At the Royal Majestic

Its world premiere was given by the organist Cameron Carpenter and the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the direction of John Adams at the Walt Disney Concert Hall on April 11, 2014.

Riley has had a lifelong interest in the organ and previously featured it in such works as A Rainbow in Curved Air, Persian Surgery Dervishes, The Ten Voices of the Two Prophets, and Shri Camel.

In the score program notes, Riley wrote, "I was intrigued by what Woelfli, who never traveled outside of Switzerland and who lived the last half of his life in a mental institution, thought about Negro culture.

I tried to imagine what a dance hall in the Waldorf Astoria NYC in the 1930s might be like (from Woelfli's perspective), a gaggle of black dancers in outlandish jitterbug and boogie-woogie routines in a polymetric changing tempo frenzy.

The movement references themes from the "Negro Hall" section of his 1990 chamber opera The Saint Adolf Ring, which is derived from Wölfli's oeuvre From the Cradle to the Grave.

"[4] Conversely, Ivan Hewett of The Daily Telegraph was more critical of the work, remarking, "The composer's own programme note promised a rich imaginative world, embracing the Swiss schizophrenic artist Adolf Wölfi, Tibetan temple music, and black dancers at an imagined dance hall in 1930s New York (thus the concerto's title, At the Royal Majestic).