Terry Riley: Cadenza on the Night Plain is a studio album by the Kronos Quartet, the first album-length recording of a collaboration between the quartet and American composer Terry Riley.

The music on this album was recorded in 1984, and was conceived or adapted in collaboration with the Kronos Quartet. "Sunrise Of The Planetary Dream Collector" and "G-Song" had been composed in 1980 and "Cadenza On The Night Plain" in 1983, and were adapted for the quartet. The cooperation between Riley and the quartet is described as a truly collaborative effort, specifically in the case of Kronos Quartet Plays Terry Riley: Salome Dances for Peace and Cadenza on the Night Plain. According to Riley, "When I write a score for them, it's an unedited score. I put in just a minimal amount of dynamics and phrasing marks. It's essentially a score like Vivaldi would have done. So when we go to rehearsal, we spend a lot of time trying out different ideas in order to shape the music, to form it."

"G-Song" and "Cadenza On The Night Plain" were re-recorded for the quartet's 25-year retrospective collection, Kronos Quartet: 25 Years.

Kronos began playing Cadenza On The Night Plain in 1984, with an early performance in Darmstadt, Germany; it remained on the Kronos playlist for a long time, and was performed as late as 1996.

The title is derived from Riley's "whimsical notion" of a "collector who came around every day on the planet and collected all dreams so that they could be redistributed the next day." The composition is written in 14-beat modules (in Dorian mode) and allows for a significant amount of improvisation: players are free to choose their own modules.

This is the first composition Riley wrote for the Quartet, but it is based on an earlier composition by Riley, a 1973 composition for saxophone and keyboard; the original saxophone melody was transcribed for viola. "G-song" has a jazz chord progression over which is played a 16-bar theme in G-minor.

Parts of this song come from a larger composition intended for sitar player Krishna Bhatt.

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