Kronos Quartet plays "Sun Rings'

Terry Riley's far-out meditation
(and David Stearns's unfortunate choice of words)

DAN COREN

So there we were, my wife and I and two other couples, at the Perelman Theater on the night of Thursday April 19th, about to hear the event we had planned for since last August, a performance by the Kronos Quartet. They were about to perform Sun Rings, a multimedia work composed within only the past five years by the 72-year-old Terry Riley, one of the seminal figures of the (oh so unfortunately named) Minimalist movement.

The six of us together, linked in various ways by friendships that go back decades, have logged almost a quarter of a millennium of concert-going, much of it in each others’ company. We have eclectic musical tastes, ranging from classical to jazz to rock to Spike Jones. We’ve invested thousands of dollars over the years in orchestra and chamber music subscriptions and various NPR memberships. Two of have us have sat together for more than 30 years while singing in the bass section of the Penn Choral Society. So I like to think that whatever musical consensus we might arrive at should carry some weight.

What’s the polar opposite of “a chip on one’s shoulder”? Whatever it is describes our collective attitude that evening. A chance to hear the Kronos! Who even cares what they’re playing? To put it mildly, we were all predisposed to enjoy ourselves.

Not what I anticipated

Sun Rings is a meditation on the Voyager space probes of the 1970s. It’s very much in the spirit of the days when Carl Sagan, the great humanist astrophysicist, enthralled (and wryly amused) us with his “billions and billions” of stars on public TV. I knew that the work would incorporate the sounds of radio signals from outer space, but that’s about all I knew. I had anticipated a calm, meditative piece with vast static blocks of murmurs from the void.

Instead, what we heard was a work in ten sections, many of them full of furious action, accompanied by non-stop visual projections, pops and beeps of transduced electrical signals, and, in two sections, the voices of the choral group Singing City.

Surrounded by all this imagery and noise— presiding over it— was the iconic image of the classical string quartet: four performers in black sitting in the customary arrangement, an image that inevitably brings to mind the purest music of the classical era. Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, going (at least by proxy) to Jupiter. The work went on for 90 minutes, ending at last on a long, lyrical plateau punctuated by the repeated words, “One world, one people … one love.”

Like kids at fireworks

In short, despite Riley’s enduring credentials as a musical radical (and what could be more radical, in the purest sense of the word, than his penchant for expressing deep space with simple diatonic melodies like the ones he gave to the wonderfully accomplished voices of Singing City?), Sun Rings is in the end an old-fashioned, nostalgic work. I guess if you were in the wrong mood (and given the events of the previous week at Virginia Tech, you might well have been) or, perhaps, the wrong age group, you might have found it to be insufferably sappy.

Not us. When the work ended, we all turned to each other like kids at a fireworks show with looks that said “Awww. Is it over already?!” And, from where we were seated in the balcony, it seemed evident to me that the great majority of the 500 or so other folks in the audience felt the same way. In fact, many stayed for the following Q. & A. session with the quartet and would have, it seemed, remained for hours asking intelligent, engaged questions had the Kronos not pleaded their need to get their rest before traveling on Friday.

One exchange from that session is worth repeating. Somebody asked if it were possible to do the work without a chorus. The quartet member who answered said no, the chorus was essential. But, he continued, they had done a recent performance in which the chorus, an unprepared college glee club, really hadn’t been up to the task. “But,” (I’m paraphrasing, of course) “they were so happy to be performing, and in the end, that’s what Terry hopes for: everybody involved, doing their best.”

‘Best forgotten'? By who?

There was, however, at least one dissenting voice. David Patrick Stearns of the Inquirer was having none of it. Although he did find some moments of beauty in Riley’s music, his verdict is that Sun Rings is “best forgotten.”

David, David, David … surely by now you regret that very unfortunate choice of words. Best forgotten? Why? By who? Do you really mean that it is in the interest of a few hundred people who seemed to have had a really good time to delete the experience from their memories? If you despised Sun Rings, that’s fine with me. But you’re a journalist. Didn’t you notice anyone else at the event you were reviewing?

In fact, the work’s musical content may indeed turn out to be largely forgettable in the long run. I’ll be interested to hear what it sounds like on its own when WRTI re-broadcasts the concert in a few months. (There is as yet no recording of the work, although after the concert a member of Kronos said they might release it as a DVD.) But having reached the age where I say things like, “Oh, what’s her name? You know…the actress who was in Sophie’s Choice,” I submit that no part of human experience— be it that horrible blind date when you were 15, the music of Frederic Delius, or even the Holocaust– is “best forgotten.” And, I assure you, this performance of Sun Rings and the idealism that inspired it is much better savored and remembered.



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