A Conversation at Terry Riley’s Apartment in Yamanashi
“I like to watch birds fly. They give me many ideas about musical phrases, the way the birds hang here and sweep down.”
On a warm early winter Sunday morning, I embarked on a journey to meet Terry Riley at his apartment in Yamanashi. It was real, yet unreal. I arrived at the station two hours early. Knowing that I didn’t come by car, Riley kindly offered to pick me up. At exactly 11:45 am, I saw him and his apprentice, Sara Miyamoto, approaching the station. That day, Riley wore a yellow beanie, a mustard fleece jacket, and bright yellow Crocs.
We drove through Mount Fuji on our way to Riley’s apartment.
S.M: Terry-san, today, Mt Fuji is half covered in snow. The snow is beautiful!
T.R: Wow. Kumo. Hai (Wow, cloud, yes).
I was fascinated that he spoke in
Japanese.
A week prior to visiting Riley, at 5 am, my mind was swirling round and round about what omiyage (gift) I should bring him for the visit. I thought of castella, but wasn’t sure if he liked sweets. I also considered bringing fruit; however, he lives in the Japanese fruit kingdom, and no other fruit can beat them. I began to imagine what an 86 year old who has travelled worldwide would possibly miss. I thought, perhaps I can bring spices of the world to him. The following day, I was thrilled to go on a spice adventure to the Indian Bazaar near Meguro Station and the Islam Yokocho in Shin Okubo.
Me: I’m not sure what you like, but I brought some omiyage.
T.R: Woah.
Me: I’ve read that you have lived in India, Morocco, and Paris. Everything I brought represents those exact countries.
T.R: That’s very sweet of you. Thank you. Oh my gosh, so many things!
Should I just take one?
Me: They’re all yours! I’m not sure if you miss snacks from India.
T.R: Woah, I love these. Thank you very much. Are you giving me all these?
Sara was in the kitchen preparing ingredients to make chai.
S.M: So Terry-san, where did you put the cinnamon stick for the chai?
T.R: I think she brought it.
S.M: She brought cinnamon?!
T.R: I think she did. Oh, here, look! Sara-san, she also brought fennel! You can put it into the chai. I haven’t had any fennel since I’ve been here. I want to go to Indian stores to get fennel, so this is great.
Me: These ingredients are all for chai.
T.R: I was going to buy cardamom too. So sweet huh? Oh! Do you want to try it with the Taj Ma Hal tea? Zakir Hussain, the tabla player, you go to the airport and arrive in Delhi, there’s a big poster of Zakir Hussain, 10 feet tall, “I drink Taj Ma Hal tea.”
S.M: I can’t open the fennel.
T.R: You can’t open it? Oi, want me to try?
S.M: Maybe I’m doing it wrong? Wa sugoi!
T.R: First time I did something you can’t! First time, I’m proud now.
“I like the radio. Something about TV, for me, doesn’t allow your imagination to do enough work. It paints a picture that I don’t want to see.”
Born before the age of television, Riley’s only earlier experience of the outside world was through radio. He loves it as it is a medium that broadens his imagination. Riley reminisced about the time he was living with his grandparents. While his father was away in the Marine Corps fighting in World War II, there was a massive radio in the living room where he would sit and listen to it as much as she would allow him. Popular music was mainly broadcasted, and once in a while, classical music. Radio dramas interested him, and he enjoyed cowboy and mystery stories.
For the first half of our conversation, we shared our thoughts on the three performances earlier in the year. They were all extraordinary, and yet each distinct in their own way. They all began with the singing of raga-based music. Raga commences from nothing, and it helps Riley to build and warm up to the music and his musical sensibilities. Raga is an Indian classical singing style, handed down directly from guru to disciple for at least the last 700 years. Raga melodies are closely connected to seasonality, weather, and time of day. Improvisation is at the heart of raga, and nature is a source of inspiration.
What’s fascinating about Indian classical music is the way that it is passed on. The experience differs from studying scores at a university with teachers, it is a direct transmission on a personal level of living together. The value of raga is different; he mentioned that one is not trying to revolutionise music. It doesn’t matter who wrote it; the guru enjoyed what they were singing and passed it on to the next generation.
Riley was a disciple of vocalist Pandit Pran Nath for 26 years. Pran Nath was born in 1918, a singer and master of Kirana raga, a highly refined singing style in North Indian classical music. Pran Nath left his affluent home at 12 to search for a raga teacher. By chance, he heard Abdul Waheed Khan Sahib on the radio and headed to Kirana village; for six years, he asked Khan Sahib to take him as a disciple. Pran Nath studied with him for the following 20 years. Then, his spiritual teacher Swami Narayana Giri, persuaded him to separate himself from the chaotic Delhi and to go to Tapkeshwar caves, where he sang for god and lived as a sadhu. After six years, Khan Sahib came to the caves and told Pran Nath to get married and go out in the world and carry this music across the ocean.
Riley met him when he was 35, and he was already fixed in many of his musical ideas. Pran Nath was so powerful that Riley surrendered to his music and his way of teaching. It was a precious opportunity for Riley to grow musically, spiritually, and disciplined. Riley used to practice music when he felt like it, working late at night into the morning. After becoming a disciple of Pran Nath, he would get up each morning and practice for four or five hours. “The more I was with him, the more I wanted to learn deeper. Each time you learn something, it opens up a new challenge in your whole being.”
When I watched the short documentary William Farley’s In Between The Notes: A Portrait of Pandit Pran Nath (1986), I was astonished at how Pandit Pran Nath sang to the tonality and subtlety of the birds. In the documentary, Riley expresses that even though he was considered as an established composer in the West, he did not have the hearing ability to comprehend what Pran Nath was doing, except that he was moved by the sound. He did not know what was within the sound that was moving him. It was difficult to sing back to his guruji even after being with him for 15 years.
“I still feel like it’s trying to copy smoke. It’s no shape, and it’s every shape.”
（link to documentary）
“Raga is living souls. Raga means living souls. Raga from morning to the next morning, raga cycle. Raga always in between the notes. Notes help to make the raga, because like you are breathing, the body is a note you suppose. Breathe is a raga, every breathe has a different feeling and this is the meaning of raga.”
After I read Pandit Pran Nath’s definition of raga out loud, I could feel Riley become sentimental, with watery eyes. It seemed to me the words reverberated and resonated with him deeply, something only he could understand.
I’m curious about apprenticeships. How is the experience similar and different from how Pandit Pran Nath, you, and Sara-san experience raga?
T.R: The longer you are with it, the deeper you experience it. Pran Nath did this since he was 4 years old. That’s the key to raga, and it takes a long time to understand what raga is. That definition that he gave there, that you just read, in very simple words, is such a meaningful explanation of what raga is. He’s talking about breath. When you are performing music, you give a feeling of breath. When he would sing, and everyone would start breathing with him, and they didn’t know it, he would grab their breath and pull it. The whole audience, in a single note, he can suspend their breath.
“The feeling of the particular raga, the subtleties of how to move from one note to another in the melody of the raga each of the elements are given directly as part of the oral tradition, it's totally different from what we have in the west, where you have a page of music with little black spots on it that are expected to convey all of these same elements”.
La Monte Young was one of the most important figures in Riley’s musical life. Young was already a jazz musician when they met, and he introduced Riley to Gagaku and Indian music. In 1967, Young and his partner, Marian Zazeela, heard Pran Nath’s tapes and were deeply moved. Three years later, they arranged for Pran Nath to visit the U.S.
T.R: The first time I heard him sing was about 5 o’clock in the morning. I sat next to him, I never experienced anybody singing where my whole body started vibrating with him. The vibrations were so powerful in singing. I could feel it everywhere, and I never experienced that without a sound system, just acoustically. He could create that effect if you are close enough to him.
Haven’t you experienced this with other musicians?
Never, that was the first time. There are not many singers that can create that effect. He was very powerful, not loud. It was the vibration around him that was so powerful. It’s hard to explain how powerful his vibration is unless you’ve met him.
Raga is closely connected to the time of the day and seasonality. Pran Nath practised a lot in the mornings. How are morning rituals important to raga?
T.R: In India, the morning devotions are very powerful. People go to the rivers to bathe to say their prayers, mantras in the morning. During the day of course they do too, it’s like being born every day, a fresh new person, a new birth, so if you do your devotion in the morning, you are starting out your energy in the day, which is new. You’ve got that energy to support you. He pointed that out, he never said that to me. But by his example, I realised there is a special time, if you get up at 5 o’clock and start singing, there’s a special vibration in the air that supports whatever you want to do, it makes it so much easier to do sadhana — a meditation or spiritual practice.
Could you please tell me why you think he is a great teacher? You mentioned that sometimes he doesn’t tell you about the teachings directly. How has it affected you and your teachings now?
T.R: He was a great teacher because he mainly taught by example. He didn’t tell you what to do, he would start singing, and you would sing back to him. So you could judge what you heard and what you were singing because you heard the difference and where you had to try to go to where he was. It’s a direct transmission of knowledge and feeling. It comes together. It is the emotional and intellectual package conveyed in the song, in the voice. Teaching the voice is very powerful, and you don’t have a mechanical instrument that should be playing. You are using your body and breath, the same body and breath that he is using. It is a very direct transmission.
Pran Nath is very concerned with “music purity, of being exactly in tuned.” How does he give you feedback when you sing back to him?
T.R: He might say, “You are out of tune” (giggles). He would emphasise that what you didn’t get, you didn’t get the idea. It’s hard for me to tell you exactly what a lesson would be like. Not only with him, it’s the way that oral traditions are taught, where people are not reading it out or any media to help to learn. In the oral tradition, you just have to learn from listening and try to repeat back the same shape you heard. If you do it, you see what it’s like and its value. There’s a non-intellectual approach, in a way. It has a lot of physicality.
Are the surroundings important, and do you sing outdoors?
T.R: You saw what he said. Being in a room is a “stuck feeling” (suddenly gets happy), being stuck in a room. Outside you feel as free as a bird, and you have the whole nature to sing.
You went to India in 1970; how was it like receiving the teachings both in India and the U.S.? Is there anything you miss about India?
T.R: I went to India for the first time for six months in 1970. Then we both came back to the States together and then I went back to India for six months again in 1971. I was with him a lot in India for the first two years, which was really good because getting all these teachings in the country where he grew up and the culture that he grew up in was so powerful for me to have the country as the backdrop to the teaching he was giving me. It was very powerful. I like the society and family style in India. Just the way it smells, walking to the streets to all these fires burning, smelling the smoke. People are doing worship, and it’s just a very lively culture. I feel very alive when I am in India.
You said you went to India to find the spiritual source of what was happening inside you as a musician. Would you say your current stay in Japan is an extension of that?
T.R: Japan is different. I am here alone. I’m using that experience from my younger days to sustain me while I’m here. I remember the experiences I had in India even when I sit here to practice. The thing that’s similar that I like about Japan is that people have a great deal of respect in their lives towards each other, the way they treat each other. In India, they respect their instruments and how they treat their instruments, I feel that that’s true here too. There are a lot of things that overlap between the different cultures. But Japan is so much quieter.
In one of the messages you wrote about Sado Island, “Being in Sado Island created a new burst of energy in me.” How is it different from composing back home?
T.R: Since I’ve been in Japan, I feel like I have different writing experiences. It may have to do with my age. Maybe these experiences would be the same. But I think an influence is coming to me from Japan. One of the things I’m feeling about my work is that I want to make it more powerful and simpler with more direct statements and eliminate anything unnecessary. I’ve been working on that since I’ve been in Japan to find ways to refine what I’m doing.
“You know the key to your success in life is your passion, what you really love, and really focus on that, and everything else will fall in place. If you are lucky, you will find people around you who help you on your way, and you do need help. Everybody needs help.”
After our conversation, Riley was so natural and relaxed in front of the camera. After a few shots, he stood up and said, “Maybe I should sit there.” He slowly walked to his Nord Stage 3 piano, pointed at the yellow patched curtains behind, and happily said, “This is like a stage!” As he sat down, he instinctively started to play the keyboard, then began to sing. Sara, behind me in the tatami room, sang back to her guru. It was so magical; a mini concert was being played impromptu on a warm Sunday noon at Riley’s apartment in Yamanashi – it will always remain a precious, dreamlike memory for me.
Me: Is it possible to take a picture of your workplace?
T.R: Yeah, sure, it’s a mess.
S.M: Hold on! The papers are for hip joint exercises! (Sara quickly takes away the papers)
Me: You like to perform for people. You like the crowd, and you get energy from them.
T.R: Uh huh. Yeah. I’m alive still! (He raised his voice, and his eyes were wide open.)
All of us burst out laughing.
Riley’s intense concentration throughout the conversation and very presence struck me most that day. I have never met someone who communicates so powerfully through their eyes. After a simply beautiful day, Riley and Sara kindly dropped me off at the station and then went to Sara’s parent's house for lunch. Six months later, I again had the privilege to attend Terry Riley and Sara Miyamoto’s very first raga lesson in Kamakura, where I had the courage to sing for the first time.
At the performances, I observed that Riley looks at his audience very closely. In an interview at Sri Moonshine Ranch when Riley talked about Debussy, he said, “we are shamanic as musicians, we can pick up on their vibrations, we can read the audience when they come in. You can feel that they just had a big meal, we can harmonise the space.”
T.R: I said that? Hahaha.
Is that true? (I found myself guilty for munching on a handful of organic carrots at Frue.)
T.R: I don’t remember saying that.
(giggles)
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