When I walked off the stage, I honestly had no idea how long we had been out there. The whole experience felt completely apart from time. If I had had to guess, I would have said, what, maybe 35, 45 minutes? I glanced at the clock and it said 9:55. The last time I had looked was more than two hours prior.
Wonderful things have been written already about last week's performance of In C at Carnegie; some links are included below, and video from the rehearsal is posted above. (I'm in it for about a nanosecond.) From my vantage point on stage, it was an utterly extraordinary evening, spent in an energy field of unblemished joy. (From the ten-minute standing ovation that capped the event, it seems there were at least a few in the audience who shared the feeling.) A full day later, I was still feeling the afterglow from that evening in a visceral way.
For my own benefit I need to jot down some of the special moments, before they slip from my memory ...
Feeling the pulse emerge from Evan Ziporyn's bass clarinet before consciously hearing it ...
The first time Ustad Mashkoor Ali Khan went up to the high G in his invocation, launching the ship ...
Stuart & Loren Dempster and Mark Stewart rising up out of their seats in figure 6 to didjeridu Stern Auditorium! ...
The crazy, pounding, primal unison at figure 11, and the recorders and kotos at the eye of the storm immediately following ...
Terry's vocal glides and gentle ornaments in something so simple as four whole notes in figure 14 ...
Looking upstage and seeing Adam Sliwinski from So Percussion clapping the pulse, and realizing that the clapping I was hearing wasn't from the monitors but from the audience ...
The almost shocking sense of portent in figure 21 ...
The instrumental ensemble receding in figure 22 to reveal the canon already underway between the adult singers stage right and the children's choir stage left (and then feeling Trevor Dunn come in under that!) ...
The bass frequency leviathans surfacing in figure 29 ...
The moment when the pulse was taken over by the accordion ...
The look on GVSU undergrad Katie Chapman's face when Terry said during soundcheck, let's start the whole evening with contrabassoon on the C drone ...
Suddenly remembering my 24-year-old self listening to big arcs of breath coming from Evan's clarinet in a recording session for Music for 18 Musicians (with Judy Sherman at the board) and now hearing those same arcs coming out of myself at 37 ...
Playing musical catch with Judy ...
David Harrington's limpid melody in figure 35, softly dancing above the pulsation, and all the raucous individual voices that followed his lead ...
So many overtones! ...
The sudden appearance of a banjo in the texture, and knowing that it's from Dan Zanes directly upstage ...
Seeing Francisco Núñez's whole body giving all of his energy to his young singers and having them amplify it and toss it right back ...
Twinkling everywhere and not knowing if they were from the toy piano or the celeste or the percussion or...? ...
The celebratory clangor of the carillon in figure 45 ...
Looking up and seeing the awesome Joan La Barbara across from me singing "ba da doop!" ...
Morton Subotnick playing a clarinet (instead of a Buchla Box) ...
Knowing the stylishly begloved Katrina Krimsky was still smiling around figure 40 CCCCCCCCCC &c ...
The stillness of figure 48, everyone recharging for the final push ...
Dave Douglas's augmentation of the rhythm in figure 52 or 53, soaring above a massive crescendo ...
Dennis Russell Davies's astonishing economy of gesture, suddenly pointing just one finger upward in the final crescendo, instantaneously giving everyone license to smash the ceiling ...
The gurgling of the contrabass recorder as the leviathan resubmerged into the night sea ...
The beautiful, resonant silence that followed, which was all the indication we needed to know that people had been with us the whole way.
Wall Street Journal "The sound was large. It enveloped me. It moved as it if were a living being, shifting, changing, falling away to let me hear (just for instance) the piping of four recorders... I got lost in this sound. I didn't want it to end, and it kept on delighting me for the full length of the piece, which on this festive anniversary was close to two hours. This was one of the happiest evenings of my long life in music, a celebration not only of In C and everything that stemmed from it ... but of life itself."
Theater of Found Sounds "If the European symphony evolved from concrete sound to abstract form, then the American symphony returns it to its etymological roots, a sounding-together. In C is an acknowledged masterpiece, but remains the great unacknowledged American symphony, a symphony in perpetual search of an orchestration, constantly new, constantly searching, constantly reinventing itself."
Village Voice "As all of the performers receded into silence—so that the air of Carnegie Hall itself seemed to thrum with the continuing pulsations of "C"—a nearly ten-minute standing ovation roared from the masses."
Eric Gamalinda "[You] found yourself traveling through the edge of the universe, where other worlds wafted and faded out of view. There were stretches of desolate, uninhabited spaces, exoplanets with their own tumults and surprises, and now and then a glimpse of some heavenly realm and strains of eerie, angelic voices."
Feast of Music "The biggest, most captivating performance of In C I've ever heard."
Michael Phelps's Bronze Medals "At the end of In C, there was nothing but the memory of sound in Stern Auditorium, and I could live in that moment for a long time."
Sequenza21 "In C is not so much about politics as about friendship."
New York Times "A view of music as a communal action and a key to transcendence."
disoriented "Riley is billed as a 'minimalist' composer, which suggests the idea of something spare and austere. In C was as rich and complex as you could ask for, the music not minutely pre-scripted but emerging naturally from the interactions of a stage-full of gifted musicians."
Decider "Terry Riley stood in the middle of the stage, hands clasped in prayer, smiling, and bowed. He walked away. People cheered again. He returned. More clapping. He walked away once more. Even more clapping and hollering. He returned. And it happened again and again—a moment no one was ready to leave."


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