MUSIC: Sunrings, Kronos Quartet-The Astronomical Sublime

Tonight, I see the full moon, so bright it's visible in the blue sky even before twilight,  rising in the soft blue sky of a greening California spring.  Yesterday, new photography revealed that the universe is 13.7 billion years old - give or take a few billion, I suppose.  

The Voyager missions in the 1970's, space probes and journeys never before made by human kind, were magnificent resets of my perceptions of what is possible.  It's poignant that human feet have not walked upon the surface of the moon again for many years, even though we could.  It's as if we frightened ourselves profoundly and dare not tread again.

What's interesting to me about space photography is that it represents the real thing in a unique way for us - we will never see "the real thing" the way the sophisticated cameras are able to, never see the real thing at all.  A photograph mostly represents  a real-life object that's been seen or that we can see ourselves on this earth in our lifespan.  But not these space photographs.  They become real to us in a perceptual sense that other photographs do not.  For me, this pushes visual truth into further ambiguity, adds a distancing orbit to my relation to what's real, present, and truthful.

NASA commissioned music to commemorate these space events, based on the images from the satellites and capsules, and the sounds recorded from radio waves listened to as scientists sought to comprehend the magnitude of space and our place in it.

Terry Riley, a musician-composer bridge between Indian and Western sound, made this orchestration and the Kronos Quartet, the most revered  performers of avant-garde music, performed it last night at Cal State Long Beach in Carpenter Hall.

It's depressing to go to Carpenter Hall - it honors the sweet brother-sister singing group The Carpenters,  whose syrupy tunes purveyed a 70's hippie innocence combined with moral rectitude.  But Karen Carpenter died of anorexia, unable to make a life for herself apart from her brother - her story makes me queasy.  A woman who could not live a real woman's  life, effacing her body and denying its needs and denying her soul a vessel for human sentience.

Sunrings is about the cosmos and the experience of our minute place within the timeless grandeur of the space-time continuum.  The photos are awe-inspiring and sometimes frightening, mesmerizing me with their swirling fans of flares and gases emitted from orifices of stars and planets, or dense pulsing clouds that seem to be body cavities viewed during intimacy or surgery, raising and lowering as the body energy of blood pressure and breath so move within them.  

This is not New Age soporific stuff - it clashes, becomes dis-harmony, returns to an energy lull, finds moments of melodic beauty, then back to joyous radiating chaos.  The conclusion - Alice Walker chanting, "One world, one people", with very underwhelming daily-life photos, still lingers, however.

I enjoyed seeing this work a great deal; I have always wanted to hear the Kronos Quartet.  However,  this particular piece, despite conveying a sense of wonder, is very PC, like an upscale advertorial for NASA.  I suspect that an IMAX theater probably has more compelling images of nebulae, The Milky Way, star collisions, etc. than were used in Sunrings.

I had imagined wallpaper-type nebulae of fantastic glowing forms like google image charts - these images don't quite get there, although they are compelling.

The piece has been reviewed as "lite" by more than one critic, surely a death-smooch.  Nonetheless, the dream of one world, one love, does not release easy.  I would never want it to.