Terry Riley’s “In C” (reprise)
Here’s a really informative video about Terry Riley’s “In C” that came up on my YouTube feed the other week (thanks, The Algorithm™!). This piece — and Terry Riley– have been inspirational to me in so many ways I can’t even explain. He talks about computer performances of the piece, which reminded me that in 2009 I made an Ableton Live version so that it could be performed using random number generators and MIDI. (At the time, I was not able to find any computer versions online, just references to them, and I may have been the first to do it in Ableton). A nifty little book called How To Read Music that helped me with the transcription, as my grade school memory of musical notation was somewhat sketchy.
In fact, watching this video made me want to revisit ye old blogge here, and realizing it was offline meant I went down a rabbit hole of PHP, WordPress, and backups hell for awhile to put some blood back in these old veins.
More importantly though, revisiting the concepts of generative performance made me rethink some of my own ideas for generative composition and I’ve worked out a sketch that I hope to develop. More on that later!