Terry Riley

Minimalist guru Terry Riley’s influence didn’t take long to percolate through popular culture. The glittering, hypnotic oscillations of his 1964 piece In C would forever alter the ears of classical and rock musicians alike. By 1971, even the Who was among several acts making explicit references to the composer: Pete Townshend titled one of its greatest songs “Baba O’Riley.” Kids, that’s the “teenage wasteland” one with the cyclical, Riley-ripped keyboard throb at the beginning (also used on “Won’t Get Fooled Again”), revived in later days as the theme of CSI.

This year marks the 45th anniversary of In C’s first performance at the San Francisco Tape Music Center, celebrated with something of an ongoing Terry-palooza. Three weeks ago, the Kronos Quartet led an all-star revival of In C at Carnegie Hall, where the piece made its East Coast premiere in 1967, featuring the craziest assortment of 70 musicians anyone could randomly generate: jazz trumpeter Dave Douglas, composer Osvaldo Golijov, toy-piano diva Margaret Leng Tan, session-horn pro Lenny Pickett, Philip Glass, various Bang on a Can members and kiddie-music rocker Dan Zanes.

That ecumenical assortment of players speaks to the endlessly mutable nature of the piece, a 53-section composition for any number of musicians, who play each melodic fragment for as long as they please, while a pianist sustains a two-octave pulse in C. Recorded at least 18 times, by outfits as unlikely as the Shanghai Film Orchestra and the Japanese psychedelic band Acid Mothers Temple, In C might last anywhere from 18 minutes to two hours.

Sony Classical’s new reissue of the inaugural In C recording (made in 1967 and released the following year) runs almost 42 minutes and features such new-music avatars as trombonist Stuart Dempster, saxist Jon Gibson and electronic composer Morton Subotnick on clarinet (they also were onstage for the Carnegie revival). Like so many things that were startling and radical for their time, the music now sounds like a fact of life. Much like his minimalist compatriots Steve Reich and Glass, Riley revels in a polyrhythmic rainbow of sound whose shifting colors and repetitions anticipated ambient, disco, techno and everything after. A gentle revolutionary with a flowing Gandalf beard and a profoundly Eastern meditative bent, Riley also has distinguished himself with marathon keyboard improvisations, work for string quartets and even a killer hot sauce produced from peppers he grows on his Sri Moonshine Ranch.

But with In C, he may also have stumbled upon the musical equivalent of open-source code, opening the door for generations of conductions and comprovisations to come. Essentially, diving into In C on your headphones is to drift away to the blissed-out blueprint for the late 20th century.

• More Album reviews
• More Opera & Classical articles