Sun Rings Terry Riley Terry Riley (B
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KRONOS QUARTET SUN RINGS TERRY RILEY TERRY RILEY (B. 1935) SUN RINGS (2002) FOR STRING QUARTET, CHORUS, AND PRE-RECORDED SPACESCAPES 1. SUN RINGS OVERTURE (1:24) 2. HERO DANGER (7:15) 3. BEEBOPTERISMO (7:14) 4. PLANET ELF SINDOORI (7:48) KRONOS QUARTET 5. EARTH WHISTLERS* (10:05) DAVID HARRINGTON, violin 6. EARTH/JUPITER KISS (6:38) JOHN SHERBA, violin 7. THE ELECTRON CYCLOTRON HANK DUTT, viola SUNNY YANG, cello FREQUENCY PARLOUR (5:59) 8. PRAYER CENTRAL* (16:44) * WITH VOLTI, ROBERT GEARY, ARTISTIC DIRECTOR 9. VENUS UPSTREAM (7:18) SOPRANO KELLY BALLOU+, YUHI AIZAWA COMBATTI, 10. ONE EARTH, ONE PEOPLE, ONE LOVE (9:03) SHAUNA FALLIHEE, ANDREA MICH MEZZO-SOPRANO LINDSEY MCLENNAN BURDICK, ELIZABETH KIMBLE, DIANA PRAY, COLBY SMITH ALTO KRISTINA BLEHM, MONICA FRAME, RACHEL RUSH, CELESTE WINANT TENOR BEN BARR, WILL BETTS, SAMUEL FAUSTINE, JULIAN KUSNADI BARITONE RODERICK LOWE, JEFFERSON PACKER, TIM SILVA, COLE THOMASON-REDUS BASS JEFF BENNETT, SIDNEY CHEN, PETER DENNIS, PHILIP SAUNDERS + SOLOIST Rings, about to have its premiere at the University of Iowa’s Hancher Auditorium. Contemplating the music of the spheres is, of course, a millennia-old pastime that has never gotten old. In this case, it was for Riley an occasion for both inner and outer space discovery. He had spent most of the Seventies as a composer, keyboard player, and educator determinedly moving away from musical notation towards a unique form of semi-improvised composition that embraced Indian raga, jazz, Renaissance vocal music, repetition, and elec- tronic phasing, all in an effort of all-around musical consciousness-raising. But when Kronos Quartet violinist David Harrington twisted his arm into writing a string quartet, an apparition of the beyond—the notion of a collector of all the nightly dreams on Earth—inspired Riley to find his way back to working with a traditional (if groundbreaking) ensemble. The resulting Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector in 1980 began an ongoing relationship with Kronos independently peering ENVISION TWO YOUNG MEN IN 1964 that has led to dozens of string quartets, including the rollicking epic Salome into the San Francisco Bay Area night sky. A scientist is listening and a composer, Dances for Peace and the penetratingly consoling Requiem for Adam. looking. The University of Iowa student of astrophysics happens to be participat- Twenty years after Sunrise, Kronos received a call out of the blue from NASA, ing in a NASA training program at Stanford University. The U.C. Berkeley–trained which had a small budget for commissioning space-based artwork to mark the composer, pianist, and brilliant improviser has just returned from a sojourn in 25th anniversary of the launching of Voyager 1. The agency wondered whether Paris where he had been playing jazz and fooling around with modular musical the quartet might not like to do a little something with Gurnett’s recordings of the forms. whistling produced by lightning, the bird-like choruses of electrons trapped in the Intrigued by the notion that the universe sings, Donald Gurnett had captured magnetic fields of Earth and Jupiter, and the roaring boom of a solar wind shock sounds in space with a homemade receiver in the backyard of his parents’ Midwest wave. Riley was the obvious choice. “NASA’s quest for knowledge and desire home. He would eventually go on to conduct a lifetime of pioneering research in to put people where we hadn’t been before,” the composer noted at the time, plasma physics, continuing to learn about the physical nature of the universe from “seemed strangely familiar.” So, too, did the space sounds, which reminded him of the sounds it makes. On the other hand, the stargazing implement for Terry Riley, his early work with electronic music and dance. who grew up in the foothills of Tahoe National Forest, happened to be a peyote But the 9/11 terrorist attack occurred while composing the new quartet, button, revealing the ordering of the stars into a perfect mandala. This became an and Riley says his original, gee-whiz enthusiasm for Sun Rings suddenly felt too inspiration for the patterning and sense of universal harmony that led to In C, pio- much like kid’s stuff, shooting rockets into space at an unsettlingly saber-rattling neering musical Minimalism. time. It was only after hearing poet and novelist Alice Walker on the radio recite When Riley’s and Gurnett’s paths finally did cross nearly four decades later, her September 11 mantra, “One Earth, one people, one love,” that he realized that a local newspaper in Iowa City so confused the radically different pair of vision- pondering the universe put the problems on Earth into a needed, interplanetary aries that it ran a picture of Riley—his distinctive shaved head, long gray beard, perspective. By the time of its 2002 premiere, what had originally been a modest, and Indian dress—with Gurnett’s name under it. The physicist’s friends joked that 20-minute string quartet had grown into an epic, evening-length, affirmative his newfound interest in music from encountering Riley sure seemed to have event in 10 parts with chorus and visual design by Willie Williams. changed an unprepossessing Midwestern academic. It was, however, more the Seductive as Sun Rings may be in evoking the solar system enhanced through other way around. From Gurnett, Riley was given an overpowering new impetus space imagery, listening to the quartet by itself on recording helps turn our atten- for realizing his early, music-changing mandala insight in his new quartet, Sun tion to the core of Riley’s vision of Earth in the here and now. The space sounds, God on their side, we had “a polyphony of all prayers drifting up”? That became the eighth movement, “Prayer Central,” and the essence of the quartet. Sun Rings begins with exploration, a brief overture hinting at what is in store, planetarily speaking, as swooshes from space and Gurnett’s voice guide an adventurer. For the embarkation in “Hero Danger,” space has a beat into which the quartet enters with drones and an optimistically frisky figure that travels back and forth between the players in playful counterpoint. Mostly, though, space sounds serve as promising background, while a central dirge reminds us that mysteries lurk in the unknown. What follows is a sequence of interspace interactions as Riley anthropomor- phizes other worlds: “Beebopterismo” with its sweet tunes; “Planet Elf Sindoori,” lingering in long melodies. The awe-inspiring vastness of space is conveyed by a chorus chanting in “Earth Whistlers,” singing first in Gujarati, then in English. In “Earth/Jupiter Kiss” we make contact. A violin’s seductive sighs receive whooshing invitations from the Gas Giant spraying perfumed hydrogen and helium. The Bartók-ish scherzo, “The Electron Cyclotron Frequency Parlour,” has the character of a message from Houston, mission control’s high-frequency signaling. themselves, serve scientists by demonstrating that the outer space of our solar In two parts and with a text by Riley, “Prayer Central” is written for six-voice system is not a vacuum, since it contains enough plasma for electrical events to chorus and is the longest of the movements. It begins as though an Indian chant move air and be picked up by receivers designed by Gurnett for such spacecraft but evolves into a multi-cultural, multi-spiritual, and multi-stylistic call for peace, as Voyagers 1 and 2. Once these sounds are amplified and brought into frequen- reaching the huge climax of the whole work as the chorus proclaims, one syllable cies our ears can accommodate, however, they do more than provide mere raw, at a time, “Now we must learn to de-pend on vast, mo-tion-less thought.” A long astronomically illuminating data. interlude for the affirmative space sounds provokes, for the second half, a prayer We have on Earth but few inanimate sounds—most commonly wind, the dance. ocean’s waves, thunder, and electrons traveling on wires. We furthermore have From there, the high energy of “Venus Upstream” prepares for landing on a tradition of distrust for sounds we cannot hear, such as in the classic dilemma “One Earth, One People, One Love.” The pre-recorded voice of Alice Walker joins of whether a tree falling in the forest makes a noise if no one is there to hear it. the string quartet in a hymn where space sounds and barking dogs are all the Musicians know otherwise, having long conjured up the forest and the rest of same in our one plasma/peyote universe. nature. But for Riley, whistlers and the rest of space’s music greatly expand our —MARK SWED, MARCH 2019 sense of heard and unheard Nature. Even so, as their titles make apparent, the movements of Sun Rings sug- gest fancy rather than astronomical spacescapes or, as in Gustav Holst’s The Planets, astrological associations. Riley instead uses all the musical resources at his disposal to respond to and converse with the sounds. His seems an attempt to explain us to them and, in so doing, to gain insight into humanity. This led the com- poser to another vision: What if instead of terrorists and terrorized alike claiming “You have to literally just pinch yourself and ask yourself the question silently: do you really know where you are at this point in time and space, and in reality and in existence? When you look out the window and you’re looking back at the most beautiful star in the heavens—the most beautiful because it’s the one we understand and we know it… We’re home. IT WAS DURING A RECORDING SESSION with Kronos at It’s humanity; it’s people, family, love, life.