RILEY, Terry

A sometime ragtime pianist, Riley developed in the mid-sixties a radical alternative to the predominant schools of music composition. Sometimes called Minimal, its operation is actually Modular . For In C(1964), some two dozen musicians are given fifty-three separate phrases (or modules) to play in sequence, moving from one to the next whenever they wish, ideally in sensitive response to one another. Meanwhile, the pianist plays a continuous beat on the top two C's of the keyboard for the...