Roger Reynolds FliGHT

	FLiGHT FLiGHT: An Introduction by Thomas May Program note for the New York premiere, 30-31 October 2016 “The natural function of the wing is to soar upwards and carry that which is heavy up to the place where dwells the race of gods,” observes Socrates in the Phaedrus, one of the greatest of Plato’s dialogues. “More than any other thing that pertains to the body [the wing] partakes of the nature of the divine.” FLiGHT as a dream, a metaphor, and — within a mere blip of the span of human history — a reality: this embodies a fundamental human aspiration that has inspired visionaries across the spectrum, from scientists and philosophers to poets, painters, and, of course, musicians. Conceived by the pioneering American composer Roger Reynolds, the project titled FLiGHT involves a multidimensional reflection on and engagement with this topic in the form of a full-length immersive artistic experience. FLiGHT, according to Reynolds “responds to the varieties of human experience with flight: gods, angels and demons, dreams, birds, kites, balloons, gliders, powered flight, and space exploration.” Completing its journey at the Park Avenue Armory, FLiGHT culminates in a performance event lasting about 80 minutes and synthesizing a wide span of performance components: an acoustical musical composition (a four-movement string quartet), other sound material, the interactive involvement of four actors voicing texts drawn from several millennia and several different cultures on the subject of flight, and a web of visual imagery that is projected onto 30 2 x 2 foot boxes that are reoriented by the quartet members as the performance develops. The quartet members also employ Foley sound devices during the media sections. The process of creation has lasted over three years. FLiGHT is an undertaking that in a sense updates the Gesamtkunstwerk for the hyper-technical 21^st century. At the core of FLiGHT is Reynolds’ collaboration with the JACK Quartet: a meeting of minds that brings together some of the most extraordinarily innovative musical thinkers from two distinct generations. That collaboration got off the ground several years ago, when Reynolds invited the ensemble to play new compositions by some of his students at the University of California Washington Center. The JACKs went on to perform his string quartet titled not forgotten (composed between 2007-2010) at the National Gallery of Art, and have also recorded the piece, to be released on Mode Records in 2020 (along with a performance of the string quartet music from FLiGHT). not forgotten is cast as a six-movement quartet, each of the movements of which pays homage to a specific composer (such as Toru Takemitsu or Elliott Carter) or a memorable locale (such as Giverny or Ryoanji); the final movement fuses these impulses into a synthesis titled “Now.” “We’ve known about Roger and his music since we were in school,” says John Pickford Richards, the JACK’s violist. In fact, violinist Christopher Otto studied at the University of California in San Diego, where Reynolds has long been a major presence and where he established the Center for Music Experiment and Related Research. “And we really hit it off working together as a group and have developed a family of sorts,” Richards adds, singling out the composer’s “inventiveness and imagination, along with his experience” as inspiring motivators. In working together on not forgotten, for example, Richards observes how he came to appreciate the unorthodox ways in which Reynolds conveys his musical thoughts. “A lot of times the music is in the score, and the art of notation says it all. Roger’s notation is steeped in Western history, but there is this whole other element of imagery and character to his work. I can’t imagine playing his music without actively working with him.” The collaborative process for FLiGHT went through its first extended phase starting the summer of 2014, when the JACKs began rehearsing the first acoustic movement to be completed from the string quartet composition that serves as the spine of FLiGHT. Since then, JACK has publically performed all four movements. The quartet is integral to the completed FLiGHT work. It should not be approached with the clichés of 19th-century program music in mind, as if the piece were merely interested in “illustration” through sound effects. Reynolds’s conception of FLiGHT — and of similarly ambitious projects — is far bolder and more original. A little background on Reynolds and his aesthetic context is helpful at this point. Born in Detroit in 1934, he commands a reputation as a bold explorer of what he likes to describe as the multilayered character of experience. For example, Reynolds’ works are known for engaging listeners with the spatial dimension of music and with a revelatory, complexly theatrical approach to text and voice. An excellent example can be found with george WASHINGTON, which has many parallels with the artistic parameters Reynolds has established for FLiGHT. At the beginning of its season in September 2013, the National Symphony Orchestra and Christoph Eschenbach gave the world premiere of george WASHINGTON, a work commissioned in conjunction with the recent opening of the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington. Collaborating with such colleagues as the intermedia artist Ross Karre and others, Reynolds designed george WASHINGTON as a continuous work in five interconnected sections that create a complex, nuanced portrait of the first president through an amalgam of musical score, narrators portraying Washington (in his own words) from three stages in his life, and continually morphing visuals projected onto three screens. The work dramatizes an ongoing and overlapping dialogue among different aspects of Washington’s personality over the course of his life, across time. Reynolds got a relatively late start on his career as a composer, having graduated with a degree in engineering physics and after working briefly in the missile industry in the 1950s. The choice to devote himself to music at a later stage, he recalls, gave Reynolds a unique perspective — one that prompted him to approach composition as “an encounter with life and its content that is shaped less by words and more by the direct experience of sound.” The scope of the composer’s catalogue indicates how that engagement has played out: his works range from instrumental compositions in the familiar formats of chamber and orchestral music to complex dramatic collaborations wedding elaborate technology with traditional art. (Whispers Out of Time, a work for string orchestra composed in response to a poem by John Ashbery, won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1989.) Reynolds first came to attention with his music-theater rendering of the Wallace Stevens poem The Emperor of Ice Cream (1961-62). He earned a following through his involvement with the avant-garde ONCE festivals and his experimentation with analog and digital electronic sound. Deeply influenced by a period living abroad in Europe and Japan (including residencies at IRCAM, the Paris-based center for musical research founded by Pierre Boulez), Reynolds had earlier created a North American predecessor, the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts. From his position as an influential teacher and researcher at the University of California, Reynolds has pursued a vast spectrum of interests spanning technology, sound as a spatially experienced phenomenon, literature, the visual arts, and mythology. All of these interests join together in his plan for FLiGHT. The whole project, as Reynolds summarizes it, “entails a text, montaged from historical sources, a multi-movement musical composition for string quartet, real-time computer sound transformation and spatialization, and the assemblage of an image-bank (drawings, paintings, sculptures, photos, and film clips) to be projected upon a constantly shifting array of box-like modules.” This concept again underscores Reynolds’ ongoing fascination with “experiential layering whereby differing dimensionality can be invoked, depending upon the particular occasion.” He furthermore envisioned that, in other contexts, elements of FLiGHT might be abstracted as independent performance pieces: the string quartet, for example, as a stand-alone acoustic composition, perhaps alone, or perhaps with “its movements framed and inflected by computer-derived sound, by readings, and by projections.” Regarding the sonic dimension of the piece not provided by the JACKs, Paul Hembree collaborates as the programmer and computer musician for FLiGHT. In all of its contexts, Reynolds conceives of FLiGHT overall as “a tribute to the string quartet medium.” He adds: “Everything in FLiGHT comes out of the quartet idea. The four JACK players are in a fluid conversation with each other all the time.” Hence the predominance of four across the work’s dimensions and architecture. Along with the four string quartet movements the larger framework comprises four sections: “IMAGINING,” “PREPARING,” “EXPERIENCING,” and “PERSPECTIVE.” Reynolds explains that “the first involves speculation and dreaming before the fact, the second, the pragmatics of attempts to achieve FLiGHT, the third, reports of those who actually experienced or observed FLiGHT in its different forms, and the last, reflections upon how FLiGHT alters what, and how we see, spanning fear and exaltation.” These in turn serve as the categories for four kinds of texts, which Reynolds clarifies as follows: “IMAGES (comprising brief vignettes), STATEMENTS (thoughtful, more compact pronouncements), DREAMS (particularly vivid and poetic descriptions), and STORIES (more extended, and personal descriptions).” Recorded by four actors who represent four aspects of humanity (youth, man, woman, and sage), these texts come from the treasury of world thought and literature and from path breaking aeronauts: Plato (as quoted above), the Bible, Qu Yuan, Ovid, Virgil, the Ramayana, the ancient Chinese “Nine Songs”, Shelley, Benjamin Franklin, the Wright Brothers, D. H. Lawrence, Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, and Ralph Ellison — among many others. Reynolds characterizes his unusual libretto as “an armaturearound which the various medial dimensions of the FLiGHT project will be wound (acoustic music, realtime computer sonic and visual manipulations, projected imagery and texts, dramatic readings, etc.).” In addition, the visual dimension will project onto multiple, shifting surfaces a repertoire of images “drawn from ancient times to the present and from varied cultures.” Ross Karre collaborates as videographer and projection designer. Reynolds points out that just as the JACKs and the four actors “respond to each other, pass ideas along to each other, sometimes speak at the same time” in their respective ensembles, “the same kind of thing happens with the imagery. It starts out with a singular thread and little by little develops into separate strands of images, from cave paintings to the Curiosity Mars lander.” FLiGHT is also an innovative project in terms of its genesis and development, which has unfolded through a series of “in-process presentations”. Among the workshops already completed, and that allow the public to explore FLiGHT, were presentations at James Madison University, The Phillips Collection, the National Gallery of Art, and the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder. As FLiGHT progresses, the venues — now including the Park Avenue Armory — will become a crucial part of the immersive experience as well. As Reynolds puts it: “This project needs and uses space — temporal space, physical space, mental space.” Thomas May writes about music and theater and blogs at memeteria.com

FLiGHT

FLiGHT: An Introduction by Thomas May
Program note for the New York premiere, 30-31 October 2016

“The natural function of the wing is to soar upwards and carry that which is heavy up to the place where dwells the race of gods,” observes Socrates in the Phaedrus, one of the greatest of Plato’s dialogues. “More than any other thing that pertains to the body [the wing] partakes of the nature of the divine.” FLiGHT as a dream, a metaphor, and — within a mere blip of the span of human history — a reality: this embodies a fundamental human aspiration that has inspired visionaries across the spectrum, from scientists and philosophers to poets, painters, and, of course, musicians.

Conceived by the pioneering American composer Roger Reynolds, the project titled FLiGHT involves a multidimensional reflection on and engagement with this topic in the form of a full-length immersive artistic experience. FLiGHT, according to Reynolds “responds to the varieties of human experience with flight: gods, angels and demons, dreams, birds, kites, balloons, gliders, powered flight, and space exploration.”

Completing its journey at the Park Avenue Armory, FLiGHT culminates in a performance event lasting about 80 minutes and synthesizing a wide span of performance components: an acoustical musical composition (a four-movement string quartet), other sound material, the interactive involvement of four actors voicing texts drawn from several millennia and several different cultures on the subject of flight, and a web of visual imagery that is projected onto 30 2 x 2 foot boxes that are reoriented by the quartet members as the performance develops. The quartet members also employ Foley sound devices during the media sections. The process of creation has lasted over three years. FLiGHT is an undertaking that in a sense updates the Gesamtkunstwerk for the hyper-technical 21^st century.

At the core of FLiGHT is Reynolds’ collaboration with the JACK Quartet: a meeting of minds that brings together some of the most extraordinarily innovative musical thinkers from two distinct generations. That collaboration got off the ground several years ago, when Reynolds invited the ensemble to play new compositions by some of his students at the University of California Washington Center. The JACKs went on to perform his string quartet titled not forgotten (composed between 2007-2010) at the National Gallery of Art, and have also recorded the piece, to be released on Mode Records in 2020 (along with a performance of the string quartet music from FLiGHT). not forgotten is cast as a six-movement quartet, each of the movements of which pays homage to a specific composer (such as Toru Takemitsu or Elliott Carter) or a memorable locale (such as Giverny or Ryoanji); the final movement fuses these impulses into a synthesis titled “Now.” “We’ve known about Roger and his music since we were in school,” says John Pickford Richards, the JACK’s violist. In fact, violinist Christopher Otto studied at the University of California in San Diego, where Reynolds has long been a major presence and where he established the Center for Music Experiment and Related Research. “And we really hit it off working together as a group and have developed a family of sorts,” Richards adds, singling out the composer’s “inventiveness and imagination, along with his experience” as inspiring motivators.

In working together on not forgotten, for example, Richards observes how he came to appreciate the unorthodox ways in which Reynolds conveys his musical thoughts. “A lot of times the music is in the score, and the art of notation says it all. Roger’s notation is steeped in Western history, but there is this whole other element of imagery and character to his work. I can’t imagine playing his music without actively working with him.”

The collaborative process for FLiGHT went through its first extended phase starting the summer of 2014, when the JACKs began rehearsing the first acoustic movement to be completed from the string quartet composition that serves as the spine of FLiGHT. Since then, JACK has publically performed all four movements. The quartet is integral to the completed FLiGHT work. It should not be approached with the clichés of 19th-century program music in mind, as if the piece were merely interested in “illustration” through sound effects. Reynolds’s conception of FLiGHT — and of similarly ambitious projects — is far bolder and more original.

A little background on Reynolds and his aesthetic context is helpful at this point. Born in Detroit in 1934, he commands a reputation as a bold explorer of what he likes to describe as the multilayered character of experience. For example, Reynolds’ works are known for engaging listeners with the spatial dimension of music and with a revelatory, complexly theatrical approach to text and voice. An excellent example can be found with george WASHINGTON, which has many parallels with the artistic parameters Reynolds has established for FLiGHT. At the beginning of its season in September 2013, the National Symphony Orchestra and Christoph Eschenbach gave the world premiere of george WASHINGTON, a work commissioned in conjunction with the recent opening of the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington.

Collaborating with such colleagues as the intermedia artist Ross Karre and others, Reynolds designed george WASHINGTON as a continuous work in five interconnected sections that create a complex, nuanced portrait of the first president through an amalgam of musical score, narrators portraying Washington (in his own words) from three stages in his life, and continually morphing visuals projected onto three screens. The work dramatizes an ongoing and overlapping dialogue among different aspects of Washington’s personality over the course of his life, across time.

Reynolds got a relatively late start on his career as a composer, having graduated with a degree in engineering physics and after working briefly in the missile industry in the 1950s. The choice to devote himself to music at a later stage, he recalls, gave Reynolds a unique perspective — one that prompted him to approach composition as “an encounter with life and its content that is shaped less by words and more by the direct experience of sound.”

The scope of the composer’s catalogue indicates how that engagement has played out: his works range from instrumental compositions in the familiar formats of chamber and orchestral music to complex dramatic collaborations wedding elaborate technology with traditional art. (Whispers Out of Time, a work for string orchestra composed in response to a poem by John Ashbery, won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1989.)

Reynolds first came to attention with his music-theater rendering of the Wallace Stevens poem The Emperor of Ice Cream (1961-62). He earned a following through his involvement with the avant-garde ONCE festivals and his experimentation with analog and digital electronic sound. Deeply influenced by a period living abroad in Europe and Japan (including residencies at IRCAM, the Paris-based center for musical research founded by Pierre Boulez), Reynolds had earlier created a North American predecessor, the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts.

From his position as an influential teacher and researcher at the University of California, Reynolds has pursued a vast spectrum of interests spanning technology, sound as a spatially experienced phenomenon, literature, the visual arts, and mythology. All of these interests join together in his plan for FLiGHT. The whole project, as Reynolds summarizes it, “entails a text, montaged from historical sources, a multi-movement musical composition for string quartet, real-time computer sound transformation and spatialization, and the assemblage of an image-bank (drawings, paintings, sculptures, photos, and film clips) to be projected upon a constantly shifting array of box-like modules.”

This concept again underscores Reynolds’ ongoing fascination with “experiential layering whereby differing dimensionality can be invoked, depending upon the particular occasion.” He furthermore envisioned that, in other contexts, elements of FLiGHT might be abstracted as independent performance pieces: the string quartet, for example, as a stand-alone acoustic composition, perhaps alone, or perhaps with “its movements framed and inflected by computer-derived sound, by readings, and by projections.” Regarding the sonic dimension of the piece not provided by the JACKs, Paul Hembree collaborates as the programmer and computer musician for FLiGHT.

In all of its contexts, Reynolds conceives of FLiGHT overall as “a tribute to the string quartet medium.” He adds: “Everything in FLiGHT comes out of the quartet idea. The four JACK players are in a fluid conversation with each other all the time.” Hence the predominance of four across the work’s dimensions and architecture. Along with the four string quartet movements the larger framework comprises four sections: “IMAGINING,” “PREPARING,” “EXPERIENCING,” and “PERSPECTIVE.” Reynolds explains that “the first involves speculation and dreaming before the fact, the second, the pragmatics of attempts to achieve FLiGHT, the third, reports of those who actually experienced or observed FLiGHT in its different forms, and the last, reflections upon how FLiGHT alters what, and how we see, spanning fear and exaltation.”

These in turn serve as the categories for four kinds of texts, which Reynolds clarifies as follows: “IMAGES (comprising brief vignettes), STATEMENTS (thoughtful, more compact pronouncements), DREAMS (particularly vivid and poetic descriptions), and STORIES (more extended, and personal descriptions).” Recorded by four actors who represent four aspects of humanity (youth, man, woman, and sage), these texts come from the treasury of world thought and literature and from path breaking aeronauts: Plato (as quoted above), the Bible, Qu Yuan, Ovid, Virgil, the Ramayana, the ancient Chinese “Nine Songs”, Shelley, Benjamin Franklin, the Wright Brothers, D. H. Lawrence, Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, and Ralph Ellison — among many others. Reynolds characterizes his unusual libretto as “an armaturearound which the various medial dimensions of the FLiGHT project will be wound (acoustic music, realtime computer sonic and visual manipulations, projected imagery and texts, dramatic readings, etc.).”

In addition, the visual dimension will project onto multiple, shifting surfaces a repertoire of images “drawn from ancient times to the present and from varied cultures.” Ross Karre collaborates as videographer and projection designer. Reynolds points out that just as the JACKs and the four actors “respond to each other, pass ideas along to each other, sometimes speak at the same time” in their respective ensembles, “the same kind of thing happens with the imagery. It starts out with a singular thread and little by little develops into separate strands of images, from cave paintings to the Curiosity Mars lander.”

FLiGHT is also an innovative project in terms of its genesis and development, which has unfolded through a series of “in-process presentations”. Among the workshops already completed, and that allow the public to explore FLiGHT, were presentations at James Madison University, The Phillips Collection, the National Gallery of Art, and the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder. As FLiGHT progresses, the venues — now including the Park Avenue Armory — will become a crucial part of the immersive experience as well. As Reynolds puts it: “This project needs and uses space — temporal space, physical space, mental space.”

Thomas May writes about music and theater and blogs at memeteria.com