Terry Riley

Terry Riley (b. 1935, Colfax, California) studied composition at San Francisco State University, the San Francisco Conservatory, and UC Berkeley under Seymour Shifrin and Robert Erickson. While composing Music for the Gift in Paris in 1963 he conceived the time-lag accumulator, a tape-loop delay technique that became central to his electronic work. In C (1964), built from 53 short modules performed in loose synchrony, premiered at the San Francisco Tape Music Center with a group that included Steve Reich, Jon Gibson, Pauline Oliveros, and Morton Subotnick. In 1970 he began intensive study of Hindustani classical singing under Pandit Pran Nath, making repeated trips to India over their long association and joining Mills College’s faculty the following year to teach Indian classical music; the just-intonation tuning of that tradition shaped later works such as Shri Camel (1980).