This is a piece for an indeterminate number and type of instruments. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s at a moderate tempo and the dynamics are fairly constant throughout.<\/p>\n
I like this work a lot. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s mesmerizing. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve listened to it quite few times already, and am listening to it again, while I type these thoughts, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hard, because the piece keeps drawing me in. <\/p>\n
A weird thing about this piece is that it sounds like there are some improvised bits in the middle. Of course, there aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t any improvised notes\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthe notes are written out, even though when to switch from pattern to pattern is improvised\u00e2\u20ac\u201dbut there is something that sounds like a recorder in the middle that seems to have made a break for it and gone over the wall. I wonder whether this sort of thing surprised Riley. Riley could have recorded this as a one-man band (by multitracking), but maybe this is the sort of (what to me sounds unexpected) thing that made him record it with other musicians.<\/p>\n
This piece is really a sort of \u00e2\u20ac\u02dccloud\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 of possibilities that only \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcsettles down\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 or becomes well defined in a particular performance. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s too bad that the CD captures just one realization of this piece. Even the same band, on the same afternoon, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m sure, would have recorded a much different version of it. I wonder whether this (the fact that there is one \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcdefinitive\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 version of this piece) disappoints Riley sometimes. The ideal \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcrecording\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 of this piece (in my opinion) would be a computer program that generates different interpretations.<\/p>\n
In fact, Riley is sort of a computer programmer, as much as a composer, in the writing of this piece. . (IBM pays me good money, thank you, to write computer programs, so I hope (for IBM\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s sake, at least) that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not being completely na\u00c3\u00afve in these observations.) In computer programming, you have to think carefully about every possible sequence of events (permitted by your program) that a user might come up with. This is not easy. The first thought that comes to mind when a programmer looks at many bugs is, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I never thought anyone would do that.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Now, what Riley is doing here is something much more complicated than your run-of-the-mill computer programming. What he is doing here is what is known in the industry as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153multi-threaded programming\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. In multi-threaded programming, there are several paths of execution happening simultaneously. One thread might be responding to the user\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s input through the graphical user interface (for example, dealing with button clicks and so on), while another thread might be doing some background processing (such as checking spelling in a document). And this only is a simple example. But, believe me, even simple multi-threaded programming can be hard. It can be very hard. One of the main difficulties is with conflicts between different threads (which I guess corresponds to dissonance or something in this perhaps tenuous analogy). “In C” is a multi-threaded program\u00e2\u20ac\u201deach musician is an independent thread. However, Riley has managed to walk a very thin line in writing this multithreaded program. Not only do all the threads interact harmoniously (this would be easy\u00e2\u20ac\u201dsimply have each of the musicians play either a C, E, or G at their discretion), but also the music that results is interesting, not discordant. That is, it walks the fine line between homogeneity (or simple repetition) and chaos. (\u00e2\u20ac\u0153It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a fine line between chaos and creation,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d as the Man said.)<\/p>\n
Also, with this work, I would say that Riley pretty much invented the idea of loops. [I found out later that they were in use in the late ’40s and ’50s in classical electronic music.] The idea of tape<\/i> loops had been around for a while. For example, the Beatles had used them as far back as 1966 in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Tomorrow Never Knows\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, and even they<\/i> had gotten the idea from Stockhausen. But, the short musical phrases that make up “In C” are more like the loops used in musical software programs (such as Apple Computer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s GarageBand). That is, each is an atomic musical phrase, whereas tape loops tend to be a bit more free form and not necessarily atomic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is a piece for an indeterminate number and type of instruments. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s at a moderate tempo and the dynamics are fairly constant throughout. I like this work a lot. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s mesmerizing. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve listened to it quite few times already, and am listening to it again, while I type these thoughts, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hard, because […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.leipzig48.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.leipzig48.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.leipzig48.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.leipzig48.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.leipzig48.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.leipzig48.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.leipzig48.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.leipzig48.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.leipzig48.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}