Celebrating David Behrman: In Conversation with Terry Riley & Tom Welsh

Tuesday, September 23rd at 12pm, ISSUE Project Room releases an exclusive conversation between pioneering composers David Behrman and Terry Riley in advance of the 2025 Gala celebration honoring Behrman’s legacy of collaboration, technological innovation, and influence across generations of experimental music. The conversation, moderated by archivist Tom Welsh, is also presented in the context of a forthcoming Columbia Recordings box set reissue recognizing Riley’s 90th birthday, with liner notes written by Behrman. After more than 15 years, ISSUE captured the two artists face-to-face for a heartfelt reunion and discussion about their longstanding relationship and work in experimental music. 

The talk revisits formative moments in Behrman and Riley’s shared history, including their first meeting in mid-1960s New York and their groundbreaking work on Riley’s “In C,” recorded for Columbia Masterworks. Behrman, then a producer at Columbia under John McClure, recalls the extraordinary conditions that made experimental recording possible—namely, support from commercial successes that gave cover to boundary-pushing projects. The conversation also touches on A Rainbow in Curved Air (1969), Riley’s landmark solo recording, and the sense of shared intuition and innovation that has defined their decades-long creative friendship.

For more information and tickets to ISSUE’s 2025 Gala celebration please contact ISSUE's Director of Advancement & Administration, Monica Pabelonio at monica@issueprojectroom.org, or visit our website. If you can’t attend, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution. A gift of any size helps to support our programs and community of underserved artists. 

David Behrman is a composer and artist active since the 1960s. Over the years he has made sound and multimedia installations for gallery spaces as well as musical compositions for performance in concerts. Most of his pieces feature flexible structures and the use of technology in personal ways; compositions rely on interactive real-time relationships with imaginative performers. Together with Robert Ashley, Alvin Lucier and Gordon Mumma, Behrman founded the Sonic Arts Union in 1966. He had a long association with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company as composer and performer, created music for several of the Company’s repertory pieces, and was a member of the Company’s Music Committee during its last years. Pictures, with its music Interspecies Smalltalk, won the Olivier Award in 1985. It remained in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company repertory from 1984 to 1989, and was revived in 2002. Behrman has received grants from the NEA, NYSCA, NYFA, the Japan-United States Friendship Commission, the D.A.A.D., the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Henry Cowell Foundation. He was a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2016. Audio recordings of his works are on the XI, Lovely Music, Pogus, New World, WERGO, Black Truffle Records and Alga Marghen labels.

Composer and performer Terry Riley is one of the founders of music’s Minimalist movement. His early works, notably “In C” (1964), pioneered a form in Western music based on structured interlocking repetitive patterns. The influence of Riley’s hypnotic, multi-layered, polymetric, brightly orchestrated Eastern-flavored improvisations and compositions is heard across the span of contemporary and popular music.

Thomas M. Welsh has worked closely with Terry Riley as manager and archivist for over 20 years. Along with David Behrman, he has written liner notes to the forthcoming box set reissue of Riley’s legendary Columbia recordings due out on Sony in August 2025. Welsh ran the performing arts series at the Cleveland Museum of Art, where he curated the year-round programs; launched the commissioning series with major works by Henry Threadgill, Cenk Ergün, Aleksandra Vrebalov, Stacy Garrop, and others; started an in-house record label; and created the influential Solstice summer festival and City Stages global music series. He later joined the staff as managing director at Big Ears, the most adventurous festival in the US, for its tenth edition. Earlier professional experiences include managing New Albion Records and Elision Fields artist management in San Francisco, where he worked closely with a number of the preeminent composers and performing artists of our time, including Terry Riley, Morton Subotnick, Maja S.K. Ratkje, Pauline Oliveros, Stefano Scodanibbio, Matthias Ziegler, and many others. Welsh hosted a weekly radio show on WRUW 91.1 fm for ten years, has written on contemporary music for The Wire, and collaborated with David Bernstein and Johannes Goebel on “The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde” (UC Press). He is currently the Executive Director of Piano Spheres in Los Angeles.