Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup metatuning Terry Riley review - Music of the stars, 'Celestial whistlers' turn a sound-video collaboration into an unearthly extravaganza.

I always been a big Terry Riley fan, I hope this gets released as
a DVD someday!

* David Beardsley
* http://biink.com
* http://mp3.com/davidbeardsley

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Music of the stars
'Celestial whistlers' turn a sound-video collaboration into an unearthly
extravaganza.

By Mark Swed, Times Staff Writer

Listen to the University of Iowa's space sounds

Iowa City, Iowa -- Donald Gurnett can't say exactly what it is
about the sound of whistlers that he loves, but he is more than
happy to try. In his office at the University of Iowa physics
department, he pulls a tape out of an old cardboard box and
pops open a Radio Shack cassette player from the early '70s.
But before pressing "play," he figures he'd better close the door
to the hall, or else "they'll all say, 'There goes Don Gurnett
listening to his whistlers again.' "

Finally, the tinny speaker spews out short sibilants that rise and
fall against a crackly background, not unlike the hiss of fireworks
before they explode. It's the sound produced by lightning disturbing
the plasma, the charged gas that makes up most of space outside
the Earth's atmosphere. A beatific smile lights up Gurnett's face.
"It's like the electrons get together and whistle," he says.

For 40 years, Gurnett has been recording whistlers and other
space sounds, and the very thought of them can send shivers
down your spine. Gathered by instruments he designs for NASA
spacecraft, they are the authentic music of the spheres.

As one of the leading authorities in plasma physics, Gurnett
is emphatic about the scientific value of these sounds. His
discovery of whistlers on Jupiter, for instance, was the first
indication that there was lightning someplace other than Earth.
But whistlers and similar phenomena are also musically engrossing,
as rich in complex overtones and as unusual as electronic music.
At their most alluring, they resemble cosmic speech whistled
through some great celestial mouth with starry gap teeth.
They are always changing; they always surprise you.

Gurnett's whistlers are no secret. The University of Iowa's
physics department puts sound clips of them on its Web site
for all to hear. And over the years, Gurnett has supplied tapes
to numerous composers who have requested them. But he can't
recall any of those composers' names, because none of them
ever called back. As far as he knows, whistlers never found their way into
music.

But now they have, and in a sensational form. Terry Riley's
"Sun Rings," a multimedia extravaganza for string quartet,
chorus, space sounds and video, was given its premiere at
Iowa's Hancher Auditorium two weeks ago. Written for the
Kronos Quartet and illustrated by new-media artist Willie
Williams, it is the music of the spheres and then some -- an
incomparable love letter to the stars and the planets, including our own.

NASA commission

"Sun Rings" appeared out of a series of chain reactions
between art and science. The big bang was a phone call --
NASA, in Washington, to Kronos, in San Francisco. The s
pace agency has a modest budget for art; since the early
1960s, it has offered commissions of about $2,500 to painters
ranging from Norman Rockwell to Robert Rauschenberg to
represent the drama of space flight.

But in the spring of 2000, Bertram Ulrich, the curator of the
NASA Art Program and a longtime fan of Kronos, decided
to reach, comparatively, for the stars. He offered the
quartet $20,000 to do something with space sounds,
and he sent along a tape, culled from Gurnett's collection.

"I knew right away the composer had to be Terry," says
David Harrington, the Kronos' first violinist. Riley, the quartet's
closest collaborator, is best known for his psychedelically r
epetitive "In C," and he's no stranger to imaginary space travel.
His first string quartet, written at Harrington's urging in 1980,
was called "Sunrise for the Planetary Dream Collector."

More alien than space sounds to Harrington and Riley,
however, was NASA itself. So they traveled to Cape
Canaveral to watch a shuttle launch and make sure that they
wouldn't unwittingly feed the military-industrial propaganda machine.

"The main reason we went to Florida was to find out what
they really do at NASA," Harrington explained late one
evening from Budapest, where Kronos was on tour last
month. "But of course, like a couple of kids, Terry and I
really wanted to go to the launch."

What they found were fellow seekers. "This quest for
knowledge and the desire to put people places where
we hadn't been before seemed like what I had been involved in
for many years," said Harrington, who has been the catalyst
for Kronos' many multicultural musical adventures. The
astronauts proved "very inspiring and strangely familiar."

Soon, the chain reactions began to seem inevitable. The
tape Ulrich sent to the musicians was unlabeled -- it provided
no clue that the whistlers had a connection to the University
of Iowa. But because the school had commissioned some
45 works from Kronos in the past 20 years, it was an obvious
source to approach for additional funding. Only after Iowa
had agreed to be a co-commissioner did the players and Riley
discover that the sounds were recorded by one of the leading
scientists on campus.

Upon learning about Gurnett, first Harrington, then Riley
headed to Iowa. After a day with the physicist, Harrington
said that for the first time in his life, he understood how the
universe operated.

"That night I called my wife and told her, 'I finally get it.' '
So, how does it work?' she asked. 'Well, uh, I knew a
couple of hours ago,' I said.

"When you are with him, he makes you feel as if outer
space is just around the corner."

"He's a brilliant guy," Riley confirmed, "and a lot like an artist.
He's very creative and his general vibe is very twinkly."

A common bond

Truth is, Terry Riley and Don Gurnett share that twinkly vibe.
They are, in the nicest sense of the term, a pair of space cadets.
At 68, both exude the kind of devotion to their work that
makes them cult figures in their fields. They even look their
respective parts, the unpretentious Midwestern physicist who
does not stand out in a crowd and the West Coast composer,
with shaved head and long, thin Mr. Natural beard, who does.

On the stage at Hancher before the "Sun Rings" premiere, they
made a great act. Gurnett brought along one of his favorites
from the cardboard box. He calls the tape "R2D2." It includes
the sounds of phenomena known as "dawn chorus," which was
recorded by one of the Voyager spacecraft off the surface of
Jupiter. The similarities to garbled android speech gave the crowd a
delighted start.

Riley, suffering from lingering bronchitis, was slightly more
subdued. But he noted that while composing he tried to put
himself out in space, an attempt both men have in common.

Forty years ago, as a student at Iowa, Gurnett heard his first
whistlers, and it changed his life. "This guy from the National
Bureau of Standards came out from Boulder, Colo., to give a
talk and play some recordings," Gurnett recalled last summer,
sitting in his office amid models and faded photographs of the
many spacecraft he has designed instruments for, going all
the way back to Explorer I in 1958. "I found it intriguing
and just decided, gee, maybe I should try to build a radio
receiver that could detect whistlers."

All it takes is a simple device, so Gurnett, who had been a
national champion model-airplane builder, assembled the
equipment and took it to his parents' farm outside Cedar Rapids.
"We turned out all the electricity and stuff, and we heard some
whistlers," he says with a look of complete satisfaction.

Around the same time, Riley, then a young composer and jazz
pianist in San Francisco, had his own profound extraterrestrial
experience. Just as he was struggling with the idea for "In C,"
he took peyote and spent a night under the stars.

"Suddenly I saw the geometry of the heavens," he insists, with
a note of awe still in his voice.

"Stars weren't randomly placed at all but rather revealed an
incredible order, a perfect symmetry like a mandala. It was
just so apparent it dumbfounded me, and I wondered why
I hadn't seen it before. And I haven't seen it since."

A short time later, he unleashed the pulse and patterns of
Minimalism, which would become one of the dominant musical styles of the
late 20th century.

An inner journey too

To get to Riley's home on the edge of the Tahoe National
Forest in Northern California, you drive through wilderness
for a half hour. The glass doors to his studio peer out into the
woods; a brilliantly illuminated night sky is available for the examining.

Riley began composing "Sun Rings" there in the summer of 2001,
and his first impression of listening to the tapes was one of dï¿½jï¿½ vu.
"You know so many of them sound like the music I was
composing for [dancer] Anna Halprin in the '50s and '60s," he explains.

But after about three weeks, he got distracted. "Once the terrorists
struck on 9/11," he says, "I knew that there would be a ferocious
outcry for vengeance, and I was very saddened by it. It seemed
like this piece had suddenly become superficial, just about NASA
and space and shooting up rockets."

A breakthrough came when Riley heard poet and novelist Alice
Walker on the radio talking about how she had made up a
Sept. 11 mantra -- "one Earth, one people, one love." It suddenly
occurred to him that contemplating outer space could be a
way to put the problems on Earth into perspective.

Riley also took unusual inspiration from the way everyone
claimed that God was on their side. "I thought about a prayer
central that would be like a big operating system up there
that funnels all the prayers from different people," he said.

"And that's what I have the chorus doing, they're all saying
fragments of prayers or ideas about love and peace, but
then they get quite jumbled and polyphonic, so you only
hear fragments of them coming out."

As Riley expanded what was originally to have been a
20-minute piece, Kronos decided that the work would
benefit from a visual component as well. The quartet's manager,
Janet Cowperthwaite, knew Willie Williams' video work for
U2 stadium shows and gave him a call. He was committed to
designing the $7-million video projections for the current
Rolling Stones "Licks" world tour, but he squeezed in
"Sun Rings." It so happens that he is an astronomy buff
and a onetime physics student, "before," as he says, "I
ran away to join the circus and got involved with rock 'n' roll."

NASA's $20,000 commission has ultimately turned into a
$300,000 project. Williams culled images from NASA's
archives to accompany Riley's 95-minute work, complete
with 60-voice chorus. To pay for it, Ulrich doubled NASA's
contribution, and Barbican Centre in London, the San
Francisco Jazz Festival and the Eclectic Orange Festival in
Orange County all signed on as well.

As its first notes sounded in late October, "Sun Rings"
transformed Hancher Auditorium into a postmodern planetarium.
Space sounds swirled in the air; galaxies carpeted the walls and
ceiling; and Riley's generous melodies flowed through Kronos'
four string instruments. The audience sat in spellbound
silence they way spectators do at a space launch.

The work's 10 movements were shot through with
digitized versions of Gurnett's whistlers, including ones
that the musicians could trigger. The score called for
devices like latter-day theremins to be placed on the
stage next to the music stands. When the players waved
their hands, random space sounds were released.

In the end, though, "Sun Rings" proved as much an inner
journey as a trip through outer space. As Riley peered
through his musical telescope, he also looked back at himself
and his career, and Williams always seemed to have an
unexpectedly appropriate illustration. In one movement,
"BeeBopterismo," Williams synchronizes projections of
Gurnett writing equations to a homage to Riley's jazz-pianist youth.

"Earth/Jupiter Kiss" is a planetary romance with a heavenly,
drawn-out melody accompanied by seductive shots of the planets.

In "Earth Whistlers," the chorus, out of sight in the pit, sings a
hybrid of Indian raga and Gregorian chant, through which the whistlers
majestically sail.

The last movement, "One Earth One People One Love,"
brought the work back home again in what may be the
most mystically enveloping music Riley has created during
a long career of writing mystically enveloping music. On the
screens behind the musicians, Williams flashed images of
Earth from the "golden disc" launched with the 1977 Voyager
spacecraft and addressed to anyone out there that Voyager,
now far past Pluto, might happen to run into.

Asked afterward what he liked best about "Sun Rings,"
Gurnett said, "All of it, everything." Asked what sun rings
are, he said, "You'll have to ask Terry."

They are a poetic conceit, Riley admitted. And that is just
fine with Gurnett.

"This is not supposed to be a science lecture," he said as
he turned to answer questions from the crowd gathering around.

* * *
Mark Swed is The Times' music critic.

Terry Riley review - Music of the stars, 'Celestial whistlers' turn a sound-video collaboration into an unearthly extravaganza.

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