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From outer space, music of peace
01:00 AM EST on Thursday, November 2, 2006
Backed by NASA’s recordings of deep space, 40-foot video projections, and the Providence Singers, Kronos Quartet will perform “Sun Rings" on Friday at Veterans Memorial Auditorium Arts and Cultural Center as part of the FirstWorksProv Festival.
Zoran Orlic
Glyph-like physics formulas flash across a 24-by-40-foot screen. A glowing orange planet swirls through space as hisses and whistles pulse in the background. Pictures of birds and fish appear as the voice of a woman intones a mantra for peace.
These are the sights and sounds of avant-garde composer Terry Riley’s Sun Rings, which can be seen and heard tomorrow night at Veterans Memorial Auditorium, the final offering in this year’s FirstWorksProv festival.
The 85-minute score will be performed by the cutting-edge Kronos Quartet, which has tackled some pretty far-out stuff over the years, but nothing quite so spacy as Riley’s ode to humankind, a multimedia extravaganza that blends music for strings and singers with the celestial sounds of outer space. About 45 members of the Providence Singers will join the Kronos.
It was NASA, which has dabbled in the arts over the years, that first approached Kronos about creating music using sounds recorded by its spacecraft. Bertram Urlich, NASA’s arts curator and a big fan of Kronos, offered the group $20,000 to come up with a piece based on what can only be called the true music of the spheres. The cost of the project would end up closer to $300,000.
This most ambitious and complex of Kronos’ commissions came out of the blue, so to speak. David Harrington, first violinist for the quartet, recalls getting a fax from NASA while touring Europe. Would the group be interested in writing music that would incorporate sounds from space?
To begin with, Harrington had no idea there were any sounds in space. He asked to hear them.
“You think of NASA as being very high-tech,” said Harrington from San Francisco, the quartet’s home base. “What I got was a very basic cassette. But what was on it was a fascinating aspect of nature I hadn’t had a chance to hear before.”
As soon as Harrington heard the tape he thought of Riley, one of the quartet’s closest and oldest collaborators.
Riley, who is best known for his hypnotic In C, a work that helped usher in the minimalist movement, had spent his early years manipulating taped sounds. One of the scores he created for Kronos, said Harrington, was a “sort of cosmic orchestra” titled Sunrise for the Planetary Dream Collector.
Harrington said he played the NASA tape for Riley during a recording session and the composer became “very excited.” Two weeks later, Riley and Harrington took in a NASA launch, in part to watch like little kids, as a rocket rose into the heavens, but also to become acquainted with the agency they were about to work for.
Later, the two musicians were invited on a tour of the agency’s facilities.
“We just wanted to make sure we were going to be comfortable being involved with them,” said Harrington. “We didn’t know anything about them.”
The Grammy-winning Kronos — adventurous, eclectic, wide-ranging — has become one of the most celebrated chamber groups of our time. Its repertoire ranges from 20th-century masters, such as Bartok and Part, to jazz, pop and world music.
Formed more than 30 years ago, Kronos — that’s Harrington and John Sherba (brother of Rhode Island Philharmonic concertmaster Charles Sherba), violins; Hank Dutt, viola; and Jeffrey Zeigler, cello — has recorded CDs of music by famed Bollywood composer R.D. Burnam, Mexican pop-rockers, gypsy bands and the likes of Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie and of course, Riley.
Riley, who looks a little like a Taoist monk with his bare head and flowing gray beard, began work on Sun Rings in August 2001. Then came the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, and Riley, who was overwhelmed by the devastation, put aside the score.
When he came back to it, he took a different approach.
“At first,” said Harrington, “the piece was about what it was to look outward. After 9/11, Terry was more interested in what we have here on Earth.”
It became more about looking inward.
Riley has said he saw how the nation was changing after 9/11 and wanted Sun Rings to be motivated by peace, not revenge. Although he contends the piece is not political, some of the texts deal with humanity and compassion.
The piece, originally about 20 minutes long, grew in scope. Riley decided it needed a chorus. Then visuals were added.
Kronos manager Janet Cowperthwaite had attended a U2 concert with Harrington’s daughter and was struck by projections created by Willie Williams, who has worked with U2 for the past 20 years or so. The images made the setting seem more intimate, said Harrington.
Williams, who had been interested in space since he was a kid, was in the middle of preparing the $7-million projection for the Rolling Stones’ “Licks” tour, but managed to squeeze Kronos into his schedule.
The show’s towering video projections contain scrawling physics formulas, Earth spinning through space like a swirling blue-and-white marble, and images for birds, fish and commonplace objects that were placed in the Voyager spacecrafts.
Those appear in the final section, during which author Alice Walker recites a sort of mantra in response to 9/11 — “One Earth, one people, one love,” as a solo cello cries out.
It was Williams who added the poetic musings of astronaut Neil Armstrong to the opening of the finale.
“It is one of the greatest prayers I know,” said Harrington, “even though there is no religious point of view.”
The space sounds in Sun Rings — screeching whistles, sighs and booms — were recorded by a device built by University of Iowa physics professor Donald Gurnett. Both Riley and Harrington went to visit Gurnett, who for decades had designed recorders for NASA spacecraft.
“As a violinist,” said Harrington, “I never thought I’d be lectured to from a man who was in on the ground floor of NASA.”
Because there is no air in outer space, there are no sound waves. What we hear instead are plasma waves triggered by, among other things, lightning and solar winds. Plasma is the ionized gas that makes up most of outer space.
One problem, said Harrington is that the plasma waves are off the scale of human hearing, and thus have to be converted into audible sounds by Gurnett’s machine.
Sun Rings is the most high-tech piece Kronos has undertaken. Members of the quartet, who perform on an illuminated platform that appears to float in space, must arrive in town a couple of days before the performance to set up equipment and rehearse with the singers.
During the performance, Harrington and his colleagues trigger sounds and text by waving their hands over sensors. They also wear earphones so they can listen to click tracks, a sort of metronome that allows everyone to remain in sync. Everything has to be timed down to the second.
“There’s a lot of technology we never thought we’d be involved with,” said Harrington. “It’s the most complicated show we’ve ever put on.”
The Providence Singers, led by new music director Andrew Clark, appear in 2 of the piece’s 10 sections, or “spacescapes,” as Riley calls them. In a movement called “Prayer Central” with a text by Riley, supplications for peace and prosperity are offered. Then the music becomes more convoluted, the text more self-centered.
“Fix my truck, cure my cancer,” the chorus sings. “Send me a sexy ballet dancer.”
Finally the sopranos chime in, “look deeper.”
“See mighty nations fall, but from space they all look so small.”
The work ends in a serene C Major chorale that will win over the hearts of the most hardened listeners, said Clark, who will also be wearing earphones with click tracks (the downbeat is louder than the rest of the clicks, so the players can keep track of measures).
“We’ve come to love it,” said Clark of Sun Rings. “And to perform it with the Kronos is a real feather in our hat.”
Riley has said that the recorded space sounds are in some cases intended as a jumping-off point for the quartet writing, that fragments heard in the recordings have been developed into string melodies.
The two sections with the chorus represent humanity reaching out to its heavenly surroundings. The chorus also adds a feeling of “community,” said Harrington.
“We’ve done Sun Rings in Russia, England and Canada and all over the United States, and we always notice a sense of community about the piece.”
Harrington said that Sun Rings is among Riley’s most beautiful and beguiling music, especially the final section with the divine cello solo.
“Of the 600 pieces that have been written for us,” he said, “this is at the pinnacle.”
The Kronos Quartet and Providence Singers present Terry Riley’s Sun Rings tomorrow night at 8 at Veterans Memorial Auditorium. Tickets range from $20 to $75, with the top price including a reception. Log on to www.tickets.com or call (401) 272-4862.
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