004] and Jeremy Grimshaw, Draw a Straight Line and Follow It: The Sonic Life of La Monte Young [New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming]). Still, a thoroughly critical treatment of Riley remains to be written.

Robert Carl's informative monograph on In C nicely inaugurates this long overdue appraisal of Riley and his landmark composition. A professor of theory and composition at the Hartt School of Music (University of Hartford), Carl has authored a number of articles, two of which include discussions of minimal music ("The Politics of Definition in New Music," College Music Symposium 29 [1989]: 101–14 and "Six Case Studies in New American Music: A Post-modern Portrait Gallery," College Music Symposium 30, no. 1 [Spring 1990]: 45–63); he also commands great expertise with new music through his own activities as a composer and through his work as critic for the respected compact disc review periodical Fanfare.

Carl's book addresses In C from multiple scholarly perspectives. A short introductory chapter attempts to forestall objections that In C is not a work worthy of such study at all. (As most are surely aware, the score consists of fifty-three separate modules; performers are instructed to play each module a number of times and in order; but they are encouraged to vary their entrances and even occasionally remain silent, so that the resultant sound actually contains a web of overlapping module statements constantly varying in...