In C (1964)

A piece that fully deserves its claim to be minimalist music's first masterpiece

"This primitivistic music goes on and on," the prescient San Francisco Chronicle music and art critic Alfred Frankenstein wrote in his 1964 review of the premiere of Terry Riley's "In C."

"At times you feel you have never done anything all your life long but listen to this music and as if that is all there is or ever will be, but it is altogether absorbing, exciting, and moving, too," he continued.

Unless a bolt out of blue hits the musical world between now and Nov. 4, Riley's controlled improvisation of 53 melodic fragments built around the key of C and regulated by a continual pulse will have the distinction of being the most influential work of the past half-century and the most unlikely one.

Although the 28-year-old composer and pianist had been fooling around for the previous five years with a new, hypnotically reductive music made either of long tones or rapidly repeated patterns, "In C" proved precisely the right music for the right moment.

Its premiere at the San Francisco Tape Music Center, a small alternative space, was the day after Lyndon B. Johnson had been elected president. The country was still coming out of its gloom following the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

"In C" was not only "Like None Other on Earth," as the headline in the Chronicle proclaimed, but it also lifted spirits like the typical contemporary music of the time was not intended to do. Here was process music that seemed unprocessed, free and natural.

But no one at the time could possibly have been so prescient as to envision what Riley's invention wrought and continues to do.