IN C // 20 SONNEURS
Terry Riley (US), composition
Erwan Keravec (FR), artistic direction
"It's quite unusual for me to rework an existing piece. Since taking an interest in contemporary music, I've devoted myself to commissioning new pieces. This time, it's a little different. I wanted to extend the quartet of pipers towards a set-up reminiscent of the bagad.
IN C (1964) consists of 53 ordered patterns. The musicians repeat them at will and then move on to the next. Terry Riley simply explains that each musician must be neither too far behind nor too far ahead of the others. Giving this degree of freedom to each performer ties in with my desire for an ensemble of soloists.
For IN C // 20 SONNEURS, I imagined a circle made up of 20 individual platforms. The viewer's gaze is no longer drawn in a single direction. Each audience member chooses what attracts their attention.
I was quite reluctant to record this performance. How could I capture the feeling of this circle on record? In the interests of more conventional listening, we opted for a stereo reduction that could be listened to on any audio system. We recorded in a circle, under live conditions, so that the musicians were in their usual playing positions, then we reduced it to stereo.
The result is a record that is not completely what we play in the circle. It does, however, offer an unusual interpretation of IN C as a thrilling field of play."
Erwan Keravec (trad. Gerry Campbell)
