‘In C’ Forever: The Eternal Evolution of Terry Riley’s Minimalist Masterpiece

Inspiration can spark in the most mundane circumstances. In 1964, a young composer named Terry Riley was on his way to work — playing ragtime piano at San Francisco’s Gold Street Saloon — when he had a light bulb moment that would alter the American musical landscape. A tiny, hiccuping, 2-note seed unexpectedly came to him.

“I was riding to work on the bus when I heard this first line come into my consciousness like somebody was playing it to me,” Riley recalls. “And I got quite excited, so as soon as I got off work that night, I went home and wrote down the first line.”

That seed blossomed into In C, a piece which essentially launched the musical movement later known as minimalism.

In the early ’60s, Riley was among a cohort of free-thinking West Coast musicians experimenting with music, especially tape loops, and psychedelic drugs. The rest of In C came to him quickly, but even after he had gathered all the musical ingredients, the piece wasn’t quite ready for prime time.

“When we first started rehearsing it, nobody, including me, knew how to play it,” Riley says. “I had a kind of idea of how it should sound, but to rehearse it and actually turn it into music took a bit of doing.”

It took some doing because one of the things that makes In C innovative is that it carries so few guidelines. And that’s the idea — the composer gives up control to the performers. The score is just a single page containing 53 short musical “riffs” that any number of musicians can play in order, but at their discretion. Every performance, by design, will sound completely different.

One challenge the players faced in those early rehearsals was the lack of a solid pulse, a kind of click track to keep the players together. Enter Steve Reich. He was among the musicians who helped Riley introduce the piece, along with other soon-to-be-legendary composers Morton Subotnick and Pauline Oliveros.

William Robin, a University of Maryland music professor, has written about the history of the music in his book On Minimalism — Documenting a Musical Movement, co-authored with Kerry O’Brien. He believes Reich’s contribution to In C can’t be overstated. “Reich makes a simple but profound suggestion: What if a pianist simply plays two Cs high on the keyboard in octaves to start the piece and go continuously throughout?” Robin notes. “Basically it functions as a human metronome.” That pulse, he adds, is fundamental to the sound of In C, giving it an infectious groove.

Finally, on Nov. 4, 1964, Riley and his group of like-minded musicians debuted In C at San Francisco’s Tape Music Center, a haven of electronic and new music. Four days later, the headline for a review of the concert in the San Francisco Chronicle read: “Music Like none Other on Earth.” The reviewer, Alfred Frankenstein, ended by declaring In C “the evening’s masterpiece.”

Cellist Maya Beiser agrees. She first heard In C as a 17-year-old high schooler who stumbled across the LP in a record shop. “I immediately felt that it was such a genius thing, akin to E=mc²,” she says. “The idea of an open score was just so beautiful and revolutionary. I was blown away by that simple idea and by the notion of freedom that it presented.”

Beiser released her own unique version of In C earlier this year. Her experiment began as an off-the-cuff gift for Riley, then after his blessing, it blossomed into a recording.

Appropriate to Riley’s improvisatory way of thinking, Beiser and her recording engineer began with a mostly blank slate, just Riley’s spartan score. “We started to kind of loop all those melodic modules and I literally found my way into it as I was going because I deliberately didn’t want to decide anything,” she recalls. Armed with just her cello, a looping machine and a pair of percussionists, Beiser emphasizes the deep, sometimes headbanging, grooves inherent in the music.

“She broke it down into sections and integrated each section very distinctly,” Riley says. “Something I hadn’t thought of doing myself. There’s always somebody finding new ways to use these materials.” In Beiser’s rendition, there’s a grungy section with whiffs of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir,” a vocal passage interlacing her voice and cello in a nod to the medieval hocket style of singing, and plenty of lovely droning with the low C string of Beiser’s processed cello ricocheting off the drummers.

Unlike Beiser’s mostly solo approach, In C is usually played by at least a dozen or more musicians, which emphasizes its communal powers. “One of the things that In C has done over the years, has helped to connect people of different backgrounds,” Riley says.

That connection mushroomed in 1968, when Riley recorded In C for Columbia Records. Suddenly, this strange new music was catapulted directly into the mainstream, while taking aim at the new, youthful counterculture. In C was on the map, with an album that actually contained a map to the piece itself.

“This was an incredibly popular recording,” Robin says. “It stayed in Columbia’s catalog, unlike plenty of other avant-garde records. And one of the cool things is that it actually prints the full score for the piece on the sleeve of the record. So they were empowering people, potentially, to actually organize their own performances of this piece.”

This was at a time, Robin points out, “when a lot of American composition is extremely inaccessible in terms of the musical language — composers writing highly atonal, cerebral scientific music.” In C, in its singular way, thumbed its nose at the academy.

“Terry just came into it from a completely different place,” Beiser notes. “Because he studied in India, he was influenced by Indian classical music, by African music, by all these other non-Western traditions, and of course, free jazz improvisation.”

Improvisation is at the heart of much of Riley’s music. And one way in which In C takes a page from Indian classical music is that within strict parameters there’s room for the player to make their own decisions.

“What makes In C such a landmark work is that it is kind of right at the center of pushing the boundaries of what music could be,” Robin says, “while also having this incredibly rich and attractive soundscape that’s groovy in a way that pop music was groovy in the mid-’60s.”

In C has been groovy enough to attract a surprisingly wide array of musicians. A brief survey of recordings includes: an orchestra of Chinese instruments from Shanghai, musicians from West Africa, a Swiss industrial band, Indian musicians from Brooklyn, Japanese acid rock, a group of 10 harpists in Holland and an orchestra of electric guitars.

Riley’s piece also works perfectly in amateur settings. With his students, Robin organizes annual performances of In C. “It is just one of those joyful experiences as a musician,” he says. “The nature of the music — it is at once fully notated, but it has the sound, the ethos, of this kind of communal jam session, where musicians are repeating these little riffs over and over and over again.” At Robin’s most recent performance in May, bassoon, tuba and piano traded riffs with banjo, vibraphones and Robin’s own alto sax, amid a wash of another dozen players.

Even at the beginning, Riley understood how In C was influential. “Other composers were taking an interest in what I was doing,” he remembers. “So I knew that it was going to have some significance.”

It turned out to be game-changing. Both Philip Glass and Steve Reich quickly embraced Riley’s evolving repetition. It’s hard to imagine minimalist classics like Glass’ Einstein on the Beach from 1976, or Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, completed that same year, without In C. And today, the music is all around us, from Taylor Swift’s song “Peace,” with its copycat Riley pulse, to music for television, film and commercials.

While we’re not living in the same counterculture-fueled moment as Riley was when he wrote his most famous piece, there is a strong appetite today for ambient and electronic music you can bliss out to, and for performances of In C itself. “People want to go hear an hour of transcendent music,” Robin suggests. “And it’s a tribute to this lightning rod moment for Riley, where he put it all down to the endurance of minimalism as an artistic movement that’s been so profoundly influential on popular culture.”

At 89, Riley still composes every day, with a view of Mount Fuji from his home in Japan. And he doesn’t mind looking back to that bus ride so long ago, and the spark of inspiration that helped ignite a musical movement with a piece of music that, after 60 years, continues to fascinate new audiences and evolve in the hands of anyone who plays it.

“In C is like one of your children,” he says with a wry chuckle. “They went out, became famous, did some good things, met some other people. And turned out to be something different than you imagined at the beginning.”