Sun Rings by Terry Riley & Kronos Quartet October 6, 2004

From the Website :
http://www.bam.org/events/05RING/05RING.aspx

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
Oct 6, 8 & 9 at 7:30pm
Tickets: $20, 40
80min, no intermission

BAMdialogue with Kronos Quartet, Terry Riley, Willie Williams
Oct 8 post-show

?...music of supreme beauty and spiritual impact.? ?Los Angeles Times

Twenty-five-hundred years ago Pythagoras proposed that the vast expanse of space is filled not only with planets, stars, and other heavenly bodies, but also with the music of their movements. Since the 1960s, NASA scientists and astrophysicist Don Gurnett have actually tuned in, reaping wondrous sounds from deep-space lightning and rushing solar winds, among other galactic marvels.

Sun Rings, an 80-minute work by Terry Riley, the de facto founding father of the American school of musical minimalism (his seminal In C shattered long-held notions of compositional structure), incorporates these awe-inspiring chirrups, crackles, howls, and whistles into a meditative score performed by the Kronos Quartet, longtime BAM favorites and new music revolutionaries. The 70-voice Dessoff Choirs adds a further celestial element, as does Willie Williams? visual environment of glorious images?many snapped by far-flung spacecraft?projected onto a 40-foot-wide screen. (No stranger to large-scale events, Williams has designed shows for U2, David Bowie, and REM.)

Subsequent to the events of September 11th, Sun Rings took on new urgency, thanks to Riley?s serendipitous encounter with poet Alice Walker?s ?One Earth, One People, One Love? mantra (on which he set the mystically enveloping finale), growing from a work unfettered by explicit meaning into one with a truly universal scope.