Terry Riley Interview with Bruce Duffie . . . . . . . . .

Composer / Pianist Terry Riley

A Conversation with Bruce Duffie

Terrence Mitchell Riley (born in Colfax, California, June 24, 1935) is an American composer and performing musician best known as a pioneer of the minimalist school of composition. Influenced by jazz and Indian classical music, his work became notable for its innovative use of repetition, tape delay systems, and improvisation. His best known works are the 1964 composition In C and the 1969 album A Rainbow in Curved Air, both considered landmarks of minimalism and important influences on experimental music, rock, and contemporary electronic music.

Raised in Redding, California, Riley began studying composition and performing solo piano in the 1950s. He befriended and collaborated with composer La Monte Young, and later became involved with both the San Francisco Tape Music Center and Young's New York-based Theatre of Eternal Music. A three-record deal with CBS in the late 1960s brought his work to wider audiences. In 1970, he began intensive studies under Hindustani singer Pandit Pran Nath, whom he often accompanied in performance. Subsequent works such as Shri Camel (1980) explored just intonation. He has collaborated frequently throughout his career, most extensively with the Kronos Quartet and his son, guitarist Gyan Riley.

He studied composition at San Francisco State University, the San Francisco Conservatory, and the University of California, Berkeley, studying with Seymour Shifrin and Robert Erickson. He befriended composer La Monte Young, whose earliest minimalist compositions using sustained tones were an influence. Together, Young and Riley performed Riley's improvisatory composition Concert for Two Pianists and Tape Recorders in 1959–60. Riley later became involved in the experimental San Francisco Tape Music Center, working with Morton Subotnick, Steve Reich, Pauline Oliveros, and Ramon Sender. Throughout the 1960s, he also traveled frequently in Europe, taking in musical influences and supporting himself by playing in piano bars. In 1965 he came to New York City and performed for eight months with La Monte Young's Theatre of Eternal Music.

His most influential teacher was Pandit Pran Nath, a master of Indian classical voice who also taught La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, and Michael Harrison. Riley made numerous trips to India over the course of their association to study and accompany him on tabla, tambura, and voice. In 1971 he joined the Mills College faculty to teach Indian classical music. Riley also cites John Cage and "the really great chamber music groups of John Coltrane and Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Bill Evans, and Gil Evans" as influences on his work. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate Degree in Music at Chapman University in 2007.

Around 1980, Riley began his long-lasting association with the Kronos Quartet when he met their founder David Harrington while at Mills. Throughout his career, Riley composed 13 string quartets for the ensemble, in addition to other works. He wrote his first orchestral piece, Jade Palace, in 1991, and has continued to pursue that avenue, with several commissioned orchestral compositions.

== Throughout this webpage, names which are links refer to my interviews elsewhere on my website BD

In May of 1988, Terry Riley was in Chicago along with the tour of the Kronos Quartet. He was gracious enough to take time from his busy schedule to sit down with me in his hotel room for a conversation.

Naturally, I took the opportunity to inquire about the history and influence of this style of music . . . . .

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Bruce Duffie:   You and Steve Reich and Philip Glass tend to get lumped together. Is this something you like, or something you wish had not happened?

Terry Riley:   [Smiling] Well, I don’t have a lot of concern over it. It’s something the press and the public have done, and it doesn’t concern us as much as it does the music-eyeing pubic. One unfair situation in this is that La Monte Young (1935 - ) is often left out, and that’s who I’m really close to. La Monte and I went to school together in early 1960s in Berkeley, and he’s been not only an influence in my life, but a lifelong friend. He is a very important person in this whole so-called minimalist movement.

BD:   Can you ascribe some reason why he’s been left out?

Riley:   One of the reasons is that he’s been very uncompromising in his work. He will only do his work when all the conditions are perfect. To put on a concert, he has to have the right kind of hall and the right kind of piano, and everything right on down the line. The work is in collaboration with his wife, Marian Zazeela (1940 - 2024). His productions are costly, and they haven’t occurred that often because of that.

BD:   Is this to say that you’re not as exacting a task master???

Riley:   [Smiles] I definitely say I’m not in terms of detail! I don’t know anybody who is as exacting as he is in detail.

BD:   Is he right? Does he get the effects and everything that he wants by asking for all these details?

Riley: The CD of The Well-Tuned Piano just came out last year, and is a testament to the not only careful, but very inspired work that he does. In terms of your first question, I like being compared with him because we work very closely. We both studied with Pandit Pran Nath (1918 - 1996), so our music has a similar kind of feeling, whereas I don’t feel that close to the other two composers... although I have actually worked with Steve Reich in the first performance of In C. I knew him in the early 1960s and I have known him since. I have had less contact with Philip Glass.

BD:   We in the media have given you the name ‘minimalist’. Is that a good label, or is it something that should be thrown out and never uttered again?

Riley:   Well, it’s not going to be easily thrown out! [Both laugh] It’s like laissez-faire [let it be]. Every time a movement starts happening, it’s glued onto people’s consciousness, and you’ll never dissolve that until everybody concerned is long gone! I think it’s okay. In C, which was the first piece in this style, was a repetitive piece built on a repetitive pattern. Most of the music done by these people concerned the use of this as an organizing principle of music. What it really boils down to is not so much minimalism but repetition. This ties them together.

BD:   So, you shall be called ‘repetitionists’???

Riley:   [Chuckles] Well, you see, that’s not very attractive! In my mind, that’s where the actual association comes. In C was a piece built solely on repeating patterns, and until later on, Steve based most of his pieces on repeating patterns. Philip Glass did this, too.

BD:   Is there a word that you like which you wished had been given to this movement, rather than minimalist?

Riley:   No. If I had, I would have probably coined it and pushed hard for its use. I decided to stay out of the political arena in that sense, rather than trying to make a movement out of it. As I say, it’s not one of my great concerns.

BD:   Did all three of you arrive at this similar kind of style completely independently?

Riley:   No. In C was the first piece in 1964. I’d been working for several years on forms of using repeating patterns. Steve Reich was in San Francisco at that time, and he came and met me. He became involved in the performances and was very heavily influenced. His music direction totally changed when we met, and about six months after that he started doing a series of his own pieces. So in the public’s mind we started together, although I was definitely working on it two or three years before him. Philip Glass came later into the picture, I’d say another couple or three years. He started working with Steve and got it from him. So that’s the sequence of events. Now, of course, there are millions of people working in this way, and I mean millions, when you count all the students in college who write pieces like this all over the world.

BD:   Is this where music is going today?

Riley:   This question gets asked a lot. I don’t like to prophesize where music is going, but I definitely think that the return to feeling in music, or having feeling be a big part of music, was brought about by bringing it back to tonal centers and modality. That is definitely a part of music of the future. Further beyond that is the aspect of tuning. If you’re going to get into modal music, you can’t suddenly avoid coming to grips with tuning systems, or systems that enforce new resonances of the whole number of fractions that occur in Just Intonation. Now, the big unexplored area for the Western musician is that of pitch, and Stravinsky said this before. I don’t know any pieces of his that explore that, but he realized that it was the frontier of music. We’ve explored rhythm quite thoroughly, and only in the east, India in particular, have they really worked with the subtleties of pitch combination.

BD:   When did you start using Just Intonation?

Riley:   I started in the late 1960s, and again La Monte Young is the first one who went in that direction. He started it, and I came to New York and played in his Theater of Eternal Music in 1965. Even though we’d been working together in Berkeley in the 60s, he wasn’t into Just Intonation yet either.

BD:   Is there any connection between that, with the pitches being very slightly out from what we’re used to hearing, and the microtonal composer, such as Ben Johnston or Ezra Sims?

Riley:   Just Intonation is an all-encompassing term. I don’t know if this is a correct definition or not, but microtonality means intervals that are smaller than a semitone. There are different systems, including equal temperament. You can divide the octave into any equal division, and the higher the number, the more you approach in-tune intervals. You have the chance of actually achieving in-tune triads in modulation. In the fifty-three tone scale you can actually have modulations in Just Intonation.

BD:   Are there other connections?

Riley:   Sure. Harry Partch, and Lou Harrison have worked with microtonality. Lou Harrison is also very much involved in Just Intonation, as well as other systems such as Kirnberger. It’s all related because it has to do with recognizing that there are other pitches and pitch relationships, and recognizing them as real resonances, that is as non-beating intervals.

BD:   Do we have infinite choice in this?

Riley:   It’s limited by what the ear can perceive, and we do have a great deal of choice. The piece I’m doing this week with the Kronos has ninety-three different-sized intervals within the octave. That’s not infinite, but it’s quite a few!

BD:   Are we perhaps training our own ears, and then the ears of the public to accept closer and closer intervals, so that perhaps it is eventually infinite?

Riley:   The public is most definitely getting it, not only through what we’re doing as composers, but because of their exposure to world music. So they may not know it, but when they listen to Java music or Balinese music, they’re listening to other tuning systems. And, as more and more composers get involved, which they are, synthesizers are starting to include tuning adjustments. So, more and more musicians are going to want to fool around with it, and see what other intervals sound like.
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BD:   What is it that you expect of the public that comes to a concert of your music?

Riley:   I expect that they’ll get some kind of the same feeling from the music that I do when I discover it for the first time. In a sense, we’re all discoverers when we write music. We don’t have this thing written into our consciousness. We start to work, and things come to us, and those things are given to the public in a performance. If the public is not moved, I always feel in some way I’ve failed. We try to create the expression that came to me in the first place.

BD:   You take the failure upon yourself, rather than making it a failure of the public not to have the experience of the work?

Riley:   Yes. My teacher, Pandit Pran Nath, says it should be like water. If you put your hand in cold water, you feel cold, unless you’ve got a paralyzed hand in the water. Of course, there are going to be people in the public who are insensitive. A good music listener and a good music lover should feel that effect.

BD:   What about a person who has only experienced a certain kind of music? Is that not like putting a glove over the hand that goes into the cold water?

Riley:   They might have a resistance to it because of their expectations, or because of habits like you’re saying, but they’ll hear something, and eventually that a person can’t help but be taken into these moods which are created through these intervals, because they are very real, and will affect the way they react on the nervous system. The neurons are firing in certain orders with these intervals at Equal Temperament, for instance. There’s exact repetition of these pitches, and the listener really feels the effect of this.

BD:   Are these good effects or bad effects?

Riley:   You can create both. Music is a very powerful tool if you want to create a bad effect. I actually aim for very positive feelings, but there is an area in there that you can use within intervals that is not abrasive, but something that wakes people up a little bit. It’s an interval that has such an edge to it that it doesn’t relax you. It puts you a little bit on edge. Those effects are needed in music. You can’t have continual never-ending relaxation in music, or that effect won’t create anything in people.

BD:   Are you a little bit manipulative of your audience?

Riley:   I’m manipulating myself first of all. I can’t manipulate them any more than they want to be, but yes, I’m trying to share with them the feelings I’m getting through music, which I think any musicians does. They want other people to feel the same kind of thrills that they’re getting.

* * * * *

BD:   Let me ask a philosophical question. In your music, or music in general, where is the balance between the artistic achievement and an entertainment value?

Riley:   How deep a person goes in his work, and how much he is actually willing to go inside, will determine whether or not it’s entertainment. To me, entertainment is something always done on the outside. The composer is saying he’s entertaining you, or he’s showing you a good time by telling you a good joke. The other approach, which is more like what you find in any classical music, is that the artist tries to go inside in himself and be a receptor. They don’t know what they’re going to get exactly. They just know that there’s a certain need to proceed as a performer to get that way, and they do it. I don’t consider that to be entertainment, but it is a definite attempt to create atmosphere, and mood, and to draw people into the same deep space.

BD:   Now you used the term that surprises me in a way, and that is ‘classical music’. Is your music ‘classical music’?

Riley:   Yes, I think it’s classical. I would also say that jazz is classical music when it’s well performed by somebody like Art Tatum (1909 - 1956), or McCoy Tyner (1938 - 2020), or John Coltrane (1926 - 1967). They are classical musicians. The way I use the term classical is someone who develops something that has the feeling of folk music, with all the emotional content of something of a cry of a folk musician. He then develops that into a larger form which interacts with other musical ideas, and to me that’s a classical form. Folk music attempts to go straight to the feeling, right to the heart. It could be work songs, or things that just present expressive feelings.

BD:   Then the big question becomes, what the ultimate purpose of music in society?

Riley:   In my view, music can be used for many things, and it is used for many things. It can be used for dancing, or for just having a good time. But for me, music has a way of trying to get in touch with the Supreme Being. It’s a spiritual experience.

BD:   Does each piece come closer and closer to success?

Riley:   I don’t know. It’s like any kind of spiritual experience. You can’t predict what it will look like. You just do the practice. For instance, if you were a monk, you would be praying, and you wouldn’t say that you’re going to be enlightened next year if I keep praying. You keep praying and hope that you become enlightened. As a musician, you keep doing your music practice, and through trying to get into this relationship with the Divine, you hope that some day you’ll get more and more close, because it is a communication. These musical ideas are some kind of connection with a higher consciousness. It’s not just our ordinary humdrum worldly existence of paying bills and going to the laundromat. Music is a very special activity.

BD:   Do you feel that we, as a society, are aware enough to know when we’ve succeeded in all of this?

Riley:   I’ve talked to so many musicians, and people in audiences, musical or not, who feel that when they’ve had a really deeply moving and musical experience, something special has happened. I don’t think that you could say that from then on their life has totally changed, but still many things will happen. Something is changed, so then the direction of their life is more focused. They know what they want. They know what’s out there. They have a glimmer of it, and continually strive for it. I think that’s true with all great musicians I’ve met.

BD:   If great musicians get a glimmer of this change, what constitutes great music?

Riley:   One of the elements that would have to be there would be the intense love of music itself, which is the love that creates the desire to do it. Then there’s almost inevitably a long period of practice. There are few people who come into this world almost totally equipped. Mozart, for instance, had great potential right from the beginning. But what constitutes great music is this great gift, plus a long period of really a lot of work. A lot of thought over the musical process is to let all these things germinate inside, and to let it come out in some kind of form. For the real greats, we don’t know how they do it, but after they’ve done all this practice, sometimes they just spring into being full blown!

BD:   Is the music of Terry Riley, great?

Riley:   I don’t think that’s for me to say. I would hope that it’s always getting better, and certainly I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t have the chance to create great music at some point. I don’t feel I’ve gotten where I want to go in music yet, and I probably never will.

BD:   But you’re moving in the right direction?

Riley:   I’m moving in the direction I believe is right, yes. There could be a curve in the road, and there can be many things that happen, but everything feels right to me, with my training in Western music, then my training in Eastern music, and the experiences I’ve had in jazz and popular music. They all seem to fit very well into what I really want to do. I like them all, and I like to play with them as I’m doing music.

* * * * *

BD:   You keep progressing from piece to piece, and from year to year. How do you feel about pieces you wrote ten, fifteen, twenty, or twenty-five years ago?

Riley:   Sometimes when I hear things I’m surprised.

BD:   Good or bad?

Riley:   Surprised good. I’m surprised that I actually did that, because we don’t always remember... at least I don’t remember sometimes what I was doing fifteen years ago unless I hear the pieces again. Sometimes I’m surprised that they weren’t quite as good as they should have been. I feel I should have done this or that with them. I don’t know if it’s really a progression, but it is an evolution of some kind. I don’t know if it is good, but music can have a really strong effect. When a piece like In C is well performed, it really has a strong effect which I can’t improve on now. If I tried to write the same piece, I probably wouldn’t be able to do it. I wouldn’t be able to write it as well, because that idea came as an inspiration full-blown. I didn’t have to do too much with it. So I consider that as good as probably I could do today, except today it would come out in a different way.
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BD:   Are some of the pieces that you improvise solely for yourself, or can they be performed by anyone else?

Riley:   Anybody who really wants to learn something nowadays can actually get it from a record. They could learn from a record anything I’ve done, so if they really wanted to do it, they could find a way to get at what materials are there.

BD:   Isn’t that really just imitation?

Riley:   It is, but even if I give them a score, the real essence of the music isn’t in that either. So they’d still be starting with something that they would have to start imitating. They’d have to learn what’s there in a fixed way. To me, that isn’t what the music is. Music is a process that goes on, linking one idea to another.

BD:   [Gently protesting] But if you give them a score, you’re giving them the beginning of the process. A record is the end of the process.

Riley:   Well, it depends on what materials they want to take off the record. Now I’m writing a lot of music than I used to, so they have the choice. If people want to learn my string quartets, they can get the scores, but people who play the early pieces were often learning them from records.

BD:   Are there ever times when performers will find things in your scores that you didn’t know you’d hidden there?

Riley:   The members of the Kronos Quartet [seen with Riley in photo at left] are very good at seeing the music that I write from another perspective. It’s one of the reasons I really enjoy working for them. The musicality is so deep in that group.

BD:   As a performer, do you play anyone else’s music besides your own?

Riley:   Just Indian classical music... of course, there are lot of Western composers that I’ve performed...

BD:   Are you perhaps a better or more sensitive composer because you do play music of other composers?

Riley:   It helps to play music of other composers, but in the Western world I haven’t done that, except for the standards. When I was a young man, I was playing the piano music of Debussy, Ravel, Beethoven, etc. That was a very good step for me to go through, to try and understand a little bit about music history. It’s good to have a few in the tradition behind what you’re doing, even if you’re an experimental musician.

BD:   You have to know where to experiment from!

Riley: Right. It’s good to know what’s been done. You don’t have to reinvent things which someone has done.

BD:   Do you discourage people from trying to reinvent your music?

Riley:   I wouldn’t discourage them if they have to go through that process. I was very imitative when I was young... I still am! If I hear something I really like, I try to learn to do it. Copying is one of the first necessary steps a musician takes. These are abilities that musicians should have. You should be able to copy well, but it can’t stop there. You really then have to find out what’s going on inside, and really listen to it hard, and that takes time! For most people, it takes time to find that out. They’re hearing a lot of things, and are impressed with a lot of things, and that’s what being a student is all about. I’m still a student. I still am learning all that.

BD:   What were you teaching at Mills College? Was it theory or composition?

Riley:   Oddly enough, I mainly taught North Indian classical music there, and that was my choice. My teacher, Pandit Pran Nath, was teaching there, and when he wasn’t there I would take over the North Indian classical music classes entirely. I also taught composition classes, but I would often use what I had learned from Indian classical music as a basis to make exercises for them. Or I would just show how certain ragas had certain elements in them which were very good to use in compositions. I didn’t teach composition in the sense that, okay, let’s write a piece in this style or any kind of traditional Western way.

BD:   Do you feel that musical composition is something that can be taught, or must it be innate within each student?

Riley:   You can be an adviser in a certain sense. I find teaching composition very hard because I don’t like to ever say anything negative about anything. It was hard to find some way to try to push them into a direction which you felt would be good for them. The students themselves really have to have some kind of burning desire to do it if they’re going to compose. That’s the first step they have to have. If they have that, they don’t need much from anybody else. They just have to look around and hear what’s there to experience.

BD:   Is this the advice you have for young composers?

Riley:   Yes. Generally I would say to try and listen to as many kinds of music and musicians that you can, and try to get some experience, because that’s what composing is. It can’t be taught in the sense of learning a bunch of rules. You can get a feeling for balance, and a feeling for real inspired themes and linking of ideas. That’s what we can get as students.

BD:   Are most of the pieces you write now on commission?

Riley:   On commission, yes.

BD:   When you get a commission, how do you decide if you will accept it, or delay it, or reject it?

Riley:   A lot of it will depend on whether I can actually have time to do it. The other thing to consider is if it’s something I feel I can do, and if it’s the kind of commission I can handle. I’m not a composer in a full-time sense. Because of my Indian classical music practice, most compositions only get about half of my time. Plus I am performing my own work, which takes a lot of time. I can’t sit there twelve hours a day... although when I am writing a piece, like for the Kronos, sometimes I drop everything and just write, especially during certain parts of the piece when I really get it going. Then I don’t want to do anything else till I get it done.

BD:   With everything you’ve got going, do you get enough time to compose?

Riley:   I think so, yes. [Laughs] I don’t want to create a huge library! There’s enough music in the world already. [More laughter]

BD:   Are there perhaps too many young composers coming along?

Riley:   I don’t know. I don’t know if there are too many good ones. There are a lot of people who are doing it, and very few that can really stick it out and keep doing it. It’s economically not very solid. You might have to drive a cab! Good people who have gotten fairly successful often can’t support themselves with their writing.

BD:   Is this a mistake on the part of society, or is this just the way it is and it’ll never change?

Riley:   It’s the way it is in the United States today. It’s not that way everywhere. European composers are often subsidized. In Japan I’ve talked to musicians who actually compose a lot for television and radio. They get jobs and are brought into society as real legitimate workers. In America, it’s hard to be a composer and be a legitimate worker unless you’re teaching in a college or something.

BD:   Have you written any film scores?

Riley:   I’ve done three or four, but I’ve never done the actual scoring to the film, and I don’t think I will. When I’ve been asked to do a film I always say that I’ll make music for it, and you put it on the screen! [Both laugh]

BD:   Did they take your music and do with it what you like, or are you horrified?

Riley:   Most of the films I’ve liked what they’ve done, and I’ve been involved in it. I’ve gone in and made suggestions. It’s just that I don’t like myself to sit with a click-track. I don’t feel that’s the best use of my time.

* * * * *

BD:   Are the audiences different from city to city in America, and from country to country all over the world?

Riley:   For me, no. They may respond a little differently with how warm or how much applause, but when I’m sitting in front of an audience in Japan, or America, or in Europe, or even India, I’m feeling very much the same kind of communication with them that I do anywhere in the world. I’ve never felt any real differences.

BD:   I just wondered if perhaps in Northern India you would get a warmer response.

Riley:   No, I don’t think so. For me it’s been about the same.

BD:   Do you enjoy playing in different kinds of venues, or halls that may or may not be designed for music performance?

Riley:   The acoustics of some halls are difficult. You can’t really enjoy it if you’re having a big problem, and if the hall just doesn’t sound good, and the music doesn’t sound good in the hall. But I don’t have any problem playing in different kinds of spaces if the sound is good. But it is nice to play in a hall where there’s a big high ceiling, and the sound gets its full space to unravel. That’s really nice.

BD:   Are you pleased with the records that have been made of your music?

Riley:   Not all of them! [Both laugh] Records are definitely a hit-and-miss situation. I like The Harp of New Albion [for piano tuned in Just Intonation of 1986]. I consider it a very good record [shown at right]. It was as well as I could do it at the time for sure, and the production was very good. The first record, A Rainbow in Curved Air, is a very good record for the time it was done [1969].

BD:   What about the Kronos record?

Riley:   The Kronos record could have been better. They’re great, but we had to record it in very adverse situations in a very dead small room for a studio.

BD:   You couldn’t fiddle with it via the electronics?

Riley:   They couldn’t. It was hard for them to perform in the room because they couldn’t hear each other very well. Although the record turned out well enough in the end, it could have been much better had we had a great place to record.

BD:   Is that something you would like to redo?

Riley:   Yes, we plan to redo it somewhere down the line. I think we’ll do the whole complete string quartets, which would be quite long by now. There’s a new set of quartets, the Salome Dances for Peace group [CD shown above-right]. I’ve written five quartets for the Kronos, so it would be about two hours and fifteen minutes total.

BD: Would you ever write one that takes a couple hours to perform?

Riley: I find that I do get long-winded when I write for them. It’s just fun to get into it.

BD:   Do you feel that you’re part of a lineage of composers?

Riley:   Yes, I do. These times are very interesting. I shouldn’t say no one, but it’s difficult for most composers today to feel deeply seated in a tradition, because we’re living in an age of intense upheaval as far as what’s coming. The fact that the world is so connected means we are aware of so many different kinds of music, and all these traditions now are filtering into one big giant world tradition. Plus there is the use of electronic instruments, which has increasingly come into traditional Western music. So I feel I’m pretty firmly rooted just as much as anyone, but today we’re in such a different situation than we were forty years ago. When Bartók and such people were working, there wasn’t so much awareness of what was going on everywhere. The composers were pretty much alone, but then there was this change. What’s interesting is that at the beginning of the century, there was a definite big searching for some way to expand musical expression into an almost God-like dynamic. They were trying to increase the size of the orchestra, and trying to make the tonality stretch as far as we could, such as in the works of Schoenberg. It’s been an ongoing thing, so if you asked any composer if they are working in the tradition, they might say yes, but look at the tradition! [Both laugh]

BD:   The tradition is everything.

Riley:   The tradition is explosive. Look at the condition we’re in. Who knows what will be used a year from now? [Remember, this interview took place in 1988!]

BD:   Is the world moving too fast?

Riley:   When you look outside, you definitely see that some people aren’t keeping up. It’s a difficult time. I don’t know if it’s moving as far as it should, but we’re definitely going through a period that is hard to hang on for a lot of people. That’s why I think we need music. Earlier you asked me a reason for music, and there it is. Music is very important to people’s lives in a period like this. It does bring a little bit of relief to the suffering! Here we have this elegant hotel room, but when you walk out of the hotel and you’re in a street, to me it’s grim down there. It isn’t beautiful nature. It isn’t a nice stream with some redwood trees beside it. It’s grim! I suppose it’s where you get your head bashed in if you walk down the wrong ally. The human element is what’s moving too fast in our lives. The sense of humanity is harder to hang onto. People could still feel good with friends, but there’s so much coming into their lives. To hang onto those feelings is hard for them, so they can get upset and forget that they’re human beings, and suddenly want to murder somebody.

BD:   [With a gentle nudge] You don’t like the all-natural feeling of steel and concrete??? [More laughter]

Riley:   I live out in the country. I moved out the city in the early 1970s, and it’s sometimes really shocking for me to come into a big city. Of course, I do travel a lot, and I enjoy going into the cities, but I don’t feel good about what we’re doing in terms of our direction as humans. I don’t think we’re really considering the long-term effects of what we’re doing.

BD:   Are you optimistic about the future of music?

Riley:   About the future of music? I’m more concerned about the future of man. I’d say if man does okay, then music will do okay.

BD:   Do you think man will survive?

Riley:   I hope so, I really do. I really feel that people will become concerned to try to build a better life than the one we have. We saw that we had a great tool in technology to do all these things, and we grabbed it quickly and tried to do something with it. But it’s such a powerful tool that every time we cleaned up a mess here, we made a much bigger one over there. [Both laugh] It’s true in that music reflects our situation. Electronic music is parallel to the technological revolution in our ordinary lives. It makes something very pretty here and makes a terrible mess there, because of the power of the tool.

BD:   So it has to be used carefully?

Riley:   It has to be considered, and there’s been a lot of work done to try to make electronic music technology something that’s sensitive and useful for musicians, instead of just being some kind of bomb that can go off.

BD:   Could we build a synthesizer with a heart?

Riley:   The heart still has to rest in the musicians, but we could build a synthesizer that could be responsive. That’s becoming more and more of a possibility. What we’ll end up with eventually is something that’s very much like an acoustic instrument. When they finally get the key that enables it to resonate like a musical instrument does now, I’ll be working on it. But the big work has to be done now with loudspeakers.

BD:   There really hasn’t been a change in loudspeakers in a hundred years.

Riley:   No, and when you sit in front of a grand piano, what you’re hearing is this wonderful loudspeaker that is in the sounding board and resonating strings. It’s such a great experience, and if you could get that out of a loudspeaker, you’d be on the way to creating great sound with electronic music. The synthesizers, and the sound production within the synthesizers themselves is not yet subtle enough. They’re pretty much like light bulbs going on and off. They’ve done a lot. It’s amazing what they’ve done. I have great respect for it, but most musicians agree it hasn’t gotten there yet. We’re working on it, and thankfully we have something to work on! [Both laugh]

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BD:   Is composing, fun?

Riley:   Fun can be a part of it. It’s like every other creative experience. It can result in despair when you’ve written for days and you realize you’ve written yourself into a blind alley. It isn’t fun at those moments, but it can be thrilling when ideas really work, and they come and start happening together. That’s when you wonder where they all came from. It’s very thrilling in that respect.

BD:   When you’re working, are you always in control of the pencil, or are there times when the pencil is in control of you?

Riley:   I’m very seldom in control. A lot of times I’m just trying to listen out there for what’s coming in, and there are times when things start coming in really clearly. But then, it’s still not a feeling so much of control but of excitement that you’re hearing what’s really going on. [Laughs] Really though, I feel I am in control most of the time. It’s part of the way I am that I feel this is the answer, and I’m going to put it down in black and white forever. But that feeling doesn’t encourage me. It’s usually when I feel in awe, or God, this is fantastic! What is this? It’s those kinds of feelings. If you really felt in control, you wouldn’t be hearing any music. As a performer, the times when I feel best, and the closest I come to control is when the music is coming through effortlessly, and I’m just another listener in the audience. At those times, something really quite wonderful is just coming through, and you don’t feel like you’re performing. I wouldn’t call it being in control because any moment it could go away.

BD:   You’re just a conduit?

Riley:   Yes, or just a receptor for it. That’s what most performers really like and feel wonderful. There wasn’t any work at all, and it was all beautiful!

BD:   I hope you have lots more concerts where you get that feeling.

Riley:   Yes, I do too. [Laughs]

BD:   Thank you for being a composer.

Riley:   Thank you.

BD:   It’s been a pleasure to talk with you this afternoon. I appreciate that you took time from your schedule.

Riley:   I was glad that you were prepared. Sometimes I have these interviews, and people ask me what kind of music I do. [Both laugh] That’s why I asked if you’d heard anything. [At this point we chatted a bit about my work with WNIB, and my series of programs featuring new music and interviews with composers.] I didn’t tell you, I’m going to write my first orchestral piece! I got a commission from Carnegie Hall to celebrate their 100th anniversary, which is 1991, so I’m going to write something for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.

BD:   Is Leonard Slatkin going to conduct it?

Riley:   Yes, Slatkin is going to do it. I hadn’t even been considering any orchestra pieces, but this one is too good to pass up. It’ll be a chance to really do something exciting.

BD:   Brush up your orchestration!

Riley:   I’m going to try to approach it like a totally innocent composer. I want to see what could come out of an orchestra like from an Aboriginal or something! [Both laugh] I don’t want to learn too much. As a student I did look at orchestral pieces, but...

BD:   Dust off your Piston Harmony book! [Both laugh] [For many years, this was the standard instructional volume at many universities, and was translated and used abroad.]

Riley:   I’ll be sure to throw them all away before I start! [Even more laughter]

BD:   Wipe the slate clean and start fresh?

Riley:   Right, start fresh because I think the orchestra needs it. It needs another look, and the work could happen now. I’ll give him what I can. [This turned out to be Jade Palace, which runs about 50 minutes.] Whatever comes to me, I’ll give him that. That’s the way it’s going to be, and I’ll hope he’ll be happy with it. I’m sure he will. It’s going to be something interesting.

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This conversation was recorded in Chicago on May 22, 1988. Portions were broadcast on WNIB the following year, and again in 1990, 1995, and 2000. This transcription was made in 2026, and posted on this website at that time. My thanks to British soprano Una Barry for her help in preparing this website presentation.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here. To read my thoughts on editing these interviews for print, as well as a few other interesting observations, click here.

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Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001. His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he continued his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.

You are invited to visit his website for more information about his work, including selected transcripts of other interviews, plus a full list of his guests. He would also like to call your attention to the photos and information about his grandfather, who was a pioneer in the automotive field more than a century ago. You may also send him E-Mail with comments, questions and suggestions.