Terry Riley: Requiem for Adam

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Total Tracks: 4   Total Length: 47:35

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Justin Davidson

eMusic Contributor

11.28.10
An uncharacteristic, unsettled work full of poignant agitation
2001 | Label: Nonesuch

Terry Riley’s In C, from 1964, is the scriptural text of the minimalist movement, and when the adolescent Harrington encountered it in the late 1960s, he was mesmerized by its serene luminescence. Later, when the quartet was in residence at Mills College in Oakland, where Riley was teaching, Harrington badgered him to a write a piece for Kronos, even though the composer, who was absorbed in the improvisational tradition of North Indian classical music, was reluctant to notate his ideas. He did, though, and he has remained the presiding spirit of the Kronos aesthetic ever since. When Harrington’s 16-year-old son Adam died during a hiking expedition in 1995, Riley wrote Requiem for Adam, an uncharacteristic, unsettled work full of poignant agitation. The second movement, “Cortejo fúnebre en el Monte Diablo,” is an angry funeral march, woven together with a furious clangor played on a synthesizer.

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