Terry Riley and Sharon Chohi Kim: an optimistic start to the season
Earlier this month, I attended a pair of concerts in that groggy, nascent part of the season; all the concert series’ seasons had just been announced, where the activity was still sparse as those in teaching positions contend with the beginnings of their semesters. I attended the Terry Riley 90th Birthday Celebration on September 7, and Sharon Chohi Kim’s Murmurations on September 12.
The Terry Riley celebration began with a recorded message from Terry himself, who at 90 years old could not make the trip to Los Angeles from Japan. Vicky Chow walked onstage to perform Keyboard Study No. 2, an ambient wash of layered piano figures gently percolating through the amphitheater as fog filled the stage. After a (maybe bit too much) time, the piece concluded and the remainder of the All Stars joined Vicky on stage with the notable exceptions of Chris Lightcap on bass (just 5 days behind Lizzie Brightburn’s official announcement as the All Star’s new bassist, replacing Robert Black who passed away in 2023) and Gyan Riley on guitar, not replacing Mark Stewart on any permanent basis but here to lead the ensemble in the west coast premiere of his arrangement of A Rainbow in Curved Air.
As the A-side to arguably Terry Riley’s most well-known record, the expectations were high for a mostly-acoustic reimagining of A Rainbow in Curved Air, and Gyan’s arrangement deftly navigated the space between faithful interpretation and creative liberty. The ever-present synth organ line laid a bed for florid melodies – some from the record, some imagined on the spot. The instrumentalists took turns contributing to the motoric texture as others soloed above them.
Then a bevy of musicians joined onstage from many corners of the Los Angeles music scene; Jeff Gauthier, primarily a jazz violinist, sat a stone’s throw from sitarist Rajib Karmakar and drone music stalwart Sarah Davachi, brought together by the generous spirit of Terry Riley’s In C, undoubtedly his most well known composition. Built in 53 cells with the instructions “all performers play from the same page of 53 melodic patterns played in sequence,” the composition allows for any number of any pitched instruments to perform.
The group chose to delegate the suggested eighth-note beat-keeper role to any member of the ensemble, a time keeping measure made common practice, apparently, at the suggestion of one Steve Reich. What I had thought were smartly planned dynamic structures turned out to be spontaneous collaborative decisions; speaking to Ken Thomson (from the All Stars) after the show, I learned that the rehearsal for the piece was rather short – there wasn’t even time to run through a performance of the piece. They went over some key points, checked mics, and that was it. What happened on stage was the first time that these musicians had actually gone through the piece in its entirety. Big ears across the stage ensured that the musicians took and gave space, and moments of incohesion were brief and scarcely noticeable.
I’ve heard the thought that In C is only fun when you’re playing in it, which isn’t necessarily untrue; when I attended the Bang on a Can Summer Festival in 2024, the first day of activity began with a group performance of In C. Performers, composers and All Stars alike took part in a reading of the piece with no planning; sheet music was placed on stands, mallets were handed out, and we played. This piece lays the blueprint for the kind of exploratory, easy-to-put-together composition that allows for improvisation-on-rails, and couches mistakes in the comfort of playing in a large enough ensemble that surely no one heard you play a B natural instead of a B flat. For this reason, I’ve also seen performances of In C that are unfortunately lazy; the very nature of its ease of performance makes it a great candidate for a last minute concert filler that requires little to no preparation, which can come across as a lack of respect for the material (this also happens with Pauline Oliveros, in my experience). In C is used as a corporate icebreaker etude as much as it is for concert performances, so you’ll understand my trepidation at being seated for yet another hour-long performance of a piece I’ve seen repeatedly programmed to the cross the proverbial finish line. Luckily, the quality of the musicians onstage, and perhaps fueled by the low simmering anxiety of never having properly rehearsed the piece together, produced a generous and dynamic version of In C as I could have hoped to have seen.
A few days later, I went to see Sharon Chohi Kim’s Murmurations at REDCAT, a piece for four voices, electronics, and projection that employs the dual meaning of the title: “both spontaneous flocks of starlings and a collection of low, continuous sounds.” Sara Sinclair Gomez, Molly Pease, Kathryn Shuman and Chohi herself began draped underneath a large cloth, from which the titular vocalizations emerged, and over which was projected shifting grains of sand (created by Jennifer Bewerse). Over the course of the piece, the projections would employ the topology of the cloth to create three-dimensional images of tide pools, flowing rivers, and mountains. By the end of the show, the cloth had found itself wrapped around Chohi, clearly evoking the picture of a gingko tree.
The virtuosity of the four singers was evident not only in the wide (octave) range they traversed, but also in the nearly 60 minutes of material they performed from memory. Though some movements of Murmurations were functionally guided improvisations, much of it seemed to fully written, which, combined with staging and choreography (Stephanie Zaletel), was no small feat of preparation. The projections by Jennifer Bewerse made use of the morphing surfaces beautifully, functioning at times as set dressing, prop, costume – or all three.
The conception of the piece is abstract; though there are clear themes of nature and ecology (water, sand, birds), nothing is explicit enough to suggest a message (perhaps an environmentalist one?). Gingko leaves have a prominent place in the piece, but to what effect? The ‘art’ of the piece is successful enough to survive on its own as a purely aesthetic (‘absolute’) experience, but its usage of identifiable ‘nature’ imagery seems to point to a narrative that it hasn’t created yet. I’m not so bold to say that art needs to have a readily identifiable “meaning,” but this seemed like it was asking for one.
I noticed that both of these events were held at venues operated by the Los Angeles Philharmonic (or, at the very least, housed in a Philharmonic building). Artistic control of the Ford Amphitheater was transferred to the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2020, and REDCAT is housed inside of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, built alongside the main hall, both designed by Frank Gehry. Maybe this is idealistic, but what I optimistically see here are the Classical powers-at-be continuing to provide resources and funding to the younger, hard-to-categorize artists like Chohi, and to the experimentalists of yesteryear in Terry. Anything less than Tchaikovsky at the Bowl or Beethoven 9 at the Walt Disney won’t really make any money for the Philharmonic, and the continually looming threats (and actions) of the current administration to cut arts funding (amongst the lower impact of its atrocities) never ceasing; at the risk of sounding grateful for scraps, seeing the big dogs continue to support new / contemporary music is a win in my eyes.