Terry Riley
The Harp Of New Albion

Among avant-garde music enthusiasts, the name Terry Riley is among the illustrious, a Master among Masters: a protagonist—alongside Philip Glass and Steve Reich—of the cultural evolution of a genre initially niche, which from the late 1960s has gained notoriety, notably influencing prominent artists (Peter Gabriel's 'San Jacinto', for instance, or King Crimson's 'Discipline'). We are talking about Minimalism, a movement that Terry Riley adheres to not exclusively as Glass does, given that among his works there are many examples of 'phasing' and other experiences not exactly attributable to that musical form which essentially applies the principle that 'repetition is a form of change'. After having contributed to the birth of the minimalist movement with his most famous work, 'In C' (1964), Terry Riley is distinguished by his experiments with different musical scales, microtonal intervals, controlled dissonances, and musical structures inspired by oriental ones, which today have been seamlessly absorbed by thousands of artists—browse the ECM catalog or listen to Oregon—but in the 1960s and 1970s represented a true musical revolution.

In the early 1980s, inspired by La Monte Young's 'Well Tuned Piano', Riley conceived a work for piano 'in just intonation', meaning tuned according to natural intonation (based on the natural succession of harmonics), invented in Greek times but theorized and applied starting from the mid-1500s. Let's disregard the technical part of 'just intonation', which those interested can easily explore online, to emphasize the enveloping sound effect created by the overlapping harmonics and the particular reverberation thus created in the belly of Riley's Bosendorfer. The composition's certainly hypnotic, yet somehow ancestral character (remember the instrument plays according to a less artificial scale than the one invented by Guido D’Arezzo), led Riley to title and inspire it with the legend of a harp found in 1579 by a Native American shaman in the area of New Albion, now San Francisco: the legend recounts that the man placed the instrument atop a peak, where the fierce wind played its strings for years. I mentioned composition, but it is rather a long improvisation (about 110 minutes) in ten movements, which the composer develops in an extremely fluid manner, surrendering to the flow of harmonics and partially following Minimalism's principles but limiting excesses in repetition (cf. Philip Glass, 'Music In 12 Parts'), mainly because the total envelopment and almost 'delay' effect is already largely achieved through the use of just intonation.

But enough with the (albeit necessary) explanations of the strange 'out-of-tune' sound that many will perceive on first listening, possibly to become enchanted after a few minutes: another peculiarity of 'The Harp Of New Albion' is the incredible lyricism of the composition, which would hypothetically be penalized by the piano's different tuning, the minimalist structure adopted, and the fact that it is an improvisation, with some parts practically atonal (necessarily, with a different scale!). The listening of the double vinyl or CD soon becomes absorbed, magical, timeless, and without the usual tonal reference points, with the tracks strangely comparable to Erik Satie’s ambient experiments if they had been composed and arranged by Klaus Schulze or Brian Eno. Even without Steve Reich's technical notes of phasing (especially in the memorable 'Violin Phase') and without the breadth of vision of Philip Glass's major works, where in the first minute the musical elements that will eventually overturn the work creep in twenty minutes later, 'The Harp Of New Albion' achieves the result of being a fine example of minimal music, extraordinarily complicated from a compositional point of view (the central tonal point of tuning is in this case Do Sharp, yet no piece is in the key of Do Sharp!) and yet profoundly emotional, a characteristic not often found in contemporary music (the pleasure it offers is rather intellectual, as in abstract painting) and not often pursued by the composers themselves.

I write these few lines with the awareness that I cannot convey the alien yet ancestral character of 'The Harp Of New Albion', and can only suggest an intriguing entryway to the work of a musician who has had an enormous influence on the music of the second half of the twentieth century. Any further exploration of Terry Riley's works cannot but encourage an encounter with Steve Reich, Philip Glass, John Adams, Glenn Branca, Tony Conrad, and others, up to, of course, the great precursors: Gyorgy Ligeti and Edgar Varese, just to name a few. Enjoy listening: the album is not easy to find but is all on YouTube.