Cellist Maya Beiser agrees. She first heard In C as a 17-year-old high schooler who stumbled across the LP in a record shop. "I immediately felt that it was such a genius thing, akin to E=mc2," she says. "The idea of an open score was just so beautiful and revolutionary. I was blown away by that simple idea and by the notion of freedom that it presented."
Beiser released her own unique version of In C earlier this year. Her experiment began as an off-the-cuff gift for Riley, then after his blessing, it blossomed into a recording.
Appropriate to Riley's improvisatory way of thinking, Beiser and her recording engineer began with a mostly blank slate, just Riley's spartan score. "We started to kind of loop all those melodic modules and I literally found my way into it as I was going because I deliberately didn't want to decide anything," she recalls. Armed with just her cello, a looping machine and a pair of percussionists, Beiser emphasizes the deep, sometimes headbanging, grooves inherent in the music.
"She broke it down into sections and integrated each section very distinctly," Riley says. "Something I hadn't thought of doing myself. There's always somebody finding new ways to use these materials." In Beiser's rendition, there's a grungy section with whiffs of Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir," a vocal passage interlacing her voice and cello in a nod to the medieval hocket style of singing, and plenty of lovely droning with the low C string of Beiser's processed cello ricocheting off the drummers.
Unlike Beiser's mostly solo approach, In C is usually played by at least a dozen or more musicians, which emphasizes its communal powers. "One of the things that In C has done over the years, has helped to connect people of different backgrounds," Riley says.
That connection mushroomed in 1968, when Riley recorded In C for Columbia Records. Suddenly, this strange new music was catapulted directly into the mainstream, while taking aim at the new, youthful counterculture. In C was on the map, with an album that actually contained a map to the piece itself.
"This was an incredibly popular recording," Robin says. "It stayed in Columbia's catalog, unlike plenty of other avant-garde records. And one of the cool things is that it actually prints the full score for the piece on the sleeve of the record. So they were empowering people, potentially, to actually organize their own performances of this piece."
This was at a time, Robin points out, "when a lot of American composition is extremely inaccessible in terms of the musical language -- composers writing highly atonal, cerebral scientific music." In C, in its singular way, thumbed its nose at the academy.