The latest Kronos Quartet has the path-breaking four string players collaborating again with another musician as well as keeping busy themselves bowing and playing various toy instruments and drums. Terry Riley – known for launching the minimalism movement with his In C of 1964 – has brought together his many influences for this new piece commissioned by the Quartet to celebrate the composer’s very own 70th birthday. As with much of Riley’s music, one will hear strains of North Indian raga, native American Indian music, minimlism, American blues, and a ritual sort of development and repetition that often makes his music as much a spiritual gesture as a concert work. The new element is the addition of the Chinese lute-like instrument, the pipa. played by Wu Man – with whom the quartet has collaborated before. Riley felt that its special timbre contrasted well with the string quartet and projected a sort of East/West mix that is his individual take on the sort of thing Yo-Yo Ma has been doing with his Silk Road Ensemble, as well as by others creating a new sort of world music.
The work’s title comes from astrology and has to do with the advent of the summer solstice, which celebrates the suspension of the ordinary daytime world in favor of a fantastic nighttime kingdom elucidated in works such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream. There’s also a connection to the native American all-night peyote ritual, in the use of a drum and rattle (here played by the quartet’s leader, David Harrington). Riley wanted to create a magical musical experience, and Harrington convinced him that using some of the ethnic instruments in the work that he had brought back for his children from world tours would do the trick. They are heard in the 3rd and 5th movements of the work. The final movement tries everything together in greeting the rising run at the end of the peyote ceremony. It uses flamenco harmonies and the rhythmic pulse of a Cuban montuno. The six sections of the work are as follows: 1) The Cusp of Magic, 2) Buddha’s Bedroom, 3) The Nursery, 4) Royal Wedding, 5) Emily and Alice, 6) Prayer Circle.
– John Sunier
