Cellist Maya Beiser has reinterpreted Terry Riley's pioneering work “In C,” which helped establish the musical style known as minimalism. Boyang Hu/Artist Hide Caption
toggle caption Boyang Fu/Artist provided
Cellist Maya Beiser has reinterpreted Terry Riley's pioneering work “In C,” which helped establish the musical style known as minimalism.
Boyang Fu/Artist provided
Sixty years ago, on November 4, 1964 to be exact, Terry Riley's pioneering work In C premiered in San Francisco. This event helped establish the musical style that would later become known as minimalism. Four years later, a major recording was made for his label, and this work went down in history. Many subsequent recordings of his In C were performed by a variety of professional-level groups, ranging from symphony orchestras to ensembles of traditional Chinese and West African instruments.
Enterprising cellist Maya Beiser takes on In C armed only with her instrument, a loop machine, and two percussionists, Shane Shanahan and Matt Kilmer. On the album, titled Maya Beiser x Terry Riley: In C, Beiser puts her own stamp on mesmerizing and graceful compositions, particularly satisfying passages that unleash long, flowing cello lines over a pulsating beat. give.
A word about how In C is built: Its blueprint is one page, with no specified instrumentation, just 53 musical “riffs.” This is a small module that allows performers to play at their discretion, but in order. This approximately hour-long song is typically performed by at least a dozen musicians, but on this album Beiser uses stacked cello loops and the all-important opening pulse of 120 beats per minute to establish her The heavy lifting of this album is done by a group of reliable drummers.
YouTube
It would be easy to cherry-pick a small sample of this album, but that's not the best way to listen. Instead, it's much more valuable to surrender to a larger part of the music. Doing so allows you to focus into a meditative state, or zoom in like staring at an Escher painting or a Persian rug to discover fresh hidden patterns. In the final section of the piece, you can hear sounds morphing right in front of your ears, like an audio Rorschach image.
The basis of Visor's In C version is the low-sounding C string of her cello. In the second section, we hear the metallic sound of strings set to a drum beat, one of her many danceable moments on the album. About a third of the way through her recording, something surprising becomes clear. It's a human voice, proof that there's a human behind all the looping electronics. The husky sounds of the visor intertwine with each other and intertwine with the cello, creating a hiccup effect called hocketting that dates back to the Middle Ages.
Overall, it turns out less is more for the visor. By limiting her instrumentation to cello loops and drums, she increases its transparency. As a result, there's room for some seriously exhilarating, interlocking grooves that many of In C's performances can't deliver. These polyrhythmic lines are powerful enough to drive you all night down a lonely highway.
This album is a musical journey through the mind and body, both stimulant and sedative. Many fascinating stops, from an oasis of calm where the heartbeat disappears, to Led Zeppelin-like headbanging reminiscent of 'Kashmir', to moments when cello loops intertwine with the sweet delicacy of Vivaldi. Provide location. If you take the time to soak in this uniquely hypnotic music, the world may seem a little brighter.