Composer-Pianist Terry Riley Lets Fingers Do the Singing

These days, musical style is a matter of individual choice rather than cultural heritage. Demonstrating that Tuesday evening for a tiny audience at the Irvine Barclay Theatre was composer-pianist Terry Riley, who has embraced everything from ragas to ragtime in a unique, dazzling and utterly cohesive personal synthesis.

A seminal figure in the development of American Minimalism and a longtime student of northern Indian music, Riley is also a jazz pianist of wide-ranging bent and formidable technique. Though he also sings at many of his solo performances, he operated only as a vital and virtuosic pianist Tuesday, in two extended sets.

The music, of course, was his own. He opened with improvisatory paraphrases of themes from some of his ensemble works, the epic string quartet “Salome Dances for Peace” and the chamber opera “The St. Adolf Ring.”

The transfers to solo piano occasionally sounded incongruous--moments of the “Peace Dance” suggested something like Vince Guaraldi meeting Ravi Shankar--but Riley can impart just about any inflection to any material.

He favored rounded forms, psychically if not always strictly sonically brought full circle, and chains of incremental variations.

The “St. Adolf” extract, for example, began with tolling chords that contracted into the accompaniment for a Gershwinesque blues that spiraled to its own outer limits before collapsing back into those gentle chordal clouds.

The darkly droning “Waltz for Insomniacs” was the most obsessively patterned of Riley’s pieces here, gleaming with pianistic effects but overlong for its tightly constricted focus.

“Requiem for Wally,” honoring Riley’s San Francisco ragtime mentor, Wally Rose, was the most freewheeling and open-spirited piece, alluding as it did to all manner of piano traditions but with a natural emphasis on ragtime and stride.

Riley is a truly gifted pianist, worlds beyond colleagues in the composer-recital business such as Philip Glass. He can fly up and down the keyboard in exotic runs and hammer out intricate compound rhythms, but he can also draw amazing overtone colors from pedaling effects and chord voicings, and he lets single notes speak with immovably centered poise.

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The repetition, both within a work and of stock figuration from piece to piece, can disappoint analytical expectations of conventional Western development and form, but there is much more to his music than cut-and-paste. On its deeper levels it is immeasurably cheering music, music refreshed at its basic roots and uncommonly free of ego.

Riley dispensed with a scheduled post-concert question-and-answer session but offered soft-spoken introductions and short anecdotes during the performance.

More important, he offered an uninhibited personal look at some of the fountains of contemporary music, and assurance that the springs have not run dry.