Unexplainable - Composing chaos

Episode Date: October 8, 2025

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! ⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠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

Hey, I'm Matt Bouchelle, comedian, writer, and floating head you may or may not have seen on your FYP. And I'm starting a brand new podcast. Wait, don't swipe away. It's called That Sounds Like a Lot. You know that feeling when you check your phone, read a few headlines and think, That sounds like a lot. I can't do this. Well, I can, and I'm going to get into it every Friday.

You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcast. I'm going to start by breaking down whatever insanity is happening in the world. And then I'll sit down with a comedian or actor or writer or, honestly, anyone who responds to my DMs. This is not the place to get the news, but it is a place to get the news. but it is a place to feel a little bit better about it. That sounds like a lot. Coming May 1st, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Hello, Mara.

Hey, Noah. 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. Yeah, totally. And you don't really know why? Like, it's like a weird thing. Like, why do I like this?

Yeah. Is there anything like that for you? I really like the Bonapete on the line videos, which is just like, spend a day in a restaurant doing prep, which for my own reasons I find very soon. 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. 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.

It's the one I listen to probably more than anything else. 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. 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 InC, because it was written in the key of C major. 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 InC. 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. It's really exciting. 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-sea. So there you go. Yeah. So if this was like the movie of the Life of Noam, and this was the soundtrack, what scene would this be scoring? Oh, the inner workings of my brain.

So this is like a typewriter scene? 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. Okay. Which might give some insight into my personality. All right.

But I don't think, I mean, what's interesting about this song is that it's something, what's the word? It's called ailiatoric music. It's called ailiatoric music, which is chance music. meaning that it's different every time. Okay. 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. There's this recent version I love where this cellist, Maya Biser, she played it by herself all alone with a loop pedal. Oh, cool.

So she did all the parts over herself. There's this version built on voices by Ars Nova Copenhagen. So you can hear that pulse in the background, but the voices are really taking center stage on this one. There's this crazy recording from a Japanese psychedelic rock band named Acid Mother's Temple. That one is completely insane. There's this version by Africa Express that was made for the 50th anniversary of NC, which is a mix of African and Western instruments.

And I even once saw a performance of InC in dance form. In dance. Which was absolutely mind-blowing. Like they did all the little dance moves in groups, just like people will 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 NC,

but it was in a totally different medium. Yeah. And then probably the most famous recording isn't actually a version of NC. But you know the song by the Who, Bob O'Reilly? No. You know, out here in the fields, I fought for my meal.

Okay, yeah, yeah. Teenage Wasteland. Oh, my God. I hope this episode is just an excuse to make you do a bunch of a cappella stuff. We'll see. But here's the actual song. You recognize this, right? Oh, totally.

So the whole long intro of that song is influenced by NC. And Terry Riley, the guy who wrote NC, is actually the Riley in Baba O'Reilly. 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. Doon, do. Okay. Anyways. Amazing. 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. All right. Let's get back to the NC recording that you were playing at the beginning. The bang on a can one. Yeah, yeah, that one. Could you play me a different section of it just so I can hear how it evolves?

Yeah, so it starts with that pulse. You know, the ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. And then the first new pattern comes in, which is, but up, but da, but da. And everyone comes in playing that. And then they switch to the next pattern. And over the course of the piece, the whole thing starts to shift. So if I skip ahead a bit, here's a couple minutes ahead.

So that ding, ding, ding, ding, that pulse is always going in the background. I don't know, maybe I'll just like keep it down here while we talk. Yeah. 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, 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 and 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. 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. 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. The beat never drops. I listen to this all the time and I just feel like it's a bad. 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. 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 same. 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. Yeah, I mean, you know mandala's, 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. 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. It highlights different instruments or tones. But it never really feels like it resolves.

It just moves along in these unpredictable ways. And then by the end, everyone's in the same place, and they all start to fade out. And you just have this thing, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. You know, and it just kind of disappears. And it's weird. I kind of feel like InC is unexplainable in music form. Like we're trying to bring order to chaos in a sense, but not that much order.

We respect the chaos. Yeah, like we give you this little glimpse of the unknown, but it's still mostly unknown. Yeah. And I was thinking about NC when I wrote a lot of. of the music for the show, you know, including the theme song. Hear it all the time. I don't know if there's a good way to play it for you. I mean, you have to acopel of it now is what has to happen.

Okay, so it's like, and then it builds and builds. Right? So that's, that last bit is the unexplainable. I didn't know that was unexplainable. Oh, really? Yeah. No, that's, uh, now you'll never. Unhear it. It's like the arrow and the FedEx logo. It's the arrow in the FedEx. Unexplainable. Okay. Yep.

Beautiful. But yeah, when I made the theme song, I wanted to make something that kind of felt like a mandala, you know, that comes out of nothing that goes into chaos, that gets really complicated just for a second, and then it disappears. Yeah. The thing is, though, it was really hard to write like 10 seconds of chaos or five seconds of chaos. Or five seconds of chaos. however little the chaos was that I wrote. Just a spark of it. Yeah, just a tiny bit. And I can't even imagine writing an hour of this

and having it actually still feel alive like that. 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, and I play in a Balinese music ensemble called a Gamalon. and turns out my teacher is the guy who produced this recording of NC by Bang on a Can. Small world, yeah.

He told me that he started playing NC in the 70s, and he's played it hundreds of times since then. I never imagine that over 40 years later, it would be even more vital to me than it was at that point. 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. NC from the inside, after the break. It's all about you. And when you fly with Virgin Atlantic in their upper class cabin, they take the VIP treatment to the next level.

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by Defender. With its 626 horsepower twin-turbo V8 engine, the Defender Octa is taking on the Dakar rally. The ultimate off-road challenge. Learn more. at landrover.ca. I'm Maria Sharpova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Follow Pretty Tough wherever you get your podcasts. Evan Zaporin has probably played InC about as much as anyone out there. I've played

NC probably 500 times in my life, I would say. Evans, a clarinetist. He's a composer. He produced my favorite version of InC, performed by the Bang on a Can ensemble. And he's played it so much that he forgot when he learned it. I don't actually remember being introduced to the piece. I feel like I've always known it. So how do you introduce other people to it? 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.

Seriously? Yep. Oh, my God. Okay. 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 to 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 the game.

Play the first pattern as long as you want. Then you move on to the second one, et cetera. 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. As long as you're kind of within eye shot of everybody, you're going to have a nice trip through the woods.

You know, I think the thing that I love most about this is this kind of, I don't know how I'd 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? You just let it happen, which is not a lot. 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, 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. It has this G-natural up high, and there's this pattern here, and 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 an interesting way. 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. 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 want to do. I mean, I was involved in one performance that was a pretty all-star performance, 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, 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 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. 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. Well, right, because 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 in C is that it's kind of like that, right? Like, there's all sorts of things that happen, but they happen really organically. 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. Yeah, that's a great question.

I guess it's different from performance to performance. But I think what I discover, if I could generalize it, is just the power of kind of rhythmic empathy with other people. Yeah. which has to do with a certain kind of like faith, not like a religious faith, but just like faith in community, right? Yeah, yeah. It's glorious when everybody crescendoes 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. Yeah. 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, and you do crescendo. It's not really clear.

But it is clear when you play it. You're playing and you're playing. And then there's like this thing that happens. You go like, and now we're done. Yeah. And everybody knows it. And I don't understand that either, but it's a really amazing thing.

It's an unanswered question. Yeah. We had a lot of versions of NC in the, 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 Maya Biser, Ars Nova Copenhagen, Acid Mother's 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 InC, it was choreographed by Sasha Waltz, 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 NC that I made when I was in high school that I fully forgot about until I made this episode. 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 NC 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 Hoddonaut, who runs the show, mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala, music for me, and fact-checking from Melissa Hirsch. Jorge Just and Julia Longoria are editorial directors, and Bird 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 Unexplanable at Vox.com, and we read every email. 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 slash 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 Unexplanable, let us know.

It would make us really happy. Unexplanable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We're off next week, but we'll be back on October 20th.