Terry Riley
Persian Surgery Dervishes

Considered the leader of the American "musical school" of "minimalism", Terry Riley is a figure more closely aligned with the avant-garde than with "minimal music"; if one wished to delve deeper, perhaps the only true "minimalist" of the "score" was La Monte Young. In Riley's case, one often encounters works conceptually contrasting with each other. From his early serial works for saxophone to the "Keyboard Studies" of the '60s, he reveals ideas, talents, and results comparable to those of any other experimenter of his time. Starting with the composition "In C" (1969), critics began to talk about Riley as a musician on par with Young, Glass, and Reich, but in reality, beyond that continuous pulsating piano note, in his aleatory work for an ensemble at will, one can distinctly recognize the old and by then outdated principles of the "cageian school": a number of fixed and at the same time free figures, arbitrary durations, insertions, and fades at will, etc. There has been talk of an evolution of the avant-garde; in my humble opinion, "In C" instead reflects a clear regression in the field of 20th-century sonic avant-garde and only with the subsequent work "A Rainbow in Curved Air" (1970) could Riley fully belong to the true creatives of a new phase in the field of electro-acoustic experimentation.

Starting then from what was already widely experimented with through free improvisation on solid, equal and decreasing beats, thanks to the electromechanical artifice of feedback via magnetic tape, all of which was already abundantly expressed in the suite "A Rainbow in Curved Air", the mystical and humble Terry Riley began to tour the United States and Europe between 1971 and 1972, bringing to theaters a musical show Franciscan in intent but brilliant in result. It would strike at the heart of even the youngest artists from the pop-rock scene and influence their future personal projects; examples could be many.

But Terry Riley does not aspire to pop, nor even to rock; he was there with his long white robe, sitting cross-legged on the ground; in front of him, a small electric organ with a double keyboard electronically modified concerning the audio outputs, these connected to a simple mixer and an old magnetic tape recorder. The distance between the playback head and the recording head of the portable recorder allows the creation of the ecstatic delay effect (tape-loop) controlled directly by the performer. The framework is simple: a scale of low notes going from C to C, passing step by step through all intermediates, including semitones, with the time being constant and divided into irregular multiples. The multiple melodic lines, on the other hand, are dictated by the musician's mood, always divergent and often suggested by the environment in which he finds himself playing, by the people in the room, and thus by the general "climax." Careful but not meticulous discipline, insistent pulses, random rhythms, frantic rotations that seem to suggest the very vertigo of the "whirling dervishes." Riley guides the listener in a transcendental ecstasy that detaches from the joyful sound carousel of "A Rainbow in Curved Air" in favor of a more intimate exploration of personal emotions and the most hidden recesses of the human soul. Perhaps the union of the sensitivity of a musician from the Californian countryside, combined with rituals aimed at relaxation, creates situations totally innocent yet at the same time so powerful as to induce more than a few people in the room into a sort of auditory hypnosis. The merit of this continuous contraction and expansion of sounds, of this "synfo-spatial elasticity," is mainly due to the electronic medium, the delay, but just as we are preparing to decipher a musical message hidden among the suggestive rhythmic-melodic sequences, we are amazed to notice how Riley at those precise moments was not a mere musician with his instrument, but a new instrument with its performer; those fingers chasing the keyboard cannot be detached from the simple "machine-man" / "man-machine" combination. Placing the performance in a condition of orchestral personality and not the opposite (which is then the normal custom) is probably the most brilliant idea of this humble human being.

The live double album titled "Persian Surgery Dervishes," released for the French market in 1972, captures two distinct moments of the performances discussed; on the first disc the live interpretation recorded in Los Angeles on April 18, 1971, in the second that in Paris on May 24, 1972. In both, the concept of improvisation based on the "climatic frequencies" established between the venue or the entire concert hall and the performer on the ground is evident. The first is rather frenzied and casual as one would expect from any environment or personality belonging to a metropolitan context. The second more intimate and poetic, tied to the classic naïve Central European attitude. Terry Riley was among the first in the field of serious avant-garde to highlight the feedback between the creator of sound and the listener, first, especially before that synthetic feedback (the means but not the end) generated by the poor electronic apparatus available; some gurus from the cold research labs would follow closely, but this, besides being another story, results decidedly lacking the discreet charm of the work in question.