Customer Reviews

Terry Riley: Requiem for Adam / The Philosopher's Hand

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Terry Riley has my vote for the title of great American composer. Few composers working today have Riley's ability to range from unbridled fun to profound emotional depth. His long collaboration with the Kronos Quartet brings us this latest work, certainly one of Terry's deepest and most moving. Composed as a memorial after the death of 16-year-old Adam Harrington (son of the Kronos' first violinist), who shared a birthday with Terry's own son, the result is music of great emotional and psychological richness. In the middle movement, electronic sounds, suggestive of pop music, joins the quartet - a homage to the energy and tastes of the young man it memorializes. In the last movement, sliding tones suggest (to my ear) ambulance sirens, even as the work reaches a sense of reassurance in the midst of suffering. In total, it is a work of great tonal beauty and an immeasurable humanity. I bought this CD the day before the World Trade Center was hit, and it has been the one piece of music I've found consoling in the days since that event. It is a mark of Terry's own beauty of spirit that his music speaks to us on such a level. Listen to this work.

Written to mark the premature death of Adam Harrington, teenage son of Kronos violinist David Harrington, "Requiem" is an unusual piece for a work bearing that title. Cut from the same cloth as Riley's previous (and underrated) string quartets, for the most part it would sound at home on "Cadenza at the Night Plain" or "Salome Dances for Peace." It starts with a very energetic movement, somewhere between a scherzo and a loose fugue based on a few simple patterns. But the middle movement comes as a surprise, a sudden burst of electronic instruments announcing a quasi-industrial section rich in complexity. (It actually sounds reminiscent of King Crimson's "ProjeKct" pieces.) The third and final movement returns to the unassisted quartet. Subtitled "Requiem for Adam," its long, sliding notes and anxious motion suddenly give way to a stately, processional interlude suffused with a tender sadness and a gnawing uncertainty. The piece ends with a return to the dance-like energy, closing on a final coda expressed as the two syllables in Adam's name. Perhaps less a traditional requiem than a musical portrait, it's nevertheless a thoroughly fascinating and occasionally moving work. It's followed by "The Philosopher's Hand," a gentle piano solo improvised by Riley in the memory of his mentor, Pandit Pran Nath.

the first movement, ascending the heaven ladder, opens with a gentle beginning and continues with measured progressions, an arrangement suitable for reflection and memory--a composition marked by the hand of a pianist, listening i had the impression that the first movement would work just as well transcribed for piano. the second movement, cortejo en el monte diablo, is a mixed bag of musical forms, with playback samples created by riley on an ensoniq ts-12. there are few surprises in the third movement, requiem for adam, just good music.

the companion piece, the philosopher's hand, a composition for piano, played by riley, is riley's memory of pandit pran nath taking david harrington's hand at the memorial service for harrington's son, adam, and remarking that pandit pran nath's hand was the softest hand he had ever felt. the philosopher's hand reminds me of the solo piano of chick corea, his now he sobs, now he cries.

In the first movement of the Requiem you have to ascend to heaven, and an ascension of that type is definitely difficult, even for the soul of a dead man. It is rather easy to propel the image of that ascending staircase with string instruments. They just play single notes of a certain predetermined length at predetermined intervals and there you have that ladder and you can even speed it up because no one would go up that Jacob's ladder always at the same speed. Those notes can even disappear for a short while and the climber is like lost in his thoughts or his whirling vertigo.

And that ascension can even become brilliant and joyful. After all we are ascending to Heaven and that should be a great pleasurable moment of bliss for us, even if and even though we have to die first. But well there is always a rub somewhere and in everything. You cannot peal onions without crying and you cannot take a shower without undressing first. That's the down turning side of things. So let's die to climb, hopping and skipping to the highest heaven we can find. The sky is our limit after all.

And when you think it is Adam who is finally ascending to the sky after so many millennia spent in the Limbos of hell or of nowhere because he was not a proper Christian. How dumb of him to have forgotten to go to Sunday school regularly. It may be useless but in his case it would have avoided him all these thousands of years in these dark and sad limbos. It does not matter at all that the Adam evoked here is Adam Harrington. All Adams are just one and single Adam, the one we all know from birth to death and even beyond and before.

The second movement is a complete change since we are still in the sky but only at the top of a mountain and the movement is not to go up any more but to go down. Your soul has gone up and now your body goes down into decay and decomposition. That's exactly what happened to the first Adam of them all when Jesus on that Easter Sunday, or maybe just before, when he went down into the Limbos to get Adam out and bring him to heaven. Adam left his corporal decaying body in that decaying decomposing place. The music all evokes that descent into annihilation and yet it is not the descent of the soul but only of the body so it is not really sad. Just down oriented. The decaying is also evoked by the numerous musical movements of various notes and clusters of notes, instruments and lines of composition. But the final violin is like a small note of peace and balance in an environment of brittle movement and multifarious intertwining.

The third movement of this Requiem is the Real Requiem and this time the music is irritatingly repetitive and like sawing and slashing at our ears to let us know there is no life possible without the trouble of living and the most important problem of living is dying. Living would be OK if there were no dying at the end of the road, if the road had no end. But it has and we know it. So every thing is berserk and twisted and erratic and crazy in many ways since we are only on probation and every moment of our too long life, or too short if you prefer, will be a contradiction, a hair pin turn and bend in the chaotic road of this life that has no pavement, no sidewalk, so paving or simple road surface of any kind, not even smooth, just a surface and not a chasm.

Life is a chasm and luckily we have to evade it, to go beyond even before we imagine what it may lead to. The violins are making themselves unbearable, and yet some dirge emerges from that unbearability. A dirge that surges like a religious chant to take that poor Adam to the Tenebrae of death. And that dirge turns into a procession, a long file of people slowly advancing in front of the open tomb and throwing some keepsakes to the deceased in his box. And then the damned descent starts again pulls in the two direction, up and down and that poor Adam has to try to climb the escaping ascending steps and to descend the aggressive descending stairs. It is really some kind of divine choice to take the low road to hell or the high road to heaven. Maybe the less frequented would be better but there is always a pushing crowd after death as if everyone was in a hurry.

After the crowd comes the vast immensity of the sky that has to be flown through and over to reach the heaven-like Jerusalem of paradise. Silence and an absolute lack of movement, peace and an absolute absence of noise. Only some angelic music, long notes in the distance of here and everywhere and a vague echoing tempo on some kettle drum. And that's the exit that is an entrance.

The last track, on the piano is quite different. That philosopher's Hand is the retention of sounds resounding beyond the notes themselves, notes that are like standing in midair as if they did not dare come down and just sit on the piano top and start talking to us. The piano is like murmuring a message it does not understand in a language it does not practice, the language of notes and lines that go not beyond their point of birth and yet spread and scatter all over the place. That's the hand of the philosopher which cannot do anything since the philosopher is a brain and the brain does not think with its hands since it does not even have hands. The hand reveals only the whirls and whorls of a brain that tries to think beyond the appearance of things. What a task, indeed!

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, an immensely fruitful collaboration was initiated between Terry Riley and the Kronos Quartet, who had met at Mills College. Though the inventor of "repetitive minimalism" in 1964 with his seminal "In C", Riley wasn't the main proponent of that style, leaving it to Reich, Glass and later Adams in the US, and to a flock of composers in Europe: Nyman, Tavener, Gorecki, Pärt, Andriessen... In the 1970s Riley concentrated on night-long improvisations on the keyboard inspired by his teacher and mentor LaMonte Young (a good example of what it might have sounded like is given by The Harp of New Albion) and on mastering (then teaching) the art of North-Indian Raga, under the tutelage of Pandit Pran Nath.

So the encounter and prodding of the Kronos Quartet came at the right time for Riley: time to return to Western traditional notation and theWest's time-hallowed instrumental ensemble, and infuse them with a wealth of fresh and new musical ideas. The collaboration resulted in a series of wonderful String Quartets, completed between 1980 and 1987, paying their debt not only to North-Indian vocal music but also to North-American Indian Folk-music: Cadenza on the Night Plain and Salome Dances. Indeed Riley's compositions for String Quartet are closer to the kind of World Music the Kronos Quartet soon became associated with than to repetitive minimalism. That doesn't make them "simple" pieces though, although they are highly approachable and immensely engaging, dance-like and dynamic, with a wealth of melodies and instrumental colors.

It was a sad event that prompted Riley back to the medium, ten years later, in 1998: the sudden death of Adam, the son of the Quartet's first violin, David Harrington, of a heart failure, in 1995, at 16. In the composer's words, "this tragedy moved me to want to resolve the sadness I shared with his family in a string quartet memorial".

Obviously, the quartet-requiem has none of the playfulness and dance qualities that made Riley's previous essays in the genre so appealing. Lasting 42 minutes, it has three movements. "Ascending the Heaven Ladder" is first slow-moving and dirge-like (with some accents at the beginning that almost recall Beethoven's last quartets) then increasingly agitated, grim and bleak. What remains from the earlier quartets is Riley's superb invention in tone color, an example of which being the otherworldly harmonics played at 8:30 in that first movement, when the agitated mood recedes.

The 2nd movement, Cortejo Funebre en el Monte Diablo (Funeral procession at Mount Diablo - this is the site in California where Adam Harrington died) is pop-music oriented, with the addition of a rackety and heavily pulsed and drummed soundtrack of electronic music. Thereupon develops a powerful, dogged and grim funeral march. The finale and longest movement , "Requiem for Adam", starts off furiously and vehemently, with a drone-like accompaniment in glissandos that sounds like the attack of the bee-hive. It alternates between that furious and agitated mood and (introduced after 6 minutes) more elegiac and sorrowful moments (and always Riley's striking use of glissandos, no doubt inspired by North-Indian vocal techniques, and flute-like harmonics in the elegiac moments), ending in an irresistibly moving way with mesmerizing downward glissandos (tears? sighs?) soon played on harmonics over a plaintive chant on the cello. Unforgettable.

The disc is rounded off by a gentle, soothing, five-minute piano improvisation by Riley, in the memory of his master at North-Indian music, Pandit Pran Nath, who had attended Adam Harrington's funeral service and passed away a year later. His - according to David Harrington the softest hand he had ever held - is "The Philosopher's Hand".

Oustanding liner notes, TT a shortish 48 minutes.

I would truly like to be positive toward this record, particularly given its subject matter. (When I ordered it, based on the title, I assumed it was about the Adam of the Bible, perhaps symbolic of humanity...) I love Riley's "In C" and "A Rainbow in Curved Air," and the works of the Kronos Quartet. But this work doesn't move me. Actually, the last piece, a solo piano improvisation by Riley dedicated to Riley's teacher Pandit Pran Nath, who passed away in 1996, is much more affecting than the string quartet, which I think says something. The first movement of the quartet ("Ascending the Heaven Ladder") is strong, but the electronic effects in the second movement seem out of place, and the long third movement just seems to lose momentum. Come to think of it, Riley seems to share with the other "minimalists" a tendency to become less compelling in moving away from the purity of the initial vision/impulse. The artwork on this CD is stunning, though, a series of photos of dead leaves called "Black Pulse."