ABOUT THE COLLABORATORS

Terry Riley

California composer Terry Riley (b. 1935) launched what is now known as the Minimalist movement with his revolutionary classic In C in 1964. This seminal work provided a new concept in musical form based on interlocking repetitive patterns. Its impact was to change the course of 20th century music and its influence has been heard in the works of prominent composers such as Steve Reich, Philip Glass and John Adams, and in the music of rock groups such as The Who, The Soft Machine, Tangerine Dream and many others. Riley’s hypnotic, multi-layered, polymetric, brightly orchestrated Eastern flavored improvisations and compositions set the stage for the New Age movement that was to appear a decade or so later. In 1970, Riley became a disciple of the revered North Indian Raga vocalist Pandit Pran Nath and made the first of his numerous trips to India to study with the Master. He appeared frequently in concert with the legendary singer as tampura, tabla and vocal accompanist over the next 26 years, until Pran Nath’s passing in 1996. He has been co-director along with Sufi Murshid; Shabda Kahn of the Chisti Sabri India music study tours since 1993. This yearly 2-week study program in India is designed to give students a deeper insight into Pran Nath’s profound contributions to the classical music of India. Riley now regularly performs Raga as a vocalist along with his teaching seminar and recently appeared in concert with the great Zakir Hussein on tabla. In 1999 he performed Ragas at Delhi University in a special concert arranged for the music department and also performed at the Shivratri festival in Delhi the same year.

While teaching at Mills College in Oakland in the 1970s, Riley met David Harrington, founder and Artistic Director of the Kronos Quartet, and they began the long association that has so far produced 12 string quartets; a quintet, Crows Rosary; and a concerto for string quartet, The Sands, which was the Salzburg Festival’s first-ever new music commission. Cadenza on the Night Plain was selected by both Time and Newsweek as one of the 10 best classical albums of the year when it was released in the 1980s. The epic 5-quartet cycle Salome Dances for Peace was selected as the #1 Classical Album of the Year by USA Today and was nominated for a Grammy. Most recently, he completed The Cusp of Magic, for string quartet and pipa, in 2005 – commissioned for Kronos in honor of his 70th birthday, the work marked a 25-year association for Riley and Kronos.

Carnegie Hall commissioned Riley’s innovative first orchestral piece Jade Palace for the centennial celebration in 1990/91. Leonard Slatkin and the Saint Louis Symphony premiered it there. The Rova Saxophone Quartet, Array Music, Zeitgeist, the Steven Scott Bowed Piano Ensemble, the California E.A.R. Unit, David Tanenbaum, the Assad brothers, the Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio, Werner Bartschi and the Amati Quartet are some of the performers and ensembles who have commissioned and performed Riley’s works. Riley regularly performs solo piano concerts of his works from the past 30 years. He also appears in duo concerts with Indian sitarist Krishna Bhatt, saxophonist George Brooks and Italian bassist Stefano Scodanibbio. Riley is currently at work on a set of 24 pieces for guitar and guitar ensemble called The Book of Abbeyozzud and has recently completed a book of four pieces for piano, four hands. In 1999 he was commissioned by the Norwich Festival to compose a new work, What the River Said, which toured Britain with the UK-based group Sounds Bazaar, featuring the great drupad vocalist Amelia Cuni. Then followed a commission from the Kanagawa Foundation in Yokohama to create an evening-length work for solo piano in microtonal tuning, The Dream, which received simultaneous premieres in Rome and in Yokohama, performed by the composer. The new millennium began with a tour of a new band, Terry Riley and the All Stars, which included George Brooks, saxophones, Tracy Silverman, violin and 6 string viola, Gyan Riley, guitar and Stefano Scodanibbio, string bass with the final concert launching the first New Sounds Live concert of the 21st century at Merkin Hall. A recently completed piano concerto, Banana Humberto 2000, was performed with the Paul Dresher Ensemble in the spring of 2000, and Riley is at work on a new solo cello piece commissioned by legendary artist Bruce Connor for cellist Jean Jeanrenaud. Current commissions also include Y Bolanzero for large guitar ensemble and a new saxophone quartet for the Arte Quartet. In May of 2000, Riley made his first tour of Russia with solo piano concerts at the Sergei Kuryokin Festival in Saint Petersburg and at the Moscow Conservatory and the Dom, a privately run contemporary music club.

Willie Williams

Willie Williams works with light and visual media to create performance environments and installations. His combination of hi-tech media and lo-tech eccentricity first received acclaim through his work with U2, particularly their Zoo TV, PopMart and Elevation tours. Williams' work with R.E.M. and David Bowie has also been highly regarded as being both conceptually and technologically groundbreaking.

Williams has collaborated with dance company La La La Human Steps. Other theatre projects include lighting and video scenery for the current Little Britain Live tour, and also Pam Ann at the Bloomsbury Theatre, London.  He designed the lighting and video content for the musical We Will Rock You playing at theatres in six countries worldwide and also for Barbarella at the Raimund Theatre, Vienna. 

Williams created a lighting installation within Canterbury Cathedral for Easter 2004. Other installation work includes the creation of SkyChurch, a multimedia performance space at the Experience Music Project in Seattle, plus a permanent exhibit at Cleveland's Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Museum.  Forthcoming installation work includes a new outdoor work at London’s South Bank Centre for the Summer of 2006 and a gallery show in Lancashire for 2007.

Williams has been honored by his peers several times, most recently being awarded 'Lighting Designer of the Year' at the Total Production International Awards 2006 in London.  New York’s Metropolitan Home magazine featured him in their “Design 100” issue, May 2006. He received two nominations at the 2004 "Green Room" theatre awards in Melbourne, Australia. Total Production International also awarded him Best Lighting Designer at their 2003 awards and Live! magazine named him Designer of the Year for 2002. In 2001 he received an EDDY award in New York for excellence in entertainment design. Wired magazine ranked him as one of the "Top 25 visionaries in entertainment” in the 2000. Lighting Dimensions International awarded him "Designer of the Year" in 1992, as did Performance magazine in both 1992 and 1987.

Larry Neff

Larry Neff has been the lighting designer for the Kronos Quartet for 15 years. He has designed many productions for Kronos, including Live Video (the group’s first fully staged concert), George Crumb’s Black Angels, Tan Dun’s Ghost Opera and Gabriela Ortiz’ Altar de Muertos. Neff, who also acts as Kronos’ Production Director, is responsible for the unique visual aspects of the quartet’s concerts, having worked with the group on more than 1,000 concerts throughout the world.

Neff has also worked with the Paul Dresher Ensemble (designing Slow Fire, Power Failure and Pioneer), George Coates Performance Works (designing RareArea, Actual Sho and Right Mind at the Geary Theater), and various other theater and dance companies including ODC San Francisco, Beach Blanket Babylon and Rinde Eckert.

Mark Grey

Mark Grey is a sound designer and composer living in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has acted as sound designer on many premieres of major theater, opera and concert works by John Adams, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley and the Kronos Quartet.

Recent sound design projects include the critically acclaimed John Adams and Peter Sellars stage productions of El Niño (premiered at Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris in 2000), as well as Philip Glass’ Dracula: The Music and Film, with a new score written for the 1931 Universal Pictures release, performed live to the film with Philip Glass and Kronos (premiered at Royal Festival Hall, London in 1999). Grey tours extensively throughout the world with Kronos and frequently designs sound for major opera productions at the Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris. Grey's compositions have been premiered by Kronos, the Paul Dresher Ensemble, the California EAR Unit and Joan Jeanrenaud.

Don Gurnett

Project Advisor Don Gurnett started his engineering and science career by working on spacecraft electronics design as a student engineering employee in the University of Iowa Physics department in 1958, shortly after the launch of Explorer 1. After completing his B.S. in electrical engineering, he switched to physics, where he received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees. He spent one year as a NASA trainee at Stanford University, and was hired as an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Iowa in 1965, with promotions to associate professor in 1968, and to professor in 1972.

In 1962 he pioneered the study of space plasma waves and radio emissions with the launch of a very-low-frequency radio receiver on the Injun III spacecraft. Since then he has flown similar instruments to most of the planets in the solar system, most notably on the Voyager 1 and 2 flights to the outer planets, the Galileo mission to Jupiter, and the Cassini mission to Saturn. He is currently working on a spacecraft-borne radar to search for sub-surface water at Mars. He is author of over 370 scientific publications, and has received numerous awards for his research. In 1998 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He regularly teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses in physics and astronomy, and has supervised 50 graduate thesis projects.

David Dvorin

David Dvorin lives and works in Nevada City, California. He received a B.A. in Music Composition from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a M.F.A. in Music Composition from the California Institute of the Arts, where he studied with Morton Subotnick, Stephen L. Mosko and Wadada Leo Smith. While attending both schools, he worked professionally as a film, CD-ROM and television composer, and was nominated for an Emmy Award as an undergraduate.

Dvorin is currently is active as a composer/performer/improviser, and is a member of the Nevada County Composer’s Co-operative. He has performed at numerous new music venues, technology conferences and music festivals. He spends much of his time exploring and recording compositional ideas in his studio in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Northern California, and is a music professor at Sierra College.

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