Kronos Quartet: Sun Rings
Nonesuch

During the closing movement of Terry Riley's Sun Rings, Alice Walker's pre-recorded voice is heard intoning the mantra “One earth ... one people ... one love,” words so currently relevant one might presume the work to have been written within the past year or so. In fact, Sun Rings was composed in 2002, a detail that would seem to testify to both Riley's prescience and the timeliness of the work's themes. Walker uttered those six words in the aftermath of the 9/11 tragedy, but issues relating to world peace and climate change give them a resonance that's as powerful today as ever. Though it's been performed nearly fifty times since its 2002 premiere, this Nonesuch release marks its first appearance on record.

Billed as a work for string quartet, chorus, and pre-recorded space sounds, Riley's latest collaboration with Kronos Quartet (violinists David Harrington and John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt, and cellist Sunny Yang), whose four-decade-long relationship has yielded no less than twenty-seven string quartet works, came about in fascinating manner. It originated with a call from NASA to Kronos, essentially an enquiry into whether the quartet might be interested in using in its performances sounds spacecrafts, including Voyager 1 and 2, had sent back to Earth. A meeting between Harrington and University of Iowa physics professor Don Gurnett, whose plasma wave instruments had received those sounds, ensued, which in turn prompted the violinist to immediately target Riley as the natural composer to integrate that material into a new composition for the quartet.

Working from cassettes Gurnett had given him containing those sounds, Riley began work on the piece only to be temporarily waylaid by the 9/11 attacks. Hearing Walker speak on the radio about a mantra that had helped her deal with the event renewed his desire to complete the work, and in so doing added choir to two of the work's ten movements to represent the voice of humanity and to help convey one of the work's key messages, the hope for peace on earth. The recorded version, at almost eighty minutes considerably longer than the original twenty-minute conception, judiciously augments the playing of the string quartet with plasma wave sounds and the singing of the San Francisco-based vocal ensemble Volti.

Not surprisingly, few if any traces of Riley's early minimalism style surface in Sun Rings, its style more wide-ranging and multi-dimensional (consider by way of illustration the graceful undulations of the dream-like “Planet Elf Sindoori” movement); melodically, however, the work is decidedly Riley-esque. It adventurously progresses through sequences of contrasting character and design, the emphasis on alien sounds in one place countered by the lustrous vocalizing of Volti in another, and Kronos's strings always present to tie the parts together. The electronic elements add a textural, ambient quality to the material that's itself offset by the acoustic timbres of the string instruments.

After a suitably spacey “Sun Rings Overture” sets the mood, filled as it is with swooshing space sounds and Gurnett's ruminating voice, the work proper begins with “Hero Danger,” a bright, rhythm-centered workout whose string melodies sound both Eastern-influenced and, perhaps surprisingly for a starry-eyed work such as this one, folk-flavoured; darker sonorities gradually seep into the composition, however, maybe as a reminder of the galaxy's mysteries. Riley's playfulness emerges in the title of “Beebopterismo” but also the jazz-like swing of its string melodies. Gentler by comparison, the soft vocalizations of Volti bring a humanizing presence to “Earth Whistlers” and “Prayer Central,” the latter a seventeen-minute spiritual meditation of understated grandeur. While Kronos's sensitive performance in “Earth/Jupiter Kiss” is moving, the group's most powerful expression arises during the closing “One Earth, One People, One Love” when the plaintive cry of Yang's cello intensifies the impact of the lamentation.

December 2019