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PROGRAM NOTE back to Program Notes Last modified 6 November 2020 FLiGHT for string quartet (2012-2016) by Roger Reynolds
There are various sorts of prompts that can start a creative project in a composer’s mind. Some are singular and arise unexpectedly, without an apparent parent. Others, as is the case with FLiGHT, arise out of an intersection of factors. I not infrequently muse about humankind, its doldrums and debacles, but also, of course, its dreams and aspirations. (In fact, I have written a violin concerto for Irvine Arditti titled Aspiration.) Encountering JACK was immediately stimulating – what they do as an ensemble, their verve and daring and principled ways – but also the intriguing assemblage of individual personalities and capacities its four members manifest. We first worked together in Washington, in and near the National Gallery of Art where they performed my not forgotten. Subsequently, they arranged for me to join them in a residency at the University of Iowa. During that week, we enjoyed each other’s company and the notion of a collaboration drifted into late night conversations. The idea of merging aspiration, JACK and flight came into focus spontaneously and immediately felt right. Partially in tribute to the history of the medium, the number four played an important part in my preliminary thinking about the music that I would write. Four movements? Of course: IMAGINING, PREPARING, EXPERIENCING, and the outcome of those stages, PERSPECTIVE. These subjects or stages occurred to me as I prepared a text for the larger intermedia work in which the quartet movements were to be embedded. Sometimes individual words emerged to characterize and influence a sub-section – WINGS, DREAMS, SLAM, AWE, ECCENTRIC, SCISSORS, OPPORTUNITY. I should be clear that the sub-text for the string quartet, while influential, is not somehow “illustrated” by the music. It is rather that, as I thought about the intersection of factors within which I was working, the music would come as indebted to an idea, a poetic phrase, a phenomenon. In this way I proceeded, writing individual movements over a year and a half. The movements are of differing length and character: the first more restless and marking out territory to be visited later, the second a scherzo with a manic undercurrent, the third investing at its component ideas over longer time spans. In the concluding movement, I realized that the achievement of rising into the air has changed the way we see and value not only our earth but other members of our planetary system. I decided to write a distinctive solo for each of the quartet’s members and to ask them to invest in the performance of their individualized worlds, to be self-engaged in a fashion that normal quartet playing could not tolerate. So PERSPECTIVE is a simultaneity of independent musical lines or arguments that are indebted to the music of the preceding three movements. There are occasional intersections and reinforcements between the lines. But the individual members of the ensemble have, metaphorically, risen into the air of their own worlds. 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. |
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