This show celebrates Arvo Pärt, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young – three innovative composers and musicians who turned 90 this past year, and are still creating and performing beautiful and challenging music.
Playlist:
00:00:00 Arvo Pärt, Gidon Kremer, Keith Jarrett — “Fratres”
00:14:14 Arvo Pärt, Duo Gazzana — “Spiegel im Spiegel”
00:25:07 Arvo Pärt, Stuttgart State Orchestra, Dennis Russell Davies — “Cantus In Memory Of Benjamin Britten”
00:33:07 Terry Riley, Spoleto Festival USA Chamber Artists — “G Song”
00:42:53 Terry Riley — “A Rainbow in Curved Air”
01:03:49 La Monte Young — “The Well-Tuned Piano”
Arvo Pärt (b. 1935) Estonian composer Arvo Pärt developed tintinnabuli, a minimalist style distilling music to its barest harmonic elements — a melodic voice wandering against the pure tones of a triad. Works like Spiegel im Spiegel and Fratres carry a spiritual stillness that reshaped how Western classical music engages with silence, simplicity, and the sacred.
Arvo Pärt developed a style he called tintinnabuli — from the Latin word for “little bells.”
After years of creative silence and spiritual searching, he stripped his music down to essentials: single notes, triads, silence, resonance. “Fratres,” which means “Brothers,” exists in many different versions. This performance combines Gidon Kremer’s violin with Keith Jarrett’s piano, creating something both ancient and intimate.
Terry Riley (b. 1935) Terry Riley helped change modern music in the 1960s by introducing repetition, looping patterns, improvisation, tape delay, and influences from Indian classical music into contemporary composition.
Unlike the solemn inwardness of Pärt, Riley’s music often feels playful, open, and ecstatic.
In C is a 1964 composition by Terry Riley that became one of the foundational works of musical minimalism. It is built from 53 short musical phrases. Performers move through the phrases at their own pace while staying loosely connected to each other, creating a constantly shifting musical texture. One steady repeated high C pulse keeps the whole piece grounded.
Because of it’s length, IC C is not included in this show, but You can listen to the original recording of his masterpiece on Peaks Island Radio website. Go to SCHEDULE, Scroll down to NEXT TO SILENCE and click on December 11, 2023.
La Monte Young (b. 1935) La Monte Young is the godfather of minimalism, whose radical 1950s works — some consisting of a single sustained tone — redefined what music could be. His lifelong obsession with just intonation — tuning based on pure mathematical frequency ratios rather than the compromise tuning of a standard piano — influenced virtually every minimalist and ambient composer who followed,.
The show ends with a segment of his The Well-Tuned Piano, a sprawling improvised masterwork in this pure, resonant tuning system, remains one of the most uncompromising artistic statements of the 20th century.
Boho Dreams of Space and Time 