In C is a composition by Terry Riley from 1964. It is one of the most successful works by an American composer and a seminal example of minimalism. The score directs any number of musicians to repeat a series of 53 melodic fragments in a guided improvisation.
Terry Riley's 1968 recording of In C, released on Columbia Records, was added to the National Recording Registry of the United States Library of Congress in 2022. The piece has inspired many minimalist and postminimalist composers, including Philip Glass and Steve Reich as well as pop and rock musicians.
Composition Alongside fellow University of California, Berkeley and Robert Erickson students Loren Rush and Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley had been involved with group improvisation since 1958.Dempster, Stuart. "Loren Rush (b. 1935)". Interviews with American Composers: Barney Childs in Conversation. Edited by Virginia Anderson. University of Illinois Press, 2022. 301f. The immediate forerunner for the piece was the incidental music Riley wrote for a 1963 Paris production of Ken Dewey's play The Gift. Riley ran into Chet Baker and recorded his quartet performing songs that included Miles Davis' "So What". Riley was familiar with the Echoplex tape delay unit and wanted to replicate its sound. A technician from the Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française (ORTF) set up a tape loop system for the composer, which inspired Riley to work with loops for years to come.Strickland, Edward. American Composers: Dialogues on Contemporary Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. 112. Riley later created installations using tape loops that he called "time-lag accumulators".Frankenstein, Alfred. "Magic Theater in Kansas City", San Francisco Chronicle. June 2, 1968. 31–2.
Back in San Francisco the next year, Riley played piano nightly at the Gold Street Saloon. In March 1964, he heard In C in his head on the way there and wrote it down after the show.Huizenga, Tom. "In C Forever: The eternal evolution of Terry Riley's minimalist masterpiece". NPR. November 3, 2024. Accessed June 6, 2026. The score consists of short melodic fragments, then a staple of his style.Mertens, Wim. American Minimal Music: La Monte Toung, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass. Translated by J. Haukiet. London: Kahn & Averill, 1983. 37f.
Riley saw In C as a way for instrumentalists to play in the style he had developed with tape loops.Alburger, Mark. "Shri Terry: Enlightenment at Riley's Moonshine Ranch". Twentieth‐Century Music 4, no. 3. March, 1997. 1–20. His artistic goal was shamanistic:I was never concerned with minimalism, but I was very concerned with psychedelia and the psychedelic movement of the sixties as an opening toward consciousness. For my generation that was a first look towards the East, that is, peyote, mescaline, and the psychedelic drugs which were opening up people's attention towards higher consciousness. So I think what I was experiencing in music at that time was another world...music was also able to transport us suddenly out of one reality into another. Transport us so that we would almost be having visions as we were playing. So that's what I was thinking about before I wrote In C. I believe music, shamanism, and magic are all connected, and when it's used that way it creates the most beautiful use of music.
Premiere Soon after conceiving In C, Riley was invited by Morton Subotnick to give a concert at the San Francisco Tape Music Center.Duckworth, William. Talking Music. Schirmer Books, 1995. In the fall of 1964, he began trying the composition out at local house concerts with a small group of performers. One of the issues that emerged was coordination of tempo and rhythm. Steve Reich suggested using a steady eighth note pulse throughout to keep the ensemble together. Though Riley envisioned the piece without a prevailing rhythm, he agreed to the utility of Reich's solution.Carl, Robert. Terry Riley's in C. From Studies in Musical Genesis, Structure, and Interpretation, edited by Malcolm Gillies. Oxford University Press, 2009.
The piece was premiered on November 4, 1964, during "An Evening of Music by Terry Riley" at the San Francisco Tape Music Center.Service, Tom."A guide to Terry Riley's music", The Guardian. January 29, 2013.Schell, Michael. "Radio Eclectus #39: Stuart Dempster interviewed", Mixcloud. April 9, 2020. Music from the Gift was played as the audience arrived. The first half included Riley's I, Shoeshine, In B or Is It A?, and COULE.
There was a break to set up In C. At one piano, Jeanie Brechan pulsed the top two Cs above Terry Riley, with whom she shared the instrument. Warner Jepsen and James Lowe played a second piano. The other keyboard instruments were played by Reich (Wurlitzer electronic piano), Oliveros (accordion), and Ramón Sender (Chamberlin). The Chamberlin was housed in a recording studio upstairs from the concert space, to which audio was piped up to Sender to coordinate. The wind section included Mel Weitsman (sopranino recorder), Subotnick (clarinet), Jon Gibson (soprano saxophone), Sonny Lewis (tenor saxophone), Stan Shaff (trumpet), and Phil Winsor (trumpet). Artist Tony Martin projected a light show on the ceiling. Oliveros recalls that the ensemble performed at a stately tempo of 69 beats per minute.
The concert was repeated two days later, and critic Alfred Frankenstein reviewed this performance for the San Francisco Chronicle. He raved, "'On C' was the evening's masterpiece, and I hope the same group does it again." He continued:At times you feel you have never done anything all your lifelong but listen to this music and as if that is all there is or ever will be, but it is altogether absorbing, exciting, and moving, too. One is reminded of the efforts of Carlos Chavez to reconstitute the ceremonial music of pre-Columbian Mexico. Terry Riley may have captured more of its spirit than Chavez did.Frankenstein, Alfred. "Music Like None Other on Earth", San Francisco Chronicle. November 8, 1964. 28.
After the premiere, Riley went to Mexico for three months. In C was performed again at the San Francisco Tape Music Center during a three-day festival of Riley's music from May 21–3, 1965.Welsh, Thomas M. "Chronology". In The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant‐Garde. Edited by David W. Bernstein. University of California Press, 2008. 278.
Subsequent performances
Trombonist Stuart Dempster performed In C on his October 25, 1967, recital at SUNY Buffalo. Playing soprano saxophone, Riley led the ensemble of three pianos, tuned percussion, strings, and winds. A critic for Buffalo Evening News left early and panned the piece.
The New York City premiere, which also included Dempster, was at Carnegie Recital Hall on December 19, 1967. In C shared a program with Igor Stravinsky's Octet and works by Harley Gaber, David Rosenboom, and Dorrit Licht. Lukas Foss arranged speakers throughout the venue so the music could be heard from multiple vantage points, and the audience was encouraged to circulate during the piece.Henahan, Donal. "New-Music Series Puts Toes to Test: Audience Exhorted to Walk Around—Some Don't Stop", The New York Times. December 20, 1967. 56.
The performance reminded The New York Times critic Donal Henahan of Alban Berg's "Invention on One Note" from Wozzeck, and he admired the ensemble's "gamenlanlike sonorities". He continued, "Mr. Riley's effort produced a happy din, which was at worst hypnotic and often fascinating in its multilayered rhythms and sound patterns." Pianist Margaret Hassell, then-wife of trumpeter Jon Hassell who also played, wore bandages and gloves to pad her fingers, which prompted Henahan to recall the cabaret performer Hildegarde.
The first UK performances of In C were given on May 18 & 23, 1968 at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London by the Music Now Ensemble directed by Cornelius Cardew.Programme for the Cornelius Cardew Ensemble, Royal Institute Galleries. (1968)Parsons, Michael. "Sounds of Discovery", The Musical Times, vol. 109, no. 1503, 1968. 429–30. The performance was driven by an electric guitar playing the pulse loud and fast. The Musical Times found it "rewarding" and wrote that "whereas previous performances of Riley's work have tended to be delicate, full of barely perceptible intricacies for the relaxed mind to absorb, this one was totally uncompromising. It demanded a fight".Philips, Jill. "Music in London", The Musical Times vol. 109, no. 1505, July 1968. 644–645.
Pianist Alexei Lubimov organized the Soviet premiere of In C in 1969 for an audience including composers Sofia Gubaidulina and Alfred Schnittke.Repetitition Orchestra, Terry Riley. Liner notes. Long Arms Record CDLA 01033, 2001. The piece received its German premiere that year at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse. Wolf-Eberhard von Lewinski was relieved when the piano strings broke under the stress of the pulse, but the neighboring B strings had been tuned up a half step, and the work continued to his dismay.Lewinski, Wolf-Eberhard von. "Kranichsteiner Talfahrt 1969", Melos 36. October, 1969. 429ff. This scordatura had also been used at previous performances.
The Oakland Symphony performed the first orchestral version of In C in 1970. Six months later, the San Francisco Ballet used many of the same musicians to perform Riley's score for a production called Genesis 70 choreographed by Carlos Carvajal.Hill, Sarah. San Francisco and the Long 60s. Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. 277f.
A 25th anniversary concert was held on January 14, 1990, at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. The composer and his son Gyan Riley performed in an eclectic group that also included Jaron Lanier, Sender, and Jepsen. The lineup included Kronos Quartet, and Riley was particularly fond of the way they slid into the notes of the musical fragments. The performance was released on CD in 1995.Terry Riley, In C – 25th Anniversary Concert. New Albion, 1995.
Form Score Most of Riley's music is not written down. In C remained one of his few notated pieces until Kronos Quartet began commissioning him in the 1980s.Smith, Geoff and Nicole Walker Smith. New Voices: American Composers Talk about Their Music. Amadeus Press, 1995. 233. He wrote In C so that it would be open to many interpretations. The score fits on a single page. Riley felt, "If you can't do it with just that, it's not worth doing."
The score of In C consists of 53 "modules" that fit on a single page. Each module is a short musical phrase notated in treble clef without a time signature and bracketed by repeat signs. Riley uses nine different pitch classes, only omitting C, D, and G from the chromatic scale.Reed, S. Alexander. 2011. "In C on Its Own Terms: A Statistical and Historical View". Perspectives of New Music 49, no. 1 (Winter): 47–78.
The total duration of the written score is exactly 521 eighth notes. The shortest module lasts one eighth note, and the longest lasts 64. The material varies widely in character, from drones to running sixteenth note figures. Three modules are repeated: No. 10 (as No. 41), No. 11 (as No. 36), and No. 18 (as No. 28). The longest is No. 35, which spans 60 pulses, ranges an octave and a half, and includes seven different pitches. Its length creates a sense of figure 35 as a turning point in the piece, creating a symmetry or even hinting at a very loose ternary form.
Riley indicates no tempo, instrumentation, or dynamics. The first module outlines a major third with its three quarter note Es ornamented with grace note Cs. The final melody is a minor third between G and B played in sixteenth notes. The structure of the melodic modules creates a vague sense of tonal shifts, for instance from C to E and then C to G.