Terry Riley: Sun Rings (Kronos Quartet)

The Kronos Quartet plays the sound of the universe Terry Riley's Sun Rings in first complete recording That NASA would contact the agent of a classical string quartet might seem unlikely. And that this would involve a creative musical proposal is even more unlikely. But that's exactly what happened around the year 2000: the 25th anniversary of the launch of the Voyager space probe was approaching, and the NASA Arts program had come up with the idea of making a musical work out of the "space sounds" sent back to Earth by the probe. The Kronos Quartet, which has been working with American composer and legendary minimalist pioneer Terry Riley for two decades, quickly set the course for what is now a legendary piece of "space music," now released in its first complete recording: Sun Rings for string quartet, choir, and pre-recorded space sounds. Work on the piece began as an aural adventure: "I gradually began to hear what might be hidden deep within these raw, grainy sounds," Riley says. Ideas about content gradually developed for him, "In some movements of the work, I imagined the quartet symbolically traveling through space, through the atmospheres of our solar system, representing a space probe. In some cases, melodic fragments I heard from the sounds became starting points for musical themes." The choral voices underscore the human aspect of these "soundscapes," as Riley calls the ten movements. "Space in my work is also the realm of human dreams, which it has always been for poets and musicians." A sounding universe, after all, was already imagined by the ancient philosophers ..