Unlike chamber ensembles content to perform Beethoven, Brahms and Shostakovich, the Kronos Quartet has built an international career focusing on the new and different.
But even this adventuresome foursome had never ventured into what “Star Trek” fans like to call the final frontier until it became involved with Terry Riley’s “Sun Rings” – one of its most popular projects ever.
“I think of the members of Kronos as adventurers,” said David Harrington, the group’s founder and first violinist. “And certainly this piece has allowed us to explore and to adventure into realms that we had never even thought of before.”
Kronos will join Boulder’s Ars Nova Singers at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday for a performance of the 1 1/2-hour multimedia work, which incorporates a kaleidoscope of sights and sounds of outer space.
The event is a centerpiece of EcoArts, an 11-day multidisciplinary arts-and-science festival that continues through July 16 and incorporates more than 40 activities across Boulder and Denver.
Astronomy was the farthest thing from Harrington’s mind when out of the blue in June 2000 he received a call from the arts program director at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
The official wondered if the quartet might be interested in somehow incorporating into its performances sounds from space that had been collected by University of Iowa physicist Don Gurnett over a 40-year period as part of Voyager flights and other missions.
“I didn’t know there were any sounds that were recorded on the Voyager expedition, and I didn’t know there were any sounds of space, so I was very, very curious and asked that they send us a tape,” Harrington said.
NASA did just that, and the violinist soon found himself listening to sounds he had never heard – a variety of roars, whistles, chirps, pops and clicks.
“I’ve got a lot of recordings of insects and whales and seals – all kinds of unusual sounds that have been recorded from various aspects of nature, and all of a sudden I had another one in my collection,” Harrington said.
Listening to the space sounds, he immediately thought of Terry Riley, who has collaborated with the Kronos on an array of compositions.
The composer, who launched the minimalist movement with his “In C” in 1964, is fascinated with space and cosmology and leaped at the opportunity to take part in the project.
First, Harrington and he conducted research, attending the launch of a Voyager mission in September 2000 and meeting Gurnett. Composition actually did not begin until August 2001.
The process was temporarily derailed by the catastrophic events of Sept. 11, 2001, which motivated Riley to broaden the scope of the work and incoporate a recording of novelist Alice Walker chanting “One Earth, One People, One Love.”
Around the same time, Riley decided the work needed the participation of a choir, as well as some sort of visual component.
It so happened that Kronos’ managing director, Janet Cowperthwaite, had seen the work of visual designer Willie Williams as part of a U2 concert, and she recommended him for the project.
“What was incredible was the way that he made a very large space into an intimate setting,” Harrington said. “And if there was ever a piece that would need to bring a large space into a kind of an intimate form, it would be ‘Sun Rings.”‘
So Williams, who has also worked with David Bowie and R.E.M., became part of the team, creating an accompanying visual track of space images.
“Overwhelming as it was to be given the NASA archive as a starting point for a visual piece, it was clear to me that the performance environment for ‘Sun Rings’ had to be more than just a planetarium experience or a physics lecture,” Williams writes in program notes for the work.
Riley’s composition, which he finished in July 2002, consists of 10 distinct “spacescapes,” each written in such a way that allows for an interplay between the recorded space sounds and the live musical performance.
“For me, the music exists in this amazing web of sound that Terry has put together from elements from the NASA samples,” Harrington said. “The music that we play live is most frequently very thoughtful and beautiful and meditative, and it invites the listener to reflect on life and the fragility of what we all get to share here on the Earth.”
In October 2002, “Sun Rings” debuted at the University of Iowa, and Kronos has done about 20 performances since in such cities as London, Moscow and Dresden, with more scheduled for South Korea and Australia.
In each place, the work takes on a different quality, Harrington said, in large part because of the local flavor that the participating choir in each community brings to the performance.
“Recently we did it in Moscow, and, of course, we had never done it with a choir that was singing English with a Russian accent, plus they had never had done anything quite like this,” he said. “It was just amazing. The piece took on it a whole different feeling with the Russian choir.”
“Sun Rings” is the biggest project that Kronos has ever tackled and one of its most successful, drawing even more varied audiences than those that usually attend the group’s eclectic concerts.
“A lot of times I think this piece is bringing us a new audience,” Harrington said. “It attracts a very youthful audience, and people bring their families, which I think is great.”
Fine arts critic Kyle MacMillan can be reached at 303-820-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com.
“Sun Rings”
MUSIC FESTIVAL | Colorado Music Festival and EcoArts, Terry Riley’s “Sun Rings” with Kronos Quartet and Ars Nova Singers | Chautauqua Auditorium, 900 Baseline Road, Boulder; 7:30 p.m. Tuesday | $12-$38 | 303-440-7666, or
