crosscurrents

American and European Music

in Interaction, 1900–2000
Edited by Felix Meyer, Carol J. Oja,
Wolfgang Rathert, and Anne C. Shreffler

A Publication by the Paul Sacher Foundation

The Boydell Press 2014
Based on the international conference
“Crosscurrents: American and European Music
in Interaction, 1900–2000”
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts,
USA, 30 October – 1 November 2008
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich,
Germany, 7–9 May 2009

English translations provided by the authors, revised

by J. Bradford Robinson (translations from German)
and Mark Weir (translations from Italian and French)

Copy editing: Kathryn Puffett

Index: Heidy Zimmermann
Design and Typesetting: Sibylle Ryser, Basel,
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© Paul Sacher Stiftung 2014

ISBN-13: 978 1 84383 900 2

A Publication of the Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel

www.paul-sacher-stiftung.ch

The Boydell Press,

an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd
PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK
and of Boydell & Brewer Inc.
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www.boydell.co.uk
 Veniero Rizzardi

the complete Birth of the Loop:

terry riley in Paris, 1962–63

I
In early 1962 Terry Riley, aged 27, embarked with his family on the Italian ship Saturnia with
Paris as their inal destination. When they landed, in Gibraltar, they rented a house in Spain,
at Algeciras, and soon traveled to Morocco, where they spent several weeks. They took a hotel
in the casbah and enjoyed the atmosphere. This irst contact with the Arab world was very
inluential to Riley. He was especially impressed by the soundscape, dominated by the calls
from the mosque: “I think this shaped a lot my feeling of being interested in the Orient.”
This is possibly the very beginning of Riley’s involvement with non-Western cultures and
musics.
Riley sees his departure from California in early 1962 as motivated by a need for change.
It was probably time for him to develop and choose a personal path to music-making ater
the many diferent inluences he had experienced until then. Trained as a concert pianist,
he was actually very accomplished, but he soon gave up his initial ambitions of pursuing an
ordinary concert career in favor of a more personal approach. His composition studies at the
University of California, Berkeley, with the unorthodox teacher Robert Erickson, acquainted
him with many important modern experiences. He was especially impressed by the music
of the Second Viennese School, so that by the late 1950s he found himself deeply involved in
the music of Schoenberg and Webern, and began composing piano pieces in that vein. Yet
he was unaware of the most recent developments in compositional technique, such as early
serialism.

I would like to express my thanks to terry riley, achilli, Gianni Paganini, tom welsh, scot Gresham-
who has contributed to the making of this article Lancaster, and a very special thank you to Brad
with recollections and precise information. i have robinson for carefully mending and enhancing my
collected his words in several conversations we have english prose.
had in recent years at various times and in various
places, but especially in a telephone interview of 1 alan Baker, “an interview with Pauline oliveros,”
5 may 2009. also many thanks to Daevid allen, american Public media, January 2003,
whom i interviewed in milan on 15 october 2009. musicmavericks.publicradio.org/features/interview_
all unreferenced quotations come from these two oliveros.html. see also william Duckworth,
sources. thanks also to Pauline oliveros, alessandro Talking Music: Conversations with John Cage, Philip

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 RIZZARDI: THE COMPLETE BIRTH OF THE LOOP

One notable moment at this early stage of Riley’s career as a composer was his discov-
ery of free improvisation. According to Pauline Oliveros, this happened – more or less by
chance – already in 1957. An informal trio consisting of Riley (piano), Lauren Rush (bass), and
Oliveros herself (horn) used to meet at the studio of the San Francisco radio station KPFA,
where Rush served as program assistant. According to Oliveros’s recollections, it happened
that Riley was once asked to score a very short (ive-minute) movie with too little advance
notice, so

[w]e went in and sat down together and recorded several 5-minute tracks for Terry to choose
from. Once we had done that, we realized that improvisation was something we could do.
We didn’t have to be jazz musicians; we could be musicians coming from concert or art
music traditions and improvise too. So we would meet fairly oten in the studio there and
record improvisations.1

Riley speaks of those improvisations as “kind of free style atonal music,” maintaining that
they were somehow consistent with his tastes in composition at the time. Oliveros stresses
the importance of playing back and studying the recordings as an integral part of the pro-
cess.2 By that time she had already discovered, if not conceptualized, the “deep listening”
experience through the use of the tape recorder.
Some years later this experience was presented in the irst concert of the “Sonics” series
that started late in 1961 among the group of musicians who were about to found the San
Francisco Tape Music Center (SFTMC). The irst “Sonics” event also included some early
tape compositions that took advantage of the rather primitive facilities available at the San
Francisco Conservatory.3 The sound production consisted largely of noises and vocal mate-
rial collected with the aid of air and contact microphones; the tape manipulation techniques
were basically sound-on-sound and manual speed variation. It should be noted that edit-
ing and splicing were simply functional procedures, since tape – unlike the contemporary
practices in the electroacoustic music of that era – was not intended primarily for carefully
assembling a piece of music with a deined or closed form, but rather as a tool to be used in
performance.
One should recall here one well-known fact, namely, that, as a result of the lack of insti-
tutional support for new or experimental music in the USA at that time, many early studios
had no equipment capable of elaborate sound production and manipulation, like the expen-
sive and custom-made machines of the European radio studios of Cologne, Milan, and Paris.
Experimental studios in the USA were mainly recording facilities: this very basic fact, and
the strong inluence of John Cage’s concepts on experimental composers, let a deep imprint
on the aesthetics of electroacoustic music in the United States, even among those circles,
such as the Bay Area musicians, who were following a speciic, distinctive path remote from

Glass, Laurie Anderson, and Five Generations of Ameri- 3 the “sonics” series began on 18 December 1961,
can Experimental Composers (new York: Da capo with a presentation of the tape pieces Traversals by
Press, 1999), 165–66, and Fred Frith, “the 1958 KPFa ramon sender, Time Perspectives by oliveros,
tapes,” The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s M[escalin] Mix by riley, and Sound Study I by Philip
Counterculture and the Avant-Garde, ed. David w. winsor, plus group improvisation by oliveros,
Bernstein, with a foreword by John rockwell and a sender, wilson, and Laurel Johnson (notably, not by
preface by Johannes Goebel (Berkeley, Los angeles riley). see thomas m. welsh, “chronology,”
and London: University of california Press, 2008), in Bernstein, The San Francisco Tape Music Center
208–09. (see note 1), 269.
2 Personal communication, January 2012.

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8 TECHNOLOGICAL INTERSECTIONS

the so-called New York School. In a report on the activity of the San Francisco Tape Music
Center, written in 1964 when electroacoustic music had reached its maturity, Ramon Sender
claimed that “[i]t used to be said that every composer must confront Arnold Schoenberg’s
‘Method of Composing with Twelve Tones’ and come to some sort of working agreement
with it. Today the composer cannot aford to ignore the experience of working with tape.” 4
Here one can see a telling parallel between, if not a congruence of, the technical medium
and the musical material itself.
As tape composition was the main focus of experimental sound production, the principal
object was, of course, to collect and manipulate sonic objets trouvés, though with an approach
totally diferent from that of musique concrète. Ater all, both Pierre Schaefer’s original
concept and John Cage’s experiments, such as the early Williams Mix (1952), were consistent
with Luigi Russolo’s early systematic approach to the classiication of sound sources. To the
musicians involved in the SFTMC, on the other hand, tape composition was anything but
systematic, and from the beginning they were intent on blurring the distinction between
composition and performance.
In this respect, one of the seminal inluences in experimental and electroacoustic music
was Richard Maxield, a composer from the generation of innovators that lourished in the
post-war years. Maxield also had substantial contacts with the European music scene during
the 1950s.5 In 1959, ater attending John Cage’s classes in “experimental composition” for one
year, Maxield joined the staf of the New School for Social Research and started to teach
the principles of sound synthesis. It was a signiicant leap from the aesthetics implicit in tape
manipulation, which nevertheless continued to form a substantial part of his work. While
working as a freelance audio engineer and as a full-time recording engineer for Westminster
Records from 1960 through 1962, Maxield used to save the “let-over” tapes from various
recording sessions and exploit them as material to be manipulated for creative purposes.
Prerecording and randomly mixing sounds was his predominant practice at the time.
La Monte Young relocated to New York in 1960 in order to study with Maxield and even-
tually became his assistant and the main performer of his works. Riley has acknowledged
Maxield as a major inluence since his student days at Berkeley. Indeed, they took part, to-
gether with Ramon Sender, in a semiprivate concert of tape pieces at Sender’s studio in the
late months of 1961. Riley’s earliest tape composition, which dates from that session, reveals
a peculiar approach to tape mainly as a tool for shaping evolutionary musical processes.
Mescalin Mix was started in 1960 at Riley’s home studio as an open-form piece, and ended
up in a more or less stable version when it was assembled in 1962 at Sender’s studio, a facility
equipped with semi-professional gear.

4 ramon sender, “the san Francisco tape music least ive compositions performed in Germany,
center: a report” (1964), in Bernstein, The San Fran- including one in Darmstadt. see “richard maxield,”
cisco Tape Music Center (see note 1), 45. notes by william Dawes, on www.melafoundation.
5 Having studied with roger sessions and ernst or/rm01.htm.
Krenek in the late 1940s, maxield traveled to Ger- 6 the west coast experience is apparent in several
many, where as early as 1953 he was in contact with works by Berio, notably Esposizione, a quasi-happening
the two pivotal igures of electroacoustic compo- music theatre piece with electroacoustic music
sition there, Herbert eimert and Karlheinz stock- that he conceived together with edoardo sanguineti
hausen. He continued his studies with sessions, and ann Halprin, and which was premièred at the
aaron copland, and milton Babbitt and made a Venice Biennale in 1963. riley did have later con-
second trip to europe in 1955, where his plans to tacts with Berio: “i had met him, but not through
study with Luigi Dallapiccola and Bruno maderna mills. He came with cathy Berberian. La monte
eventually failed. Between 1953 and 1956 he had at and i had mainly contacts with her, she was more

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 RIZZARDI: THE COMPLETE BIRTH OF THE LOOP

As a parenthetical observation, it is a mere coincidence that, of the composers whose

activity revolved around the SFTMC, Riley was the only one who missed the opportunity
to become acquainted with Luciano Berio, who taught at Mills College at the exact same
time that Riley moved to Europe (1962). Berio had brought to Mills the seminal experi-
ence of RAI’s Studio di Fonologia Musicale, the best-equipped electroacoustic studio of that
time, where he had served as musical codirector with Bruno Maderna since its inception in
1954–55.6
The title of Mescalin Mix pays tribute to Cage’s tape compositions (Williams Mix, Fontana
Mix) and stands as an early manifesto of bona ide psychedelia. Accordingly, the focus is on
the slow repetition of the collected sound events (a girl laughing, a blues piano rif, explo-
sions), suggesting the alteration of time perception induced by the ingestion of peyote, which
Riley had begun experimenting with in the mid-1950s.7 It is a loop-based piece: the basic
sound material was recorded randomly and then spliced according to chance operations.
“Outside my studio door,” says Riley, “wine bottles [over which the tape was spun] were
spaced according to the size of the loop at a time, to form several layers. There were various
tapes with constructions like these. For a long time the tapes existed only as separate reels
that I could assemble during the performance.” 8
When the tape was played back in performance,9 live speed alterations were intro-
duced. “It liberated sound as a texture to be manipulated,” Riley recalled in 1995, adding,
signiicantly, that the experience was still viable to him. “It interests me to go back and
explore this technique further because I believe there is a lot more to do in this area.” 10
Far from dismissing the “lo-i” conditions in which the piece was conceived and realized,
Riley stresses in retrospect the tactile quality of the process, as if he were making a piece of
“folk art.”
While tape manipulation helped to renew the approach of composition and performance
as an integrated process with hardly any notation involved, jazz began to appeal to Riley
more and more in a phase that he calls “transitional.” 11 It should also be mentioned that
Riley had earlier played piano at San Francisco’s Gold Street Saloon for a living while taking
lessons with ragtime master Wally Rose. But around 1960–61 the initial impulse to shit his
musical orientation toward modal music came from hard bop.
In the early 1960s the modal approach to jazz improvisation was a recent discovery and
a signiicant departure from the conventional harmonic patterns of the blues and Tin Pan
Alley songs. George Russell had provided a theory of this new direction with his book
Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization (1953), and Miles Davis irst popularized it
with the music contained in the album Kind of Blue of 1959.12

available to talk to. i met Berio a few times over the Stool. this was a work in progress which, according
years. we knew each other but there was no close to riley, changed its title more than once: it had
contact.” previously been called The Three-Legged Stool, while
7 “For a long time i called it M Mix because i thought subsequently, for The Five-Legged Stool, the music was
it was too blatant to call it Mescalin Mix but then so composed by morton subotnick.
many people asked me what the ‘m’ meant that i 10 Dean, riley interview (see note 7).
thought why not give it its full title.” robert Dean, 11 Jazz has resurfaced more noticeably in the 1990s,
terry riley interview, 20 september 1995, liner notes especially ater riley returned to playing piano.
to Music for The Git, organ of corti 1 (cD), 1995 12 riley was later in direct contact with russell: “i met
[2 unnumbered pp.]. George in 1967, in sweden; we did In C and Olson
8 Dean, riley interview (see note 7). III, and George was very interested. so we met and
9 Mescalin Mix was composed for a dance performance discussed, and we even did an interview together
of the ann Halprin company, The Four-Legged with Folke rabe, for the swedish radio.”

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8 TECHNOLOGICAL INTERSECTIONS

Riley’s main connection to jazz again came through La Monte Young, who already had
an important background in this domain, being an accomplished alto saxophone player
who, when in Los Angeles in the mid-1950s, had taken the opportunity to collaborate with
Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, and Don Cherry. The Blackhawk Club in San Francisco was
the place that hosted all the main jazz acts from the East Coast. Riley recalls performances
at the Blackhawk by Miles Davis and especially John Coltrane, whose long improvisations
became a model for the style he was trying to develop as a pianist. Soon he shited from the
free atonal style of the KPFK sessions to a modal and repetitive one, especially when experi-
menting in an informal piano duo with Young at the Ann Halprin Dance Studio.

II
Once he had settled in Paris, Riley was prepared for a true vie d’artiste. During his stay in
France he basically made a living working for a booking agency that sent him to play loor
shows at the NATO strategic air command bases and oicers’ clubs all over the country.
Riley served as pianist and bus driver. He had been previously employed as the pianist of
an already historic club, Fred Payne’s Bar in Rue Pigalle, sitting at the same instrument that
Cole Porter had played in the 1930s. Playing jazz standards and blues tunes became for him
a daily activity.
One of Riley’s irst acquaintances was Daevid Allen, a young poet and musician who had
arrived a few months earlier from Australia via London. Allen would soon become Riley’s clos-
est friend and, so to speak, his main intermediary for several artistic and social connections.
Allen had come to Paris in pursuit of his heroes, the poets and writers of the Beat Generation,
most of whom were living there at that time. It should also be said that, prior to Paris, Allen
had stayed in London, in 1960, where he had lodged with the family of the then teenaged
Robert Wyatt, initiating him to jazz and contemporary literature. Some years later they would
both become members of the British progressive rock group The Sot Machine. When Allen
married, in May 1962, the couple went to stay in one of the most famed centers of the cosmo-
politan bohème, the so-called Beat Hotel: “We were immediately accepted and moved into the
room just vacated by Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. And that’s how it all began.”
The Beat Hotel was a very basic, cheap, nameless boarding house whose unprejudiced
owners encouraged all sorts of irregular guests to stay there. Since the 1930s this house had
attracted a constant low of artists, mostly from the United States, many of them jazz musi-
cians. Beginning in late 1957 a group of Beats made the hotel their headquarters for about ive
years, during which time it became a home for intense collective creativity. Ginsberg lived
there, as did Gregory Corso and William Burroughs. In the words of Jean-Jacques Lebel,
who became closely associated with all of them, “[t]hey lived on an island, isolated in this
magic little paradise full of rats and bad smells. But it was paradisical because it gave them
the green light to be themselves without having to confront America.” 13
One key character in this plot was the British experimentalist Brion Gysin, who for most
of the 1950s lived in Tangier, where he started an important artistic and personal relation
with Burroughs. Gysin, too, relocated to the Beat Hotel in 1958, and it was through him that

13 see Barry miles, The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs 14 w. Burroughs, Nothing Here Now But The Recordings,
& Corso in Paris, 1957–1963 (London: atlantic Books, industrial records ir 0016 (LP), 1981.
2000), 19.

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 RIZZARDI: THE COMPLETE BIRTH OF THE LOOP

[Figure 1]
Terry Riley in Paris, 1962 or 1963.
Private archive of Terry Riley.

Burroughs, just ater the publication of his irst experiment in non-linear writing, The Naked
Lunch (1959), was exposed to the “cut-up” method, which enabled him to construct prose
from collages of fragments literally cut out from printed texts as objets trouvés, e.g. press clip-
pings. Very soon this practice evolved from the domain of the written text to that of sound,
by means of tape recording and manipulation. The main material of these experiments was,
of course, Burroughs’s own voice, and the tape recorder was, at this point, instrumental in
creating a parallel both to the (visual) cut-up poetry and to the (aural) “jazz poetry style.”
This is apparent in what survives of the recordings made by Burroughs at that time.14 In his
vivid recollection, Gysin tells how this practice started:
What we did on our own was to play around with the very limited technology and wattage
we had in the old Beat Hotel, 40-watts a room was all we were allowed. […] William loved
the idea of getting his hands on his own words, branding them and rustling anyone else’s
he wanted. It’s a real treat for the ears, too, the irst time you hear it […]15

According to Gysin, soon ater the joint composition of Poem of Poems, Burroughs had
been busy “punching to death a series of cheap Japanese plastic tape recorders, to which he
applied himself with such force that he could punch one of them to death inside a matter
of weeks, days even.” 16 These experiments were mainly based on simple operations allowed

15 W. S. Burroughs/B. Gysin/Throbbing Gristle, ed. 16 ibid.

V. Vale and andrea Juno (san Francisco: re/search
Publications, 1982), now also on www.10111.org.

355
8 TECHNOLOGICAL INTERSECTIONS

by the tape recorder without substantially altering its features, such as “inching,” i.e. activat-
ing the record and stop functions in rapid succession to make instant “collages” of loosely
related verbal elements.
While Burroughs was writing The Sot Machine and abusing his tape recorders, Riley was
well aware of what was going on at the Beat Hotel, getting real-time information through
Daevid Allen about all sorts of experiments. “I lived next door to Gysin,” recalls Allen, “my
room in the Beat Hotel was next door to his. We were doing ilm loops, as well. Everything
we could loop we looped.” He added that “Terry was entirely responsible for opening my
eyes to the potential for loops and for collage work, with Mescaline Mix and with the Chet
Baker stuf. He was my teacher, he was my loop guru.” 17
However, a single but substantial contact took place when eventually Riley went to the
Beat Hotel to discuss a project devised by Daevid Allen: a poetry and music show that should
have taken place in London and would have featured Burroughs, Gysin, and Riley himself.
This opportunity failed to materialize, however, for when Gysin saw the advance publicity
and noticed Riley’s name at the end of the program, he became angry, not wanting to appear
on a program that ended with a then unkown musician. This was, of course, before Riley
had any reputation at all.
As Daevid Allen was Riley’s closest friend in Paris, the common ground for their artistic
and social activities was mostly jazz, and the Paris jazz scene was then enlivened by many
expatriates, among them Dexter Gordon and Bud Powell. Powell’s longtime friend (and
purported partner) Altevia “Buttercup” Edwards had a bar in the area where Allen and
Riley used to perform very spontaneous happenings that included jazz poetry, piano play-
ing, and more. At that time, Allen was playing guitar in a trio, and, as he recalls, one night
“Burroughs had organized a gig out there to play The Ticket That Exploded with my trio and
him doing the text for a couple of actors. […] But later at the end of the show, Terry was
there and so we played motor scooter and guitar.” Jazz, poetry, and spontaneous theater thus
formed part of a genuine continuum.
At that time, the concept of happening, initiated in the 1950s on the East Coast by the fa-
bled performances at Black Mountain College by John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and Merce
Cunningham, already had a history in the USA and was spreading quickly across Europe.
Many of the collaborative projects in which Riley had been involved in San Francisco, such as
those with Young and Ann Halprin, had indeed been in the domain of the happening. But the
early 60s were also the heyday of the Fluxus movement, with which Riley had close contact as
well, again through La Monte Young: “I was in touch with some of the Fluxus people, so, on
the side, we were doing happenings […]. There was Jed Curtis, and George Maciunas was in
Wiesbaden. And Nam June Paik. And when I worked in the eastern part of France, I’d jump
over and catch a few Fluxus concerts, and perform with Emmet Williams and these people.” 18
Riley also composed a piece in that style, called Earpiece, and established signiicant contacts
with the Italian avant-garde, notably with Sylvano Bussotti, during a side trip to Rome.

17 “the chet Baker stuf” refers to Music for The Git; 20 the only surviving recording of the same group
see below. that performed on The Git, plus pianist rené
18 Duckworth, Talking Music (see note 1), 276. Urtreger, dates from June 1963 and consists of
19 Dean, riley interview (see note 7). three pieces: Well You Needn’t (t. monk), I Should
Care (s. cahn, P. weston, a. stordahl), and

356
 RIZZARDI: THE COMPLETE BIRTH OF THE LOOP

III
The crucial episode of Riley’s stay in Paris was his involvement in the production of the
experimental play The Git, which took place in the summer of 1963 at what is now called
the Théâtre de la Ville and was then known as Théâtre des Nations (formerly the Théâtre
Sarah Bernhardt).
Riley got involved in the production through his friendship with Kenneth (Ken) Dewey, a
young playwright from San Francisco and a pioneer in happenings and “action theater” who
also collaborated with the Ann Halprin dance company at the same time as Riley and Young.
Dewey had moved to Paris shortly ater Riley, together with the dancer-actor John Graham
and other members of Halprin’s company. There they were joined by members of the Living
Theater (the company was already in Europe at that time and would stay there for quite a few
years). Dewey asked Riley to be the composer and music director of the play he intended to
produce: The Git, an experimental play he had premièred in San Francisco in March 1962.
Another prominent artist of the time was about to join the jazz expatriates in Paris. At the
beginning of 1963 Chet Baker came to France ater being released from jail in Italy, where he
had been detained in the town of Lucca for possession of narcotics. This incident had put a
sudden stop to his quickly rising fame in Italy as a quasi-star. He had been featured with his
crooning voice and his subdued, charming personality in popular musical movies and TV
shows and was now looking for a new start in Paris, where he had already spent a musically
proliic period in the mid-1950s.
Riley remembers meeting Baker in a pool room in rue Pigalle: “Chet was there playing
pool. I was very excited because he was a hero of mine. It was about a day later that Ken
Dewey turned up in Paris and I told him I had seen Chet Baker.” 19 He went to listen to
Baker’s newly formed Parisian quartet consisting of Luis Fuentes (trombone), Luigi Trussardi
(bass), and Giorgio Solano (drums) at the famed Let Bank club Le chat qui pêche, and took
note of some musical material he could use for the theater production. Dewey arranged to
have Baker and his band on stage as both musicians and actors, and Riley thought of using
the music both in real-time performance and on tape. According to Riley, Baker was play-
ing modal jazz at the time, notably Miles Davis’s “So What.” He asked Baker to play and
record the tune with the quartet, along with a blues duet between trumpet and double bass.
From the manipulations that eventually resulted in the inal tapes of Music for The Git, it is
not easy to detect what music was actually played, but it is likely that “So What” was used,
together with another modal piece by Davis, “Milestones” (aka “Miles”).20
The rehearsals took place in the ruins of a castle in Valmondois, south of Paris, so all
the crew camped out in the shell of the building and used the large haylot as a studio. The
château hosted an experimental association of performers from diferent backgrounds. Riley
worked at an ORTF studio located upstairs at the Théâtre des Nations, where the play was
being staged and where the Chet Baker quartet was being recorded. Then, at night, Riley
would bring the tapes he had worked over to the château and try to develop an interaction
between the actors and the music. It seems that Baker was initially perplexed but soon be-
came conident with the unusual setting of the music and the staging.

Milestones; see Dizionario Enciclopedico del Jazz, in chet Baker’s rich discography, namely as a
armando curcio editore, DeJ-08 (cD), n.d. the tV performance given on 2 may 1964 by a group
billboard announcing The Git also lists saxophonist including J. Pelzer, r. Urtreger, L. trussardi,
and lutist Jacques Pelzer, but he is not heard on the and F. manzecchi; see Jazz Icons: Live in ‘64 and ‘69,
inal tapes of riley’s music. So What appears just once Universal (DVD), © 2006.

357
8 TECHNOLOGICAL INTERSECTIONS

[Figure 2]
Set-up of tape recorders for
Terry Riley’s The Gift.

[Figure 3]
Wiring diagram for Karlheinz
Stockhausen’s Solo.
© Copyright 1969 by Universal
Edition AG, Vienna.

358
 RIZZARDI: THE COMPLETE BIRTH OF THE LOOP

I asked them to record it with the group and improvise on it just like they did at the Chat qui
pêche. Then I had them play it solo with each one improvising on it. So that I had both the
group and individual instruments. I took it all upstairs at the mixing booth and we started
cutting it up into loops and re-orchestrating it, putting all these loops together.21

The voice of actor John Graham was added to the tape along with some outtakes from
Mescalin Mix: “the idea was that this would be built into layers of sound that the actors
could improvise within the play. Sometimes the tape music could be going on by itself.” 22
During the performance one tape recorder was played on stage while Riley ran the tapes
backstage over the house system. The unique feature of the tape manipulations captured on
the inal tape for playback during the performance happened to be the very irst incarnation
of the principle that Riley would later dub the “time-lag accumulator.”
While preparing the tapes for The Git, Riley was assisted by a studio engineer from the
French National Broadcasting System (ORTF), whose name he no longer remembers. The en-
gineer had been instructed to cut up many segments of solos from the original recording of
the jazz combo, and was asked to fashion them into diferent-sized loops. This had probably
started as a procedure similar to what Riley had experimented with in Mescalin Mix, that is,
a rather indeterminate mixture of layered loops performed live – clearly a further evolution
of Maxield’s practice. But now that he was working with more homogeneous material based
on the denser musical low of an improvising quartet, he should have considered obtain-
ing a sort of cumulative efect. This idea was not entirely new, for Riley had been working
with an Echoplex at Ramon Sender’s studio in San Francisco. In its basic form this device,
introduced in 1959 as an efect for the electric guitar, is an array of two (and later three) tape
heads located an adjustable distance apart, thereby adding a variable delay to the incoming
signal. Having exploited the optional feedback efect on the Echoplex, Riley already had a
fairly clear concept of a sound event echoing and looping at the same time.
Ater hearing a description of this efect, but with a much longer delay than is available
on the Echoplex, the engineer lit on the idea of setting up two tape recorders with the same
tape stretched between them: the incoming signal would then be recorded by the irst ma-
chine and played back by the second, placed a convenient distance away. The delayed signal
would then be fed back to the irst machine, which would reproduce it along with the new
incoming event. Because of the feedback, the result would be an accumulative recursion and
eventually a slow fade-out of the looped sounds (see Figure 2).23
This practice was invented on the spot, and Riley is positive that the engineer had never
done it before, and even doubts that he had been previously involved in tape experiments of
any sort. But it is also possible that, as a studio engineer at ORTF, he was aware of the equip-
ment at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, especially the custom-built Morphophone, a
device capable of complex looping operations with its twelve (adjustable) recording heads
positioned around a revolving disk, on which a tape was fastened with its magnetic side fac-
ing outward. Curiously enough, Riley, even if aware of the current developments in electro-
acoustic music and particularly of musique concrète, had no contact at all with the composers

21 Dean, riley interview (see note 7). 23 it may be observed that the progressive degradation
22 ibid. of the outgoing (looped) signal is an idiomatic
consequence of the “limitations” of the analogue
device, and part of riley’s poetics at the time.

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active in the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) during his Paris stay and hardly any
with experimental composers. It is also doubtful whether he had precise information about
the invention of the “copy head” used by Stockhausen during the preparation of Kontakte
in 1960, that is, the modiication of the normal order of the three heads in a tape recorder
(playback – erase – record instead of erase – record – playback) in order to superimpose
layer upon layer of sound on a single tape loop. It is more likely that Stockhausen conceived
his Solo “for one melody instrument with feedback” in 1966 ater information had spread
about Riley’s practice. The principle of Solo is indeed that of a polyphonic texture generated
live by a single instrument through a tape-based system capable of delay and feedback (see
Figure 3, p. 358).
Music for The Git survives now as a set of ive untitled sections, or “suite,” which Riley
arranged on a monophonic tape in 1963 from excerpts used in the play. It was irst heard in
the USA at the Tape Music Center in San Francisco to open the world première of In C in
November 1964, but it was published only in 2000 on compact disc.24 In the irst piece – ba-
sically a slow blues improvised by the trumpet over a bass and drum accompaniment – the
tape treatments appear more as occasional “embellishments” that sometimes duplicate a
fragment of the musical discourse. In the other “movements,” the voice of the actor John
Graham is added with a looped fragment of text (“She moves she”) over diferently overlap-
ping loops taken from performances of “So What” and, apparently, “Milestones.” “In the
play, the tapes were used as a background against which the musicians soloed (live) and the
actors improvised their parts as a kind of extended jazz theater.”
Ater working with Baker and discovering the “time-lag accumulation efect,” Riley de-
cided to continue to work with jazz because he had never experienced such a structured way
to perform that music. He says, quite interestingly, that the experiments he had heard with
jazz were usually Third Stream – that is, elaborate compositional “crossovers” – but that here
“there was a process that used modal jazz making it hypnotic and psychedelic.”

IV
The assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963 put a sudden stop to the GIs’ enter-
tainment program, which was Riley’s main source of income in Paris, and he found himself
suddenly forced to leave France and return to San Francisco. By the beginning of 1964 he
had resumed his job at the Golden Street Saloon and had decided, as a composer, to pursue
diferent experiments in various media and idioms. He formed a rehearsal jazz group which
used to meet once or twice a week. The group included the saxophone players Jon Gibson,
who would join the Philip Glass Ensemble a few years later, and Mel Martin, who had played
with Wes Montgomery and Benny Carter, and the bassist Bill Douglas. Also in the course
of 1964 Riley tried to develop the time-lag accumulation efect in diferent media: speech in
the piece I (the voice was again John Graham’s), pre-existing sounds in Shoeshine (based on
an organ blues rif recorded by Jimmy Smith), and composed material. In this last case, the
piece – irst performed by Sonny Lewis, a tenor saxophone player whom Riley had met in

24 terry riley, Music for The Git, organ of corti 1 (cD), 25 terry riley, program notes to Solo Time Lag Music
2000. the release includes other tape compositions, for Soprano Saxophone (1963–present), new York,
such as Bird of Paradise (1965) and Mescalin Mix steinway Hall, 25–26 april 1967. note that by 1967
(1960-62), together with Two Pianos and Five Tape the composition, or rather the concept of the
Recorders (1961), a performance with La monte Young. piece, seems to date back to 1963, while the lealet

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Paris – was initially titled In B-lat or is it A-lat?, then Dorian Reeds (“Solo Time Lag Music
for Soprano Saxophone”), before inally being christened Poppy Nogood and the Phantom
Band ater Riley had started to play it by himself on the soprano saxophone (1966). Here is
how he described it in introducing a later performance:
All the material that I am playing subsequently recycles and combines in an accumulative
manner. In this way many generations of the material can be quickly built up without
having to add each track one at a time, therefore adapting itself naturally to use in live
performance. This is the freest of all my recent work as the automatic ordering of the ma-
terial in the timelag accumulation process allows me to play quite complicated material
which then is arranged into loops and recycled. I have written no scores for this music as
so far it has all been governed by an intuitive relationship developed between me and the
machines. I do have a catalog of material which I use as a basis for these improvisations and
am constantly adding new patterns. However, I want to keep the music in the tradition of
unwritten improvised music.25

All these tape pieces, prepared in the summer and autumn of that year, followed the composi-
tion of what can be considered the consummation of Riley’s musical thinking ater all the ex-
periences of the preceding year: the magisterial synthesis In C, which seems to have “appeared”
to him in a sudden burst of inspiration.26 The impact of In C was immediately apparent
and, with its unprecedented format, meant a radical departure from all received paradigms
of composition – down to the still widespread idea that it was the foundation of musical
minimalism. Actually Riley did not exploit this format in his further work, apart from Olson
III for chorus and orchestra (1967) and the interesting experiment Tread on the Trail, a piece
inspired by (and dedicated to) Sonny Rollins which applies the modular structure and typical
performance practice of In C to the jazz idiom. The piece was indeed written for the above-
mentioned rehearsal group and premièred at an SFTMC season concert in May 1965.
Soon Riley would leave San Francisco again, planning a new move to Europe, but eventu-
ally he stopped in New York, where he joined La Monte Young’s “Theater of Eternal Music”
and again met Ken Dewey, who had recently founded the Action Theater Inc. Steve Reich
had also moved from San Francisco to New York in 1965. Riley and Dewey reconnected and
resumed, to some extent, the work they had done in Paris. Dewey got a tape recorder to
Riley, who used it in performance on several occasions at the Village along with a homemade
organ, again through a Fluxus connection:
George Maciunas gave me an old harmonium which I had a vacuum cleaner motor mounted
on it, and that was my keyboard […]. With that I recorded Reed Streams.27 That was the only
keyboard I had. Probably a year later I bought a Vox Super Continental two-manual combo
organ, and I started doing concerts with it, which were mainly based on the Keyboard
Studies in those days.

In New York Riley was beginning to gain an underground reputation with his long, con-
tinuous performances on organ, saxophone, and tape delay system. The leap to quasi-rock
stardom was not far ahead. It was achieved through a rare and lucky case of marketing

acompanying the première of In B-lat or is it A-lat? recorded renditions, is found in robert carl,
reads “october 1964.” Terry Riley’s in c (new York: oxford University
26 a comprehensive survey on the genesis of In C, Press, 2009).
together with analyses of the actual score and its 27 Reed Streams, mass art m-131 (LP), 1966.

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strategy – that is, when computer music pioneer David Behrman was appointed producer
of the “Music Of Our Time” series on Columbia Records’ budget label Odyssey in 1967.
Provided that the production was cheap, Behrman had been granted total freedom. His irst
release was an LP with Pauline Oliveros’s I to IV, Richard Maxield’s Night Music, and Steve
Reich’s Come Out. The records did not sell particularly well, but never less than 3000 copies
and sometimes as many as 6000.28 In 1968 Riley was featured with the irst recording of In
C, which beneited from a better presentation than the other LPs in the series, thanks to the
more engaging artwork and the rock-oriented liner notes on the back cover. Ater its imme-
diate success Columbia Records decided to package and market Riley’s subsequent release,
in 1969, overtly as a pop album: A Rainbow in Curved Air (coupled with Poppy Nogood and
the Phantom Band on the lip side). It sold 12,000 copies in the year of its release and, like In
C, remained in print until Columbia Records ceased to exist. Both were released on CD by
Sony in the early 1990s and have enjoyed enduring acclaim ever since.
Totally uncompromising as it was, Riley’s music seemed to interpret musically the rapid
cultural changes that North American society had undergone in the preceding few years. It
blended improvisation, “groove,” psychedelic allure, and (with Rainbow) a “far-in” electro-
acoustic sound with rigorous and unusual formal consistency. While not as massively popular
as any contemporary rock act, it nevertheless acquired much more popularity than any other
form of new or experimental music, paving the way for the later fortunes of minimalism.
This success made Riley a “musicians’ musician” and soon rebounded to Europe in a
peculiar way. When Riley paid his irst visit to Pete Townshend of The Who, he found
that Townshend owned more than a dozen copies of the Rainbow LP and listened to it
obsessively. It became the notorious source of inspiration for two tunes, Baba O’Riley and
Won’t Get Fooled Again, the opening and closing tracks of the 1972 album Who’s Next. While
retaining the appearance of rock songs, they ofer more than this: both contain a layer con-
sisting of an evolving, pulsating musical igure which is generated semi-automatically by a
Lowrey organ modulated by the low frequency oscillator of a VCS3 synthesizer – another
way of reproducing Riley’s signature time-lag efect. In 1970 a newly formed British group
took the name of Curved Air. In 1973 Brian Eno and Robert Fripp recorded the album No
Pussyfooting, based entirely on the time-lag accumulator. In 1971 Riley in turn recorded his
only overtly rock-oriented album, The Church of Anthrax, together with John Cale of Velvet
Underground fame, who had taken part in La Monte Young’s Dream Syndicate.
Riley’s popularity among progressive rock musicians actually had deeper roots. The rec-
ognizable inluence of his time-lag music is to be found in the work of The Sot Machine
around 1969, especially in their album Third. The group as such was formed in 1966 (and
named ater Burroughs’s book) as an association of Daevid Allen, Robert Wyatt, Kevin Ayers,
and Mike Ratledge, but it had been preceded by other conigurations, the irst being a trio
formed as early as 1963 by Daevid Allen, Robert Wyatt, and Hugh Hopper.29
All these musicians had met in Paris and were directly or indirectly connected to Riley.
Terry himself recalls some jazz poetry sessions with Wyatt playing trumpet and Allen read-
ing Beat texts. Through the latter, Hugh Hopper, who would join The Sot Machine as a

28 see Kenneth Goldsmith, “David Behrman: 29 see Graham Bennett, Sot Machine: Out-Bloody-
composer as record executive,” in Don’t Quit Your Rageous, with forewords by Daevid allen, Hugh
Day Job, originally published by new music Box/ Hopper, and John etheridge (London: saF, 2005).
american music center, 2000; newmusicbox.org.

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bass player in 1969, conducted his own experiments with varying lengths of spliced magnetic
tape running out into the room and back through the playback head. Hopper recalls his irst
trip to Paris in 1964: “I arrived at his [Daevid Allen’s] lat and had my irst ever joint and was
hit by this soundscape. It was a Charlie Haden bass line from Ornette Coleman’s ‘Lonely
Woman’ – the whole thing was based on that. It’s stayed in my brain as one of the formative
things of my musical life.” 30
The inluence of such a radically experimental artist as Riley was not yet noticeable
among European composers (György Ligeti’s Selbstportrait mit Reich und Riley (und Chopin
ist auch dabei) for two pianos dates from 1976), but it was especially deep in the domain of
popular music, where it crossed over the borders of what is conventionally referred to as
“progressive rock.” Here the reception of his music did not happen primarily through stylis-
tic imitation. The examples of the two tunes by The Who and the later Eno-Fripp workout
demonstrate how Riley’s experimental procedures were capable of inducing similar practices
in musical areas previously untouched by such radical attitudes. Also the very notion of
minimal(ism) was still unknown in music and could not yet mediate the popularization of
stylistic clichés that took place in the following decade.
Progressive rock usually appeals to musicologists because the formal implications of its
complex thematic processes and harmonies, elaborate rhythmic patterns, and luxurious or-
chestration are far removed from the mainstream. In this context, however, it would be better
to stress other features – compositional features in an extended sense. Popular music began
to experience a deeper inner transformation picked up from the world of art music, assimi-
lating its more critical and experimental attitude at the same time that musical composition
was opening up a dialog with electroacoustic technologies and other cultures, questioning
not only the relationship between notation and performance, but also the communicative
circuit between composer, performer, and audience, and eventually the social role of the
musician. This was especially apparent later in the 1960s. It is ironic that in 1968 and 1969 a
composer from the GRM, such as François Bayle, could ask Robert Wyatt and Daevid Allen
to contribute to his electroacoustic pieces.31 In a few years the direction of the relations be-
tween popular culture and avant-garde practices had almost reversed. In this respect Terry
Riley’s experience of the early 1960s has played an outstanding role as an agent of efective
cross-pollination between musical cultures – in much more than a merely geographical sense.

30 Julian cowley, “Hugh Hopper: repeat cycles,” 31 the tape compositions It (with vocals by wyatt)
The Wire 259 (september 2005): 31. and Solitioude (1969, with allen’s guitar), both
available on L’Expérience Acoustique (1970–72),
vols. 4–5, magison mGcB 5694, 1994 (cD).

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