Digital Booklet - The Cusp of Magic

KRONOS QUARTET
and WU MAN
TERRY RILEY
The Cusp of Magic
Terry Riley (b. 1935)
The Cusp of Magic (2004) 42:48
I. The Cusp of Magic 10:04
II. Buddha’s Bedroom 10:33
III. The Nursery 5:10
IV. Royal Wedding 6:14
V. Emily and Alice 4:09
VI. Prayer Circle 6:41
Kronos Quartet
David Harrington, violin, bass drum, peyote rattle, toys
John Sherba, violin, toys
Hank Dutt, viola, toys
Jeffrey Zeigler, cello, toys
Wu Man, pipa, toys
Bonus Track
Ram Narayan (b. 1927)
Arranged by Kronos Quartet, Transcribed by Ljova
Alap from Raga Mishra Bhairavi (c. 1989)
Kronos Quartet
David Harrington, shruti box
John Sherba, tambura
Hank Dutt, solo viola
Jeffrey Zeigler, cello
Terry Riley, tambura
Wu Man, electric sitar
The Kronos Quartet’s arrangement of Raga Mishra
Bhairavi by Ram Narayan was commissioned for
Kronos by Deborah and Craig Hoyt in memory of
Raymond Frase.
9:01
June 24th: The Day of the Blissful Wizard
Usually the more highly evolved individuals born on this day are attracted to
spiritual pursuits which they see as manifesting Divine Love. Those on their
path to this ultimate goal cultivate kindness, awareness, sensitivity, psychic
abilities, religious fervor, and respect for all living things.
—Gary Goldschneider and Joost Elffers, The Secret Language of Birthdays
“Blissful Wizard” is an apt epithet for Terry Riley (b. June 24th, 1935), a
sorcerer renowned for transmuting components of blues, North Indian
raga, Native American music, repetitive gestures, and a host of other
musical traditions into a quicksilver amalgam of ever-changing shape.
When commissioned by the Kronos Quartet to write a work celebrating
the composer’s own seventieth birthday, both Riley and Kronos decided
to add a pipa to the mix. For more than a year, pipa virtuoso and frequent
Kronos collaborator Wu Man shared with Riley her knowledge of the
techniques and repertoire of this ancient, lute-like instrument from
China. With these new sounds in his ear, Riley once again confronted his
musical omnivore’s dilemma: “In this work, the different timbre and
resonance of the pipa and the Western string quartet highlight the
boundary regions of cultural reference, so that the Western musical
themes might be projected with an Eastern accent and vice-versa. My
plan was to make these regions seamless so that the listener is carried
between worlds without an awareness of how he/she ends up there.”
But Riley’s magicianship extends beyond these acts of musical
teleportation. Not merely a composer who seeks to astonish and please the
ear, Riley might be described as a type of musical shaman, whose works
embrace the consecrations, transformations, and renewals of religious
ritual. Of his two-hour string quartet Salome Dances for Peace, Riley has
said, “It would not just be a concert piece but a piece that could be played
as a rite.” This theurgic impulse, the desire to map ordered spiritual
experience onto the contours of musical performance, appears throughout
Riley’s career, from his countless all-night musical performances to the
rites of initiation and redemption in Salome Dances for Peace and the ritual
of mourning in his string quartet Requiem for Adam.
The Cusp of Magic is a rite of midsummer. It is an astrological term devised
by author and musician Gary Goldschneider (to whom Riley dedicated this
quintet) to describe the transition from Gemini to Cancer. “The Cusp of
Magic” derives its name from the advent of the summer solstice, since
ancient times the linchpin of the entire zodiacal calendar. The summer
solstice traditionally celebrates the suspension of the prosaic, daytime
world in favor of a fantastical, often anarchic, nighttime kingdom (see
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Wagner’s Die Meistersinger
von Nürnberg)—a revel without a cause, to use Erich Segal’s happy phrase.
Riley brings about this transition from the mundane to the magical by
juggling different spheres of supernatural experience. The outer
movements of the quintet, “The Cusp of Magic” and “Prayer Circle,” are
anchored in Native American peyote rituals—all-night ceremonies
where participants gather around a fire, sing songs, murmur, pray, and
ingest sacred peyote until dawn breaks. The rite permits access to the
unreal, bestows epiphanies, and heals wounded spirits and broken
bodies. It is Good Medicine.
The indispensable instrumental accompaniments to the songs of the
peyote ritual are a drum and rattle specially hallowed for the purpose.
These instruments (played by violinist David Harrington) provide the
rhythmic framework for the first movement of Riley’s quintet. Riley’s
meters, like those of Native American song, are irregular. In this
movement he crafts them so that they smoothly expand and contract,
focusing and dissipating the listener’s attention in an unobtrusive,
almost subliminal fashion. Rhythmic absentmindedness and hyperawareness alternate with hypnotic regularity.
The sacral mood is also established with a halo of synthesizer, whose
electric, otherworldly sounds form eerie harmonic backlighting for the
composition’s numinous opening. This “music of the spheres” contrasts
with the raw, physical sounds of the string quartet and pipa. The division
thus established between this world and another, between terrestrial and
terrestrial and disembodied sounds, is overcome at the movement’s
climax: as in a peyotist’s vision, the violin, played by John Sherba, leaps
into the electric stratosphere in reverberant, grunge ecstasy.
The substance of the peyote ritual lies in singing, where individual
members of the circle perform songs of their choosing, always in groups
of four. And indeed, a song lies at the heart of each of the four internal
movements of The Cusp of Magic. For “Buddha’s Bedroom” and “The
Nursery,” Riley invited Wu Man to write lullabies such as she might sing
to her own son, Vincent. “Since I am a musician, always away from
home,” she writes, “life is hard for Vincent and me. So in the lullaby I
said, ‘Mama’s back home, my sweet baby, please go to sleep...’” Riley
himself provided a lullaby for “The Nursery,” bidding his “little clown” to
“Rest your head and don’t you fret,/ The best times for you are coming
yet.”
The opening of the fourth movement, “Royal Wedding,” features a song
of Riley’s own composition. Written to celebrate the union of Michael
and Marina Harrison, Riley’s song takes the form of a North Indian
gat—a short, 16-beat composition which is repeated, varied, improvised
upon, and periodically returned to. In keeping with the nocturnal
character of the previous movements and of the peyote ritual as a whole,
even the exuberance of this fairy-tale marriage fades out into a distant
echo of the nervous rhythms that underlie the opening.
carrying my infant granddaughter and playing her the musical toys I’ve
collected from various tours. He decided that these sounds should be in
this piece, and came over to the house during Emily’s nap. Terry and I
had fun playing with Emily’s toys and some of Alice’s toys as well, which
were borrowed for the occasion, and sampled the sounds. From that
Terry created the palette of colors that eventually entered the third and
the fifth movements of The Cusp of Magic.”
The song for the harrowing fifth movement, “Emily and Alice” (named
after Harrington’s granddaughter and the daughter of Kronos’ manager
Janet Cowperthwaite), comes from the children’s extensive collection of
musical toys from around the world, amassed through Kronos’ travels.
“Terry called me and said that he wanted to create a magical experience
for Kronos and our listeners,” said Harrington, “and that’s when I said
to him that one of the most amazing experiences I’ve ever had was
The toys cast their own distinctive spell on this quintet. For children,
toys are benevolent household gods, conduits to a magical world.
Through the child’s imagination, the inanimate is miraculously brought
to life: think of Clara’s Nutcracker (heard in this movement) or Ravel’s
L’enfant et les sortilèges. As the Skin Horse explains to the Velveteen
Rabbit, “When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play
with but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.” The music and
laughter that emanate mysteriously from these toys are emblems of their
enchantment.
The tune heard in “Emily and Alice” is the theme song of the Russian
cartoon character Cheburashka, an adorable creature resembling a cross
between a monkey and a bear, with great, moon-shaped ears.
Cheburashka proclaims: “I was once a strange toy without a name; in
the shop no one would come near me. Now I am Cheburashka and every
mongrel offers me its paw when we meet.” Toward the end of the
movement, the voice is subjected to disturbing, hallucinatory, electronic
distortions. For Riley, this ominous vision arose almost against his will:
“After I had finished these two movements, I realized that, although they
deal with happy and joyous surroundings, they both end in a somewhat
dark atmosphere. I feel this relates to the reality of our present times,
which are so threatened by the war-posturing of my nation, looming like
a dark cloud over our young.”
After a somber night of song and prayer, the peyote ceremony closes
with the dawn, the new day symbolizing spiritual rebirth. The quintet’s
final movement, “Prayer Circle,” greets this rising sun. Riley here bases
the movement on the Cuban montuno, using flamenco-tinged
harmonies to suggest southern warmth. The montuno’s repetitive bass
line, similar to the classical passacaglia or chaconne, grows inexorably
brighter, undeterred even by a brief reminiscence of Cheburashka’s
theme, unfurling in a rainbow of harmonic color as it intensifies and
closes in a blinding unison. And with this flash, the magician
disappears.
—Gregory Dubinsky
Produced by Judith Sherman
Recorded August 7–12, 2006, at Skywalker Sound, Nicasio, CA
Engineered by Scott Fraser
Assistant Engineer: Dann Thompson
Additional recording for “Emily and Alice”:
Vocals by Elisabeth Commanday
Produced and engineered by Scott Fraser
Recorded August 8, 2007, at The Plant, Sausalito, CA
Assistant Engineer: Robert Gatley
Electronic music elements enhanced and mixed by David Dvorin
Mixed by Judith Sherman and David Harrington
Editing and Mixing Assistant: Jeanne Velonis
Mastered by Robert Ludwig, Gateway Mastering & DVD, Portland, ME
Art direction and design by Frank Olinsky
Cover: “Yellow Road” © Dean Chamberlain
Booklet back cover: “Green Mist” © Dean Chamberlain
Photograph of Terry Riley by Christopher Felver
Photograph of Kronos Quartet and Wu Man from the opening concert of the 2007
Tongyeong International Music Festival (Main Hall, Tongyeong Arts Center, Korea,
March 23, 2007), © TIMF Foundation, www.timf.org
Photograph of toys by Luis Delgado
Project Supervisor for Kronos: Sidney Chen
For Nonesuch Records:
Production Coordinator: Eli Cane
Editorial Coordinator: Ronen Givony
Production Supervisor: Karina Beznicki
Executive Producer: Robert Hurwitz
Published by Ancient Word Music (BMI)
Terry Riley’s The Cusp of Magic was written and commissioned for the Kronos Quartet and
Wu Man as part of a national series of works from Meet the Composer Commissioning
Music/USA, made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts, The Helen F. Whitaker
Fund, and the Target Foundation. Major support was generously provided by The Wallace
Alexander Gerbode Foundation, with additional funds from The Margaret E. Lyon Trust.
For the Kronos Quartet: Janet Cowperthwaite, Managing Director; Laird Rodet, Associate
Director; Sidney Chen, Artistic Administrator; with Scott Fraser, Christina Johnson, Larry
Neff, and Lucinda Toy.
Kronos Quartet extends special thanks to Wu Man; Robert Hurwitz, Karina Beznicki,
David Bither, Peter Clancy, Melissa Cusick, and everyone at Nonesuch; Bonnie Quinn,
Emily Quinn, and Alice Kilduff; Elisabeth Commanday; and Greg Dubinsky, Regan
Harrington, Paola Prestini, and Mizue Sherba.
Wu Man would like to thank Terry Riley for writing a such fantastic piece for pipa, and for
expanding the repertoire for the instrument. She also thanks her family, Peng and Vincent,
for their support.
Kronos dedicates this recording of The Cusp of Magic to the memory of Hamza El Din, who
was introduced to us by Terry Riley. Hamza’s gentle, pioneering work connected music and
musicians in countless ways.
www.kronosquartet.org
www.wumanpipa.org
www.nonesuch.com
360508-6
Nonesuch Records, a Warner Music Group Company, 1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104.
P & C 2008 Nonesuch Records for the United States and WEA International Inc. for the world outside of the United States.
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