In C (1964)

The world première of In C took place at the San Francisco Music Center on 4 November 1964. It featured a group of young performers and composers which, apart from the composer, included Steve Reich, Jon Gibson, Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnick and Ramon Sender. The first recording of the composition was made with a somewhat different cast in March 1968 for the CBS label. Since then, In C has enjoyed extraordinary popularity. Its score – which fits on one sheet of paper – is continually accessible, and the work has been performed and recorded many times in various instrumentations and in all different places around the world. The Piano Circus ensemble, for example, recorded a version for keyboard instruments (1990); the 35-person Shanghai Film Orchestra, one for traditional Chinese instruments (1989); and the European Music Project, a version featuring pairs of DJs equipped with synthesizers and drum machines (2002); while the Salt Lake Electric Ensemble recorded In C for laptop orchestra with percussion (2010).

This is what the composer and its first performers have to say about the work, its significance and their own impressions:

The piece is laid out in 53 repeating cyclic patterns, and the players all play patterns 1 to 53, but they relate to each other freely, I mean they don’t have to be playing the same pattern; they can be a pattern or two away from each other. So it forms an interlocking grid as they move through the piece, and gradually as they go through the piece there are slight shifts in tonality, also […] And it’s a democratic piece, there’s no conductor, so it really relies on the musicians’ spontaneous judgments to make it work. The best performance is when everybody is really listening well and hearing what’s going on around them and relating to it in a meaningful way.

[Terry Riley]

Just as Terry learned a lot from La Monte Young, I learned a lot from In C, and maybe Phil Glass from me… but In C is a really first-rate piece that I think will be around as long as we’ll be around… Harmonic stasis, repetition, these were all things I was working with. And In C was a way of putting it all together. And here was someone who had the same ingredients, and put it together in this marvelous piece. And I think that set me ff. Obviously our paths have diverged quite widely, but credit where credit is due: I certainly learned a lot from In C.

[Steve Reich]

I think the idea of everybody starting out with that motive and then gradually doing it so that you move in your own time through a chord progression and actually go somewhere… it’s sort of like taking peyote and listening to a Bach partita or canon which the voices veer off in time, and don’t get there at the same time. But everything is going in a direction.

[Morton Subotnick]

There’s a good feeling about the piece that comes about because of a community effort. And it doesn’t come about because someone is better than another person. The motives are easy enough, but what is not so easy is being together and not together at the same time. That’s a wonderful exercise for musicians. It has a metaphorical meaning, symbolic meaning, a meta-musical meaning.

[Pauline Oliveros]