Composing chaos

Terry Riley's "In C" is one of the most influential pieces of music of the last century...but you'll never hear it the same way twice. Guest: Evan Ziporyn, composer, clarinetist, and producer of "In C" For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 1:29Noam Hassenfeld?

  Hello, Mara.

• 1:30Speaker 03

  Hey, Noah.

• 1:31Noam Hassenfeld?

  So you know that feeling when you're like totally obsessed with a thing? You can't stop thinking about it. And it seems like no one else really gets it the same way you do.

• 1:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:45Noam Hassenfeld?

  And you don't really know why?

• 1:47Speaker 03

  Like, it's like a weird thing. Like, why do I like this?

• 1:50Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah. Is there anything like that for you?

• 1:53Speaker 03

  I really like the Bon Appetit on the line videos, which is just like, spend a day in a restaurant doing prep, which, for my own reasons, I find very soothing.

• 2:06Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, and I've been thinking about this a lot recently, especially with so many algorithms telling us what we should be watching or listening to. It feels like trying to figure out what we actually like for ourselves is a really important thing. Instead of what's being served to you? Yeah, but figuring out why we like it can be even harder, kind of like a personal unexplainable. And we've been doing this once in a while on the show over the past few months, just trying to answer these personal unexplainables of, you know, why can't I stop thinking about this thing? So today I wanted to tell you about my favorite song. All right. It's the piece of music I think about more than anything else.

• 2:50Noam Hassenfeld?

  It's the one I listen to probably more than anything else. Okay. It's the one that influences the way I write music, including the music I've written for this show. But it's something that I don't really understand. It's this kind of weird blob of sound that hits different every single time you listen to it. It feels like it has a mind of its own, like it feels almost like chaos. So the question I really want to figure out is, how do you actually create chaos? Like, how do you write it? Okay. So let's start with what it is. Yeah, I'm intrigued and a little scared. Fair. It's called "In C",

• 3:34Noam Hassenfeld?

  because it was written in the key of C major.

• 3:38Noam Hassenfeld?

  It's by this guy named Terry Riley, who is still alive. I think he just turned 90, but he wrote this in 1964. And since then, there's been a whole bunch of recordings of "In C", but I want to play you my favorite one by this group called Bang on a Can. Okay. It's usually about like an hour long, but let's just start with the beginning.

• 4:09Noam Hassenfeld?

  It's really exciting.

• 4:13Noam Hassenfeld?

  It's kind of a polarizing piece. Like, there's this review I found that said it's the single most influential post-1960s composition by an American. And then there's this other review that I found that said, "A modern vision of hell might well contain an unbroken loop of in-see."

• 4:34Noam Hassenfeld?

  So, there you go.

• 4:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. So if this was like a, the movie of the life of Noam, and this was the soundtrack.

• 4:41Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 4:42Speaker 03

  What scene would this be scoring?

• 4:45Noam Hassenfeld?

  Oh.

• 4:47Noam Hassenfeld?

  The inner workings of my brain.

• 4:50Speaker 03

  So this is like a typewriter scene, like?

• 4:52Noam Hassenfeld?

  No, this is like, I have a, my brain is always buzzing with sounds, no matter where I am. So I think this is sort of the low-key soundtrack of everything I'm doing all the time.

• 5:09Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 5:09Noam Hassenfeld?

  Which might give some insight into my personality.

• 5:14Speaker 03

  All right.

• 5:15Noam Hassenfeld?

  But I don't think, I mean, what's interesting about this song is that it's something, uh, what's the word? It's called aelia, aleatoric music.

• 5:24Speaker 03

  Aleatoric.

• 5:25Noam Hassenfeld?

  It's called aleatoric music, which is chants music, meaning that it's different every time.

• 5:30Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 5:30Noam Hassenfeld?

  So the way it's written is it's not actually, like, written out in a way. There are these 53 tiny little melodies. All the instrumentalists just play them in order, and they can change whenever they want. But everyone is just making their own decisions. So the piece is sort of like a slime mold, like an amoeba that's mapping out the Tokyo subway system a little bit. So every single recording is different. It can be played by any number of people, for any instruments, at any speed.

• 6:06Noam Hassenfeld?

  There's this recent version I love where this cellist, Maya Beiser, she played it by herself, all alone, with a loop pedal.

• 6:14Speaker 03

  Oh, cool.

• 6:15Noam Hassenfeld?

  So she did all the parts.

• 6:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:17Noam Hassenfeld?

  Over herself.

• 6:21Noam Hassenfeld?

  There's this version built on voices by Ars Nova Copenhagen.

• 6:28Noam Hassenfeld?

  So you can hear that pulse in the background, but the voices are really taking center stage on this one.

• 6:38Noam Hassenfeld?

  There's this crazy recording from a Japanese psychedelic rock band named Acid Mothers Temple.

• 6:49Noam Hassenfeld?

  That one is completely insane.

• 6:54Noam Hassenfeld?

  There's this version by Africa Express that was made for the 50th anniversary of N.C., which is a mix of African and Western instruments.

• 7:07Noam Hassenfeld?

  And I even once saw a performance of N.C. in dance form.

• 7:11Speaker 03

  In dance?

• 7:12Noam Hassenfeld?

  Which was absolutely mind blowing. Like, they did all the little dance moves in groups, just like people would play the little melodies, and they would change together like a visual amoeba moving around the stage. It was really, like, it kept the same feel of N.C., but it was in a totally different medium.

• 7:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:33Noam Hassenfeld?

  And then, probably the most famous recording isn't actually a version of N.C., but you know the song by The Who, Baba O'Reilly?

• 7:42Speaker 03

  No.

• 7:43Noam Hassenfeld?

  You know, "Out here in the fields, I fought for my meals."

• 7:47Speaker 03

  Okay, yeah, yeah.

• 7:48Noam Hassenfeld?

  Teenage wasteland.

• 7:50Speaker 03

  Oh, my God. I hope this episode is just an excuse to make you do a bunch of a cappella stuff.

• 7:58Noam Hassenfeld?

  We'll see.

• 8:00Noam Hassenfeld?

  But here's the actual song.

• 8:05Noam Hassenfeld?

  You recognize this, right?

• 8:06Speaker 03

  Oh, totally.

• 8:08Noam Hassenfeld?

  So the whole long intro of that song is influenced by N.C. And Terry Riley, the guy who wrote N.C., is actually the Riley in Baba O'Reilly.

• 8:21Noam Hassenfeld?

  You know, you have that familiar pulse in the background, and then you just have all these little melodic moments. And it just slowly shifts until you get that iconic piano entrance.

• 8:42Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 8:44Noam Hassenfeld?

  Anyways.

• 8:45Speaker 03

  Amazing.

• 8:46Noam Hassenfeld?

  Basically, every time, it is completely different. It's a different take, it's a different medium. It's just an idea that can be expressed in all kinds of different forms.

• 8:56Speaker 03

  All right, let's get back to the in C recording that you were playing at the beginning. Can you?

• 9:01Noam Hassenfeld?

  The bang on a can one?

• 9:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, that one. Could you play me a different section of it, just so I can hear how it evolves?

• 9:08Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, so it starts with that pulse, you know, the ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding.

• 9:14Noam Hassenfeld?

  And then the first new pattern comes in, which is bada bada bada.

• 9:19Noam Hassenfeld?

  And everyone comes in playing that. And then they switch to the next pattern.

• 9:26Noam Hassenfeld?

  And over the course of the piece, the whole thing starts to shift. So if I skip ahead a bit.

• 9:37Noam Hassenfeld?

  Here's a couple of minutes ahead.

• 9:40Noam Hassenfeld?

  So that ding ding ding ding ding, that that pulse is always going in the background.

• 9:46Noam Hassenfeld?

  I don't know, maybe I'll just like keep it down here while we talk.

• 9:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:50Noam Hassenfeld?

  It feels alive to me. It's a piece that feels like a bunch of little people talking to each other. They're all saying their own thing. You can hear them going like.

• 10:08Noam Hassenfeld?

  When you see this live, you can just see the notes bouncing around the stage. The musicians are literally having conversations through their music. You know, they're pointing at each other. You know, the clarinetist will play this one melody and point at the violinist, who will respond with the same melody in a different beat. And it does feel like you are watching some type of, I don't know, people talking in a restaurant or people on the subway. It feels like you're watching some type of living thing happen, just in music.

• 10:43Noam Hassenfeld?

  This piece to me feels like a little world in a globe coming alive. It just feels like he put some notes out there and every time he's just like, "Hey notes, make some music," and the notes do their thing.

• 10:58Noam Hassenfeld?

  And then it slowly morts. But it does so, so slowly and gradually that you don't even really notice as it's happening. There's no melody. It's just this kind of like weird coalescing of sounds. It doesn't really build anywhere. Like, there's no beat drop.

• 11:19Speaker 03

  The beat never drops.

• 11:23Noam Hassenfeld?

  I listen to this all the time and I just feel like it's about everything somehow. Like, it's a song about my internal experience. It feels like it's about the universe. It's about this tenuous relationship between chaos and order that, I don't know, it just feels a lot like life.

• 11:46Speaker 03

  I feel like it's an early morning thing. It's like about things like coming awake and coming alive, like walking in Manhattan early in the morning and slowly the city is coming alive around you or things like that where it's just like all these little disparate pieces coalescing into the like breathing of this bigger universe.

• 12:07Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, I mean, you know, mandalas, like this Buddhist tradition where people make these kind of images, this art, they're often made out of sand. And when they're done, they'll just sweep it away. They'll just kind of destroy it.

• 12:24Noam Hassenfeld?

  And I sort of feel like that's what this is. You know, it starts so simple, just these little grains of sand. It builds to more complicated parts, builds to these tense parts.

• 12:39Noam Hassenfeld?

  It highlights different instruments or tones.

• 12:44Noam Hassenfeld?

  But it never really feels like it resolves. It just moves along in these unpredictable ways.

• 12:51Noam Hassenfeld?

  And then by the end, everyone's in the same place and they all start to fade out. And you just have this ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding.

• 13:07Noam Hassenfeld?

  You know, and it just kind of disappears.

• 13:18Noam Hassenfeld?

  And it's weird. I kind of feel like NC is unexplainable in music form. Like, we're trying to bring order to chaos, in a sense, but not that much order.

• 13:32Speaker 03

  We respect the chaos.

• 13:33Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, like, we give you this little glimpse of the unknown, but it's still mostly unknown.

• 13:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:40Noam Hassenfeld?

  And I was thinking about NC when I wrote a lot of the music for the show, you know, including the theme song.

• 13:46Speaker 03

  Hear it all the time.

• 13:47Noam Hassenfeld?

  I don't know if there's a good way to play it for you.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  I mean, you have to a cappella it now, is what has to happen.

• 13:54Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay, so it's like

• 14:02Noam Hassenfeld?

  and then it fails and goes

• 14:08Noam Hassenfeld?

  Right? So that's, that last bit is the unexplainable.

• 14:11Speaker 03

  I didn't know that was unexplainable.

• 14:13Noam Hassenfeld?

  Oh, really?

• 14:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:15Noam Hassenfeld?

  Oh, that's, uh, now you'll never unhear it.

• 14:18Speaker 03

  It's like the arrow in the FedEx logo.

• 14:21Noam Hassenfeld?

  It's the arrow in the FedEx.

• 14:22Speaker 03

  Unexplainable. Okay.

• 14:24Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yep.

• 14:26Speaker 03

  Beautiful.

• 14:26Noam Hassenfeld?

  But, but yeah, when I made the theme song, I wanted to make something that kind of felt like a mandala, you know, that that comes out of nothing, that goes into chaos, that gets really complicated just for a second, and then it disappears.

• 14:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:41Noam Hassenfeld?

  The thing is, though, it was really hard to write, like, 10 seconds of chaos, or five seconds of chaos, or however little the chaos was that I wrote.

• 14:50Speaker 03

  Just a spark of it.

• 14:52Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, just a, just a tiny bit. And I can't even imagine writing an hour of this and having it actually still feel alive like that.

• 14:59Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 15:00Noam Hassenfeld?

  And I wanted to know what actually goes into Writing something that's like purposefully so chaotic and flexible. Right. And it turns out that my teacher of this ensemble that I play in, I play in a Balinese music ensemble called the Gamelan. And it turns out my teacher is the guy who produced this recording of N C by Bang on a Can. Small world, yeah. He told me that he started playing N C in the 70s and he's played it hundreds of times since then.

• 15:30Speaker 04

  I never imagined that over 40 years later, it would be even more vital to me than it was at that point. You know, literally every time I would come back to it, I'd realize there was more and more in it. And that just seems to be the case more and more every year.

• 15:48Noam Hassenfeld?

  N C from the inside after the break.

• 15:58Speaker 00

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• 19:25Speaker 06

  I'll probably go to a Skrillex concert and I'll be waiting for the bass drop and it it'll never come.

• 19:33Noam Hassenfeld?

  Evan Zaporin has probably played "In Sea" about as much as anyone out there.

• 19:37Speaker 04

  I've played "In Sea" probably 500 times in my life, I would say.

• 19:43Noam Hassenfeld?

  Evan's a clarinetist, he's a composer, he produced my favorite version of "In Sea", performed by the Bang on a Can Ensemble, and he's played it so much that he forgot when he learned it.

• 19:55Speaker 04

  I don't actually remember being introduced to the piece. Like, I feel like I've always known it.

• 20:03Noam Hassenfeld?

  So how do you introduce other people to it?

• 20:05Speaker 04

  It's 53 patterns, all written on one page, that Terry Riley made while riding a bus on the way to his gig as a saloon pianist in the early 60s.

• 20:17Noam Hassenfeld?

  Seriously?

• 20:18Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 20:19Noam Hassenfeld?

  Oh my god, okay.

• 20:22Speaker 04

  So he says, "I wasn't there at the time," but it's the best piece I know to just take any group of people with goodwill and have them make something really beautiful and very memorable without fail. And the best way to do it is to just kind of have everybody understand the basic rules of a game. Play the first pattern as long as you want, then you move on to the second one, etc., and that's about it. And when I do it with people who haven't done it before, I like to say that it's kind of like taking a hike. You don't have to be all bunched up together, but you don't want to be too far apart either, you know? As long as you're kind of within eye shot of everybody, you're gonna have a nice trip through the woods.

• 21:07Noam Hassenfeld?

  You know, I think the thing that I love most about this is this kind of, I don't know how to put it, it's like a tension between really basic, simple stuff and chaos. So how do we get from these tiny regimented patterns to something that's never the same twice?

• 21:28Speaker 04

  You just let it happen, which is not as simple as it sounds, because you have to really like realize that you can't control everything. You just do what it says to do, and there's basically a dialogue that you have with yourself, where you go like, "Am I ready to move to the next pattern?" What octave do I want to play it in? How loud do I want to play it? Do I want to fit in with the person next to me? You're just making all these micro decisions in real time. Yeah. But he designed it that way. And I know this for a fact because I did tour with Terry. And it was really interesting because when we first did it with him and we really didn't know him at all then. And I was a little bit intimidated just to say. And we get into rehearsal and he goes, oh, okay. Well, so you know, there's this pattern here.

• 22:14Speaker 04

  It has this G natural up high and there's this pattern here. It has this F sharp down low. And you know, sometimes it's cool if they kind of are going at the same time because they interact in interesting ways. So if that should happen, just kind of go with it because it's cool. And normally you'd think that that would be something you wouldn't want to have at the same time. Well, that's one thing, but the other thing is that he's the composer. If he wants it to happen, he can make it happen, you know? So in other words, it's built into the piece that he's trying to kind of empower people to make their own choices about it. And to kind of let it go where it goes. It's a platform for the players to do whatever they they want to do. I mean, I was involved in one performance that was a pretty all star performance.

• 22:56Speaker 04

  Let's say at a big venue and I don't want to mention any names, but the people that were hosting it, which were quite well known. They wanted moments that were going to highlight them and they were pretty insistent like, look, this is the way we're doing it. But I really don't think that's the way to go with this piece. Did you notice that it changed the feeling of the piece? Well, it inhibits you. That's the thing. And I've seen this happen before. The magic of this piece is that things that just can't happen when you're kind of thinking about it. But when you're there doing it in performance, suddenly, you know, just these really remarkable crescendos happen like group diminuendos.

• 23:37Speaker 04

  Things suddenly get really loud, things kind of empty out to the point where you feel like the whole thing could just fall apart. But it doesn't. You know, it's not just about you. Western classical music, you know, has this kind of pesky little notation that you put in front of you and all sorts of ways to kind of distract you from actually just being as sensorially present as a musician as you should be when you play music, you know? And NC is a nice corrective to that because if you do what he advises you to do, you're really in the middle of a room, listening to a lot of people and communicating in these

• 24:22Speaker 04

  very small ways. But the decisions that you're making that seem very personal are actually really influenced by what's going on around you.

• 24:35Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, it almost feels like this emergent phenomenon or something like how clouds are built out of tons of these little tiny particles. And then when they come together, they behave in all kinds of weird, unpredictable ways.

• 24:50Speaker 04

  Well, right, because it doesn't, it doesn't ever start and it doesn't ever stop. That's the thing. I mean, like, we like our narrative art to have beginnings and ends, right? You know, we're not so happy about our lives having ends, you know, but, you know, as we live them, it's very seldom that things are very clean, like, okay, this has happened and then this happens and this happens. Things overlap, events don't kind of come in the right order. In a way, what's nice about NC is that it's kind of like that, right? Like, there's all sorts of things that happen, but they happen really organically.

• 25:24Noam Hassenfeld?

  You mentioned something that you didn't expect this to be as vital to your life 40 years ago as it is, and that you're always finding new things every time. And I'm wondering what you discover when you listen to it now, having played it for decades.

• 25:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a great question. I guess it's different from performance to performance, but I, I think what I discover, if I could generalize it, is just the power of kind of

• 25:52Speaker 04

  rhythmic

• 25:54Speaker 04

  empathy with other people.

• 25:57Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah.

• 25:58Speaker 04

  Which has to do with a certain kind of like faith, not like a religious faith, but just like faith in community, right?

• 26:05Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:06Speaker 04

  It's like,

• 26:08Speaker 04

  it's glorious when everybody crescendos together and nobody's told anybody to do that, but everybody does it and then everybody gets soft and that's glorious. And the other thing that's really amazing about it is that like, you know, it doesn't tell you really how to end it.

• 26:22Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah.

• 26:23Speaker 04

  You get to the end and it's just there. And then in the instructions, there's like, well, maybe when everybody gets to the last pattern, you crescendo, you crescendo. It's not really clear, but it is clear when you play it.

• 26:35Speaker 04

  You're playing and you're playing. And then there's like this thing that happens. You go like,

• 26:40Speaker 04

  and now we're done.

• 26:41Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah.

• 26:42Speaker 04

  And everybody knows it. And I don't understand that either, but it's a really

• 26:50Speaker 04

  amazing thing.

• 26:51Noam Hassenfeld?

  It's an unanswered question.

• 26:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:08Noam Hassenfeld?

  We had a lot of versions of NC in this episode, and I'd love for you to check them all out. So as you know, my favorite is the recording by Bang on a Can, produced by Evan. We also heard takes from my advisor, Ars Nova Copenhagen, Acid Mothers Temple, Africa Express, a version for six laptops and a melodica that was recorded at Brandeis. And if you're interested in checking out the dance version of NC, it was choreographed by Sasha Walts and you can find it on YouTube. And there's one more version, actually. What you're listening to right now is a cover of "In Sea" that I made when I was in high school that I fully forgot about until I made this episode.

• 27:51Noam Hassenfeld?

  I made it when I was interning at a recording studio and I basically didn't have much to do. And I made it with some pretty crappy software instruments, so it's got none of the magic and flexibility and chaos that a real live "In Sea" recording should have. But I like listening back to it and remembering that I've been turning this piece over and over in my head since before I actually knew how to make good music. And like Evan says, I'm still finding new things in it every time. This episode was produced by me, Noam Hassenfeld. We had editing from Meredith Hadnath, who runs the show, mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala, music from me, and fact checking from Melissa Hirsch.

• 28:33Noam Hassenfeld?

  Jorge Just and Julia Longoria are editorial directors, and Byrd Pinkerton stood back-to-back with Aaron Bird. They counted out paces, slowly walking away from each other. At 10, they spun around. Bird dodged Aaron Bird's arrow, but instead of firing back, she threw her boomerang far over his head, straight at the wooden carriage. As always, thanks to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show. And if you have any thoughts about our show, any ideas, any criticisms, any suggestions, send us an email. We love hearing from you. We're at [email protected], and we read every email.

• 29:17Noam Hassenfeld?

  We'd also love it if you could leave us a review or a rating wherever you listen. It really helps us find new listeners. You can also support the show and all of Vox's journalism by joining our membership program. You can go to vox.com/members to get ad-free podcasts and all sorts of things like unlimited access to Vox articles and member-exclusive newsletters. And if you do become a member because of us, because of Unexplainable, let us know. It would make us really happy. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We're off next week, but we'll be back on October 20th.

• 30:19Speaker 01

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• 30:59Speaker 07

  Support for today's episode comes from Delta, official airline of the National Women's Soccer League. Traveling is basically magic. It creates opportunities, it fosters understanding, it expands horizons, it connects people and communities to each other and to their own potential. Those are the values that drive Delta. With up to 5,500 daily Delta and Delta Connection flights to more than 300 destinations on six continents, Delta is committed to helping you explore your world. Whatever gives you the travel bug, Delta is here to help you get there. Visit delta.com for more info. Delta, wherever the journey takes you.