Riley - In C, Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector

The Guardian 60

Ragazze Quartet/Slagwerk Den Haag/Kapok
(Channel Classics)

Terry Riley wrote In C in the early 1960s as a gleaming, freewheeling utopia: a blissed-out soundbite of non-hierarchic social empowerment in which one person plays a repeated C (the first performance at San Francisco’s Tape Music Centre featured a young Steve Reich laying it down on a Wurlitzer) while the rest of the gathering thrums along with 53 variously interlocking little phrases. The piece became a 20th century classic and has been performed a zillion different ways, from 15-minute miniatures to multi-hour epics.