Terry Riley: Requiem for Adam

Adam Harrington, age 16, died of heart failure caused by a blood clot, sustained while hiking with his family on Mount Diablo, a 3,849 feet mountain in the San Francisco Bay Area, on Easter Sunday, 1995. Riley finished the three-movement composition in 1998,[1] and it was first performed in the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam on 28 June 1999;[2] David Harrington recalls that this performance was "the most powerful in his memory."[3] The requiem has been in the quartet's repertoire ever since.[4][5]

As Terry Riley explains in the liner notes, the first movement has a rising sequential four-note motif moving upwards, and a series of variations on this pattern, ending with the motive being played in upper-register harmonics. The title of the second movement alludes to the spot where Adam Harrington suffered his accident. An electronic soundtrack of horns and percussion (played by Riley on an Ensoniq TS 12) is the background for the strings, in what Riley calls a "New Orleans Dixieland" kind of funeral march. The third movement is an A-B-C-A-B coda, in which a two-note motif opens and closes the composition, two notes representing the two syllables of Adam's name. The fourth track, "The Philosopher's Hand," is a solo piano improvisation by Riley inspired by the late Pandit Pran Nath; Riley at the time was working on Atlantis Nath, a tribute to the Indian master.[3] Pran Nath had been at Adam's memorial service and taken David Harrington's hand; Harrington remarked later that it was the softest hand he'd ever held.[6][7]

Terry Riley and the Kronos Quartet have been collaborating since 1978, when Riley taught composition, improvisation, and Hindustani classical music at Mills College in Oakland, California, and the quartet were artists in residence. Both parties benefitted from the exchange. In the words of Joan Jeanrenaud (Kronos cellist until 1998), "Terry shaped how Kronos shaped the music we played"; the Kronos Quartet, in turn, helped Riley "to move beyond the minimalism of his early period."[2] Riley has composed many works for the quartet, including Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector, G-Song, and Cadenza on the Night Plain, released on Cadenza on the Night Plain (1988); and the four compositions on the 1989 double-CD Salome Dances for Peace.

Rob Cowan in The Independent called it "humbling but ultimately life-affirming," praising its "silvery harmonics, quiet yet flowing and as unsentimental as late Beethoven," and its "inconsolable glissandos."[9] John von Rhein of the Chicago Tribune assigns it first place in his top-10 of 2001 recordings.[10] Allen Gimbel, reviewing works by Riley in the American Record Guide, says the requiem is "undeniably quirky" but "quite effective and exhibit[ing] a substantial emotional range": "it's hard not to be moved."[7] Peter Lavezzoli says "it has been regarded as the most compelling recording by either Riley or the Kronos Quartet."[3]

• List of 2001 albums