Roger Reynolds george Washington

	george WASHINGTON The Making of george WASHINGTON Orchestra, 3 Narrators, Video projection, Real-time sound processing and spatialization by Roger Reynolds During a period of six years in the 2000s, I was resident at the University of California’s Washington Center for three months a year. It developed that a senior staff person there, Rodger Rak, had a relationship with the Director of the Mount Vernon Estate in nearby Virginia. Rodger arranged a luncheon meeting with the Director and his staff. He expressed a desire to have a musical composition created to honor the opening of a proposed Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington in the Fall of 2013. I indicated that I would welcome such an engagement, but that I did not want such a work to be performed only once as an “occasion piece”, and that I would also need to find a text consisting of Washington’s own words. Further exploration resulted in agreement from the National Symphony Orchestra’s Music Director, Christophe Eschenbach, that his orchestra would collaborate with Mount Vernon and the University of California, to fund a multimedia work that would open the Orchestra’s 2013 season at the Kennedy Center. I read a number of Washington biographies and developed a working relationship with Mount Vernon’s lead archivist, Mary Thompson. Although Washington’s public pronouncements struck me as peculiarly Germanic and wooden, his personal letters and diaries revealed a deeply sensitive man who evolved strikingly over the period between his teenage years as a surveyor in the Ohio Country and his retirement after relinquishing his Presidential powers. Taking into account the complexity of Washington’s life – the various roles he played and his constantly shifting residences between Mount Vernon, Philadelphia, New York, and so on – a chronological portrayal was clearly impractical. I settled on three periods and two interludes: Origins, Martha, Engagement, Lafayette, and Reflections. Three narrators were required: a youthful Washington, another in middle age, and a third elderly voice. My assembled text allowed for the different Washingtons to interact with one another such that youth could speak to age, and age consul the man in mid-life. I wanted the impact of the eventual work to provide a listener-viewer with a sense of what was going on in Washington’s mind during the formative years of the American Nation. Working with videographer Ross Karre, video-recordings were made from different venues on the Mount Vernon estate from sunrise to sunset, at all four seasons of the year. This allowed the visual dimensions of the work to move smoothly from one to another image content as the narrative line presented by the narrators evolved though the seasons of his years. The five textual sections necessitated not only appropriate orchestral music to evoke and respond to the narrative content and a particular aspect of Washington’s life, they also incorporated so-called Foley sounds that had been recorded on the estate and, in some cases, digitally manipulated by another collaborator, computer musician Jaime Oliver. These included birds, animals, a gristmill, marching feet, and rustling leaves.

george WASHINGTON

The Making of george WASHINGTON

Orchestra, 3 Narrators, Video projection,
Real-time sound processing and spatialization
by Roger Reynolds

During a period of six years in the 2000s, I was resident at the University of California’s Washington Center for three months a year. It developed that a senior staff person there, Rodger Rak, had a relationship with the Director of the Mount Vernon Estate in nearby Virginia. Rodger arranged a luncheon meeting with the Director and his staff. He expressed a desire to have a musical composition created to honor the opening of a proposed Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington in the Fall of 2013. I indicated that I would welcome such an engagement, but that I did not want such a work to be performed only once as an “occasion piece”, and that I would also need to find a text consisting of Washington’s own words.

Further exploration resulted in agreement from the National Symphony Orchestra’s Music Director, Christophe Eschenbach, that his orchestra would collaborate with Mount Vernon and the University of California, to fund a multimedia work that would open the Orchestra’s 2013 season at the Kennedy Center. I read a number of Washington biographies and developed a working relationship with Mount Vernon’s lead archivist, Mary Thompson. Although Washington’s public pronouncements struck me as peculiarly Germanic and wooden, his personal letters and diaries revealed a deeply sensitive man who evolved strikingly over the period between his teenage years as a surveyor in the Ohio Country and his retirement after relinquishing his Presidential powers.

Taking into account the complexity of Washington’s life – the various roles he played and his constantly shifting residences between Mount Vernon, Philadelphia, New York, and so on – a chronological portrayal was clearly impractical. I settled on three periods and two interludes: Origins, Martha, Engagement, Lafayette, and Reflections. Three narrators were required: a youthful Washington, another in middle age, and a third elderly voice. My assembled text allowed for the different Washingtons to interact with one another such that youth could speak to age, and age consul the man in mid-life.

I wanted the impact of the eventual work to provide a listener-viewer with a sense of what was going on in Washington’s mind during the formative years of the American Nation. Working with videographer Ross Karre, video-recordings were made from different venues on the Mount Vernon estate from sunrise to sunset, at all four seasons of the year. This allowed the visual dimensions of the work to move smoothly from one to another image content as the narrative line presented by the narrators evolved though the seasons of his years.

The five textual sections necessitated not only appropriate orchestral music to evoke and respond to the narrative content and a particular aspect of Washington’s life, they also incorporated so-called Foley sounds that had been recorded on the estate and, in some cases, digitally manipulated by another collaborator, computer musician Jaime Oliver. These included birds, animals, a gristmill, marching feet, and rustling leaves.

	The compositional task required a very complex “score document” that coordinated narrative text, appropriate imagery, musical materials, and digitally processed sound in ways that allowed the various collaborators to be, quite literally, “on the same page”. My task was not only to compose meaningful music, but to allow it to reference the 18^th century and to envelope in meaningful ways the voices of the narrators, which must always remain clearly understandable to listeners. I decided to seek a period tune that might actually have been played by Washington’s niece on the estate. The entire work begins with a digital recording of such a period work that meanders spatially around the hall. It is gradually stretched out in time so as to seemingly evaporate into the orchestral sound that continues with an exploration of the melodic structure of this opening seed. The development of the materials for george WASHINGTON was done in the Experimental Theater of UC San Diego’s Conrad Prebys Music Center. Senior Recording Engineer Josef Kucera had captured impulse responses in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall, and was able to recreated at UC San Diego, acoustics nearly identical to those of the Kennedy Center Concert Hall. Nevertheless, the logistical demands of finding appropriate narrating voices, rehearsing and recording them, gathering visual imagery and shaping it into a triptych structure (in imitation of Mount Vernon Cupola’s grid-like windows), as well as coordinating the simulated orchestral sounds, narrator’s voices, Foley sounds, and projected imagery – in order to insure the optimal alignments in time – was an immensely demanding process. I worried about the final stages when the entire work was to be assembled and rehearsed in Washington. But it developed that NSO’s Artistic Coordinator, Nigel Boone, was intensely engaged, and helped to almost immediately find a solution to each of the logistical issues that emerged as we brought everything together. The entire back of the stage was outfitted with three modular walls of digital display screens so as to embrace the large orchestra required. The installation, alignment, tuning of the visual materials as well as the balancing of the 8-channel computer music materials in the hall was demanding but efficiently managed. In rehearsals, I was impressed not only by the orchestral musician’s cooperative spirit in fulfilling an experience that was, for them, completely unprecedented, but also by the command that conductor Eschenbach had over not only the orchestral materials but their intricate interweavings with the narrators. What could have been a frustrating and disruptive process was managed with elegant efficiency.

Theater — Paul Hembree, Roger Reynolds, and Ross Karre working on Karre's video

The morning of the premiere, the Kennedy Center hosted several hundred school children of different ages, and we collaborators gave a presentation for them in an amphitheater on the Kennedy Center’s top floor. At the end of our presentation, the children were asked to form two lines at opposite sides of the auditorium if they had questions. To our great surprise, virtually the entire audience got in line at one or the other side. Their infectious enthusiasm and high level of curiosity itself provided a rewarding level of satisfaction for all of the collaborators. Happily, the premiere performances that evening and two subsequent evenings were also deeply rewarding.

– Roger Reynolds