PROGRAM NOTE

Last modified 26 June 2024

FLiGHT (2012-2016)

String Quartet, A Montage of Texts Assembled by the Composer (pre-recorded and spatialized), centering on human aspirations for flight which span centuries and culture, Reconfigurable projection modules, Real-time Algorithmic sound processing, Multichannel sound distribution

by Roger Reynolds

The multi-media experience, FLiGHT, includes a four-movement string quartet commissioned by the JACK Quartet, computer processing and spatialization of sound (Paul Hembree), integrated projection of images on multiple surfaces (Ross Karre), and the reading of an assembled text (Reynolds) by a quartet of actors directed by Robert Castro.

        The project responds to the varieties of human experience with flight: gods, angels and demons, dreams, birds, kites, balloons, gliders, powered flight, and space exploration. It draws on stories and concepts including the mythic flight of Icarus, Plato on the soul, the Montgolfier brothers’ hot air balloons, the Wright brothers, Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart’s epic flights, and humanity’s voyaging beyond our planet.

        Wishing for and eventually achieving the ability to fly has been a central theme in humankind’s aspirations since the capacity to imagine first evolved in us. Flight was and continues to be, quite literally, the stuff of dreams. The FLiGHT project was a multi-staged, multi-year undertaking involving partnering with James Madison University, the National Gallery of Art, The Phillips Collection, University of Colorado - Boulder, University of California San Diego, and Park Avenue Armory in New York City.

        The overall concept aims to give each medial layer an interactive, performative character in imitation of and in tribute to the string quartet medium. So the text involves a four-voiced conversational phantasma. Successions of images are simultaneously
projected onto modularly reconfigurable surfaces so as to allow a counterpoint of visual
materials reflecting the musical and textual “conversations”.

        About the premiere performances of FLiGHT, Bruce Hodges wrote in Musical America, “At that initial moment of lift off on an airplane, as gravity temporarily becomes a memory, there’s a sensation of being suspended. That feeling … is what composer Roger Reynolds accomplishes in FLiGHT …”

        “Sound designer Paul Hembree managed to combine the myriad strands [of vocal and computer-processed sounds] into a cohesive whole, placing speakers around the darkened room to create a 360-degree marvel that completely engulfed the audience. …”

        “Most of the time, the unexpected juxtapositions of words, music, and visuals had a
dreamlike affect, the mind was pleasantly awash in free association. One 20-ish man said later, ‘It was more unexpected than I expected.’”

        FLiGHT was commissioned by JACK, with the assistance of the National Gallery of Art. Partners include the James Madison University Contemporary Music Festival at the Forbes Center, The Phillips Collection, Mount Tremper Arts, the University of California, the Dean of Arts and Humanities at UCSD, the Department of Music at UCSD, the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder, the Park Avenue Armory, the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, the San Diego Air and Space Museum, Caltech’s NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It is dedicated to the quartet, its original members as well as newer members. FLiGHT was premiered at the Park Avenue Armory in New York on October 30, 2016.

– Roger Reynolds