B (2:23)

All right.

A (2:23)

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.

B (2:30)

Okay.

A (2:30)

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. I, um. It's this kind of weird Blob of sound that hits different every single time you listen to 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.

B (3:04)

I'm intrigued and a little scared.

C (3:08)

Fair.

A (3:09)

It's called In C 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 In C. But I want to play you my favorite one by this group called Bang on a Can.

B (3:30)

Okay.

A (3:31)

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 nc. So there you go.

B (4:11)

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

A (4:17)

Okay.

B (4:18)

What scene would this be scoring?

A (4:21)

Oh, the inner workings of my brain.

B (4:26)

So this is like a typewriter scene? Like.

A (4:29)

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.

B (4:45)

Okay.

A (4:46)

Which might give some insight into my personality.

B (4:50)

All right. But I don't think.

A (4:52)

I mean, what's interesting about this song is that it's something. What's the word? It's called Alia. Aleatoric music. Called aleatoric music, which is chance music, meaning that it's different every time.

B (5:06)

Okay.

A (5:07)

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 Beiser, she played it by herself all alone with a loop pedal.

B (5:50)

Oh, cool.

A (5:51)

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 INSI, which is a mix of African and Western instruments. And I even once saw a performance of INCY in dance form. In dance, 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 In C, but it was in a totally different medium.

B (7:08)

Yeah.

A (7:09)

And then probably the most famous recording isn't actually a version of NC, but you know the song by the who. Baba O'Reilly.

B (7:18)

No.

A (7:19)

You know, out here in the fields I fought for my meals okay, yeah, yeah. Teenage wasteland.

B (7:27)

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

A (7:34)

We'll see. But here's the actual song. You recognize this, right?

B (7:42)

Oh, totally.

A (7:44)

So the whole long intro of that song is influenced by nc.

B (7:48)

Hmm.

A (7:49)

And Terry Reilly, the guy who wrote In C 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.

B (8:12)

Doom. Doom.

A (8:18)

Okay, anyways.

B (8:22)

Amazing.

A (8:22)

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.

B (8:32)

All right, let's get back to the NC recording that you were playing at the beginning.

A (8:37)

Can you. The bang on a can one?

B (8:39)

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

A (8:44)

Yeah, so it starts with that pulse, you know, the ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. And then the first new pattern comes in, which is. 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, 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, chicka doo, chicka doo doo doo, badoop, badoop. 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. 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. Then it slowly morphs, 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. There's no beat drop.

B (10:55)

The beat never drops.

A (10:59)

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.

B (11:22)

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 breathing of this bigger universe.

A (11:44)

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. 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 ding, ding, ding. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. You know, and it just kind of disappears, 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.

B (13:08)

We respect the chaos.

A (13:09)

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

B (13:15)

Yeah.

A (13:16)

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

B (13:22)

Hear it all the time.

A (13:23)

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

B (13:25)

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

A (13:30)

Okay. So it's like. And then it builds and builds. Right. So that's. That last bit is the unexplainable.

B (13:47)

I didn't know that was unexplainable.

A (13:49)

Oh, really?

B (13:50)

Yeah.

A (13:51)

No, that's. Now you'll never unhear it.

B (13:54)

It's like the arrow in the FedEx logo.

A (13:57)

It's the arrow in the FedEx unexplainable.

B (13:59)

Okay.

C (14:00)

Yep.

B (14:02)

Beautiful.

A (14:03)

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.

B (14:17)

Yeah.

A (14:18)

The thing is, though, it was really hard to write, like, 10 seconds of chaos or 5 seconds of chaos or however little the chaos was that I wrote.

B (14:27)

Just a spark of it.

A (14:28)

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.

B (14:43)

Right.

A (14:43)

And it turns out that my teacher of this ensemble that I play and I play in a Balinese music ensemble called a gamelan. And turns out my teacher is the guy who produced this recording of NC by Bang on a Can.

B (15:00)

Small World. Yeah.

A (15:01)

He told me that he started playing NC in the 70s, and he's played it hundreds of times since then.

C (15:06)

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.

A (15:24)

NC from the inside. After the break, avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start. Thumbtack knows homes, so you don't have to. Don't know the difference between matte paint finish and satin or what that clunking sound from your dryer is with thumbtack. You don't have to be a home pro, you just have to hire one. You can hire top rated pros, see price estimates and read reviews all on the app. Download today. Support for Unexplainable comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Claude is an AI that can help you explore different angles on all kinds of questions. Like the other day I was watching the Red Sox and they played this sound after a strikeout and I was like, huh. I don't remember when that became a thing, but it also wasn't something that I could just search for easily. So I asked Claude. He gave me some sources, I tracked him down and before I knew it, I had the definitive history of the I also use Claude when I'm curious about genuinely complicated things. I'll ask it something big. We'll go back and forth to hone exactly what I'm looking for. And yeah, it does get things wrong sometimes, but when I double check or ask for a citation, it'll give me a better source. Now it's important to know how to use Claude well, like ask it follow up questions. Actually check out the citations it gives you. But if you do, Claude can be a powerful tool. It helps me find articles and primary documents that I never would have come across. And it helps me dig wider and deeper, all while staying in control of the digging. You can try Claude for free at Claude AI Unexplainable and see why the world's best problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner. Not all journalism is the same. Take the Guardian. Our coverage has something unique fierce independence. Nobody owns us or tells us what we can and can't say, so we're free to report the whole picture. We connect what's happening in Washington to the rest of the globe, expose corruption wherever we find it, and give fresh perspective on everything from wellness and soccer to culture, the climate, and more. Read, watch and listen to the Guardian for free@theguardian.com.

C (17:54)

I'll probably go to a.

A (17:55)

Skrillex concert and I'll be waiting for.

C (17:58)

The bass drop and it'll never come.

A (18:02)

Evan Zaporin has probably played NC about as much as anyone out there.

C (18:07)

I've played NC probably 500 times in my life, I would say.

A (18:12)

Evan's a clarinetist. He's a composer. He produced my favorite version of nc, performed by the Bang on a Can Ensemble. And he's played it so Much that he forgot when he learned it.

C (18:25)

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

A (18:32)

So how do you introduce other people to it?

C (18:35)

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

A (18:46)

Seriously?

C (18:47)

Yep.

A (18:48)

Oh, my God. Okay.

C (18:52)

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 the 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 eyeshot of everybody, you're going to have a nice trip through the woods.

A (19:39)

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?

C (19:58)

You just let it happen, which is not as simple as it sounds, because you have to really 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 to 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, 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.

A (20:57)

And normally you'd think that that would be something you wouldn't want to have at the same time.

C (21:02)

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, 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.

A (21:43)

Did you notice that it changed the feeling of the piece?

C (21:47)

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 in C 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.

A (23:04)

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.

C (23:20)

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. Things. 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.

A (23:54)

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.

C (24:10)

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 rhythmic empathy with other people.

A (24:26)

Yeah.

C (24:27)

Which has to do with a certain kind of, like, faith. Not like a religious faith, but just, like, faith in community. Right.

A (24:35)

Yeah.

C (24:35)

Yeah. That's like. 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.

A (24:52)

Yeah.

C (24:53)

You get to the end and it's just there. And then in the instructions, there's like, well, maybe when everybody gets the last pattern you can send in. It's not really clear, but it is clearer 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. And everybody knows it. And I don't understand that either, but it's a really amazing thing.

A (25:20)

It's an unanswered question.

C (25:22)

Yeah.

A (25:38)

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 Maya Bizer, 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 nc, 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 in C 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 Hoddenott, who runs the show, mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala, music from 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 Resnik 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@ unexplainableox.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.commembers 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.

B (28:49)

Mercury knows that to an entrepreneur, every financial move means more. An international wire means working with the best contractors on any continent, a credit card on day one means creating an ad campaign on day two, and a business loan means loading up on inventory for Black Friday. That's why Mercury offers banking that does more all in one place, so that doing just about anything with your money feels effortless. Visit mercury.com to learn more. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group, Column N A and Evolve bank and Trust Members. FDIC Nobody knows your customers better than your team, so give them the power to make standout content with Adobe Express. Brand kits make following design rules a breeze, and Adobe quality templates make it easy to create pro looking flyers, social posts, presentations and more. You don't have to be a designer to edit campaigns, resize ads, and translate content. Anyone can in a click and collaboration tools put feedback right where you need it. See how you can turn your team into a content machine with Adobe Express, the quick and easy app to create on brand content. Learn more@adobe.com Express Business.