Ravinia 2024 Issue 1

premiere at the 150th Anniversary season of the Serbian National Theater in Novi Sad. As a Serbian expat, Vrebalov is the recipient of the Golden Emblem from the Serbian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for lifelong dedication and contribution to her native country’s culture. About Gold Came From Space , Aleksandra Vre- balov writes: Gold Came From Space —a meditation on the beauty and purity of soul incorruptible by earth- ly dealings and on the nobleness of work guided by love and truth—is a singular journey driven by curiosity, passions, memories, and explora- tion of my deep creative connection to Kronos Quartet and our place as creators who together crossed over from the 20th into the 21st century. The dramatic narrative of the piece is abstract and distorted with islands of harmonic and me- lodic grounding. The piece unfolds through the juxtaposition of contrasting, extreme qualities of musical parameters: rhythm is amorphous and driven, harmony emerges from and dis- solves into noise, the texture vacillates between sparse and dense, and fragmented circular pat- terns—timestoppers—propel into linear cohe- sion. The overall structure follows 17 harmon- ics descending towards the mothertone, and 17 turns of the spiral in the Fibonnaci sequence spiraling down to 1. The piece, much like nature, follows the contours of these phenomena, but it never conforms to their theoretical precision. Sporadic references to a chord, a pattern, or a line from The Sea Ranch Songs, Beyond Zero 1914–1918, and ilektrikés rhimés do not sound like quotes; they form the fabric of a new context, celebrating where we—Kronos and I—have mu- sically come from over 25 years of collaboration. Gold Came From Space is a space of gathering of old friends, an imaginary session of philoso- phers and alchemists, a picture a little diffused and out of focus whose image slowly gets re- vealed as the eye adjusts. My purpose—to create beauty, and to create it with others, for ourselves, and for others, for the world to be more loving and wonder-full, has been fulfilled many times with Kronos, as well as with The Friends of Kronos at The Sea Ranch who commissioned this work. I am immensely grateful for it. Aleksandra Vrebalov’s Gold Came From Space was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by The Friends of Kronos at The Sea Ranch, as part of the KRONOS Five Decades Project, which celebrates the quartet’s 50th anniversary. SUN RA (1914–93), TERRY RILEY (b.1935) & SARA MIYAMOTO (b.1989) Kiss Yo’ Ass Goodbye Arranged by Paul Wiancko (b. 1983) Sun Ra was one of the most unusual musicians in the history of jazz, moving from Fletcher Henderson swing to free jazz with ease, some- times in the same song. Portraying himself as a product of outer space, he “traveled the space- ways” with a colorful troupe of musicians, using a multitude of percussion and unusual instru- mentation, from tree drum to celeste. Sun Ra, who enjoyed cloaking his origins and development in mystery, is known to have stud- ied piano early on with Lula Randolph in Wash- ington, DC. His first noted professional job was during 1946–47 as pianist with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra at the Club DeLisa on the South Side of Chicago. In addition to playing pi- ano in the band, he also served as one of the staff arrangers. Finding his calling as an arranger, he put together a band to play his compositions. In the 1950s, he began issuing recordings of his un- usual music on his Saturn label, becoming one of the first jazz musicians to record and sell his own albums. Sun Ra’s band became a central part of the early avant-garde jazz movement in Chicago, being one of the first jazz bands to em- ploy electronic instruments. In 1960, he moved his band to New York, where he established a communal home for his musicians, known as the Sun Palace, and by 1970s, the Sun Ra Arkes- tra and its various permutations began touring Europe extensively. An outsider who linked the African American experience with ancient Egyptian mythology and outer space, Sun Ra was years ahead of all other avant-garde musicians in his experimen- tation with sound and instruments, a pioneer in group improvisations and the use of electric instruments in jazz. Since Sun Ra’s death, the Arkestra has continued to perform under the direction of Allen. Terry Riley first came to prominence in 1964 when, with the groundbreaking In C , he sub- verted the world of tightly organized atonal Sun Ra composition then in fashion and pioneered the musical aesthetic known as minimalism. Fol- lowing In C , he quit formal composition in or- der to concentrate on improvisation, and devot- ed himself to studying North Indian vocal techniques under the legendary Pandit Pran Nath. In 1979, Riley began notating music again when both he and Kronos were on the faculty at Mills College in Oakland. This four-decade-long relationship has yielded dozens of works for string quartet, including a concerto for string quartet, The Sands , which was the Salzburg Fes- tival’s first-ever new music commission; Sun Rings , a NASA-commissioned piece for choir, visuals, and space sounds, the recording for which won the 2020 Grammy for Best Engi- neered Album, Classical; and The Cusp of Magic , for string quartet and pipa. Kronos’s album Ca- denza on the Night Plain , a collection of music by Riley, was selected by both Time and News- week as one of the 10 Best Classical Albums of the Year in 1988. The epic five-quartet cycle, Sa- lome Dances for Peace , was selected as the Clas- sical Album of the Year by USA Today and was nominated for a Grammy in 1989. Sara Miyamoto is an improviser, composer, multi-instrumentalist, and graphic artist orig- inally from Yamanashi, Japan. A graduate of JOSHIBI University of Art and Design, Depart- ment of Media Art, Miyamoto was able to hone her musical skills under the guidance of the pro- fessional musicians who recorded in her father’s recording studio. After recording as a backup singer for Japanese singer-songwriter Tomofu- mi Tanizawa, she would go on to join Tanizawa’s band Space Like Carnival on vocals and electric bass. Since then, she has performed as part of her own mood punk band AWAW and has been commissioned to compose for radio dramas, films, and Peck and Pluck for the Prague group Fluxus and Neoflux’s Stolen Symphony. She has performed frequently with Terry Riley in Mex- ico, the US, and Japan, including a concert with Joe Hisaishi’s Music Future Band. Miyamoto has been a disciple of the Kirana School of Indian Classical vocal music since 2019 and co-directs KIRANA EAST classes in Kamakura. Sara Miyamoto and Terry Riley RAVINIAMAGAZINE • JUNE 7 – JUNE 30, 2024 66