The swirling synthesizer intro to The Who’s Baba O’Riley is a direct tribute to Terry Riley, the American composer born in Colfax, California in 1935 who helped found musical minimalism. This episode traces how a student of rigorous European composition at San Francisco State, the San Francisco Conservatory and UC Berkeley was simultaneously absorbing John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Bill Evans and paying rent by pounding barrelhouse piano in European bars. Out of that cross-pollination came a view of classical music as an open, improvisational framework rather than a rigid blueprint.

We break down the time-lag accumulator he built in Paris in 1963 with Chet Baker, stretching tape between two reel-to-reel machines so physical distance controlled the delay, and the 1964 landmark In C, with its 53 modules, pulsing piano, and open instrumentation. The conversation follows his New York years with La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music and John Cale, the 1969 album A Rainbow in Curved Air that inspired Pete Townshend and Mike Oldfield, his 1970 turn to Hindustani vocal study under Pandit Pran Nath, and his 13 string quartets for the Kronos Quartet.

• How modal jazz taught him that tension can come from rhythm and repetition rather than chord changes
• Why In C works as a game design where performers listening to each other generate the music
• The phasing effect that emerges as players drift in and out of sync
• Microtones, cyclical time and the decision to become a beginner again in India
• Just intonation and improvisation folded into traditional classical forms in later works