RILEY In C1. STEVEN Straight on Till Morning. BRÉGENT Atlantide: Excerpts * Walter Boudreau, cond; Société de musique contemporaine du Québec; Raôul Duguay (voice)1; Ensemble Vocal de Montréal1 * ATMA ACD22251 (56:45)
It's now about 37 years since Riley wrote In C, which became an almost immediate classic as one of the keystones of Minimalism. The classic CBS recording from 1968 is the one that probably defines the piece for most of us, although in practice the piece embraces potentially any instrumentation in addition to a having an open structure developing "over a period of about 45 to 90 minutes." "No preconceptions, you just dig it," as Paul Williams wrote in the original liner notes. This kind of openness has led to all kinds of different performances and recordings, but not surprisingly there aren't that many in the catalog at the moment. The CBS is still available, and one by Piano Circus, and a New Albion recording done at the 25th anniversary of the piece, in 1989. The CBS is brittle and aggressive sounding, now, but as a historic document it's the only version one really needs. I don't say this to denigrate the piece but rather to point out that the nature of "open form" music is such that recordings undermine fundamentally the very mutability that's so important to their essence.
The present recording is a document of what seems to have been an exuberantly hippy-trippy concert given by the Quebec Contemporary Music Society in June 1997. There's a slight conceptual twist (which happens often enough in In C) in that the vocalist Duguay is the leader, and he prefaces the performance with an improvised prelude similar to that of an Indian raga. He's also a poet, and has provided a text for himself and the chorus, which in the grand tradition of the love-in can be sung also by the audience. A note from Terry Riley indicates his approval. Duguay, though, is maybe a little too much of a front man here. There seem to be several areas of deliberate playing together, a lot of big unison passages for example--serendipity or planning? The effect, owing a lot to the presence of the choir and these unisons, is one of almost Romantic drama. The whole is about 35 minutes, including the prelude.
Donald Steven (born 1945) is a McGill University professor whose first professional experience came in the pop realm; he eventually studied with Babbitt at Princeton. Straight on Till Morning for ensemble and tape (constructed using a Synclavier II) is a kind of musical landscape that shows his eclectic background. There are some nice sonic moments, but unfortunately the tape is responsible for none of them; the cheesy synthesized sounds, which leave a lot to be desired, dominate the first half of the piece. One can imagine some kind of journey here as implied by the title, with a passage of harmonious "arrival" in the final couple of minutes. There is a similar confused-to-coherent progression in Michel-Georges Brégent's Atlantide, or at least in this 10-minute excerpt from the piece. Brégent (194893) wrote this radio-collage on commission from Radio-Canada, and all of the sounds relate somehow to the medium: information, music, noise. The piece begins very harshly, but ultimately the musical facet of the radio's voice, sounded most clearly in soprano saxophone, becomes most prevalent. The notes don't say how long the entire piece is.
This is one of those collections that would probably please greatly anyone who attended the concert in 1997. There's even a sense of nostalgia. But the program doesn't work that well on disc. Everything seems a pale reflection of its potential; there's far too much going on to capture it. The disc does hint strongly that interesting things that are going on in Quebec with Walter Boudreau and the SMCQ Ensemble.
