About Sun Rings, Terry Riley writes:

The ten “spacescapes” that comprise Sun Rings were begun in August of 2001 and finished in July of 2002. They were written as separate musical atmospheres with the intention to let the sounds of space influence the string quartet writing and then to let there be an interplay between live “string” and recorded “space” sound.

In some movements, the intention was to place the quartet in such a way that it felt like they were traveling through spatial atmospheres, as a symbolic representation of the wanderings of space probes Voyager and Galileo as they moved through what must have been the incredible atmospheres of our solar system. In some cases, fragments of melody that I observed in these sounds became the basis for themes that were developed in the quartet writing. The addition of the two movements with the choirs was to further emphasize that this work is largely about humans as they reach out from earth to gain an awareness of their solar system neighborhood.
When Dr. Donald Gurnett handed me these original NASA recordings, which were to be the point of departure for this challenging adventure, my thoughts became filled with images stimulated by locales as distant as Jupiter and Uranus. I could almost feel myself propelled through space as one atmosphere gave way to another.

Space is surely the realm of dreams and imagination and a fertile feeding ground for poets and musicians. Ancient astrologers were aware of the significant influences of planetary movements on our lives. I feel these influences are somehow responsible for this amazing collaboration which has been so enthusiastically undertaken by all the participants responsible for its outcome.
Do the stars welcome us into their realms? I think so or we would not have made it this far. Do they wish us to come in peace? I am sure of it. If only we let the stars mirror back to us the big picture of the universe and the tiny precious speck of it we inhabit that we call Earth, maybe we will be given the humility and insight to love and appreciate all life and living forms wherever our journeys take us.

I dedicate Sun Rings to Dr. Donald Gurnett, whose brilliant mind has wandered the solar system and beyond for a lifetime, who inspired and launched all of us Sun Rings collaboratiors with his twinkle and the depth of his understanding, and who generously shared with us some of the Universe's secrets.

Terry Riley, August 2002

About Sun Rings, Willie Williams writes:

Overwhelming as it was to be given the NASA archive as a starting point for a visual piece, it was clear to me that the performance environment for Sun Rings had to be more than just a planetarium experience or a physics lecture. The spectacular photographs from Hubble and Voyager have become so very well known that I was keen to find something less discovered, less familiar, so often what we are seeing during the performance is an abstraction based more loosely on the mood of the composition as a whole.

Nevertheless, an amount of space imagery was naturally going to make up part of the design and spending time with Don Gurnett at the University of Iowa led me to sources of rare moving footage sent back to earth from spacecraft via a 1970s version of digital video. Next to the imagined visions of space that we have seen in science fiction movies the raw images are extremely rough in quality, but their authenticity conveys enormous emotional power.

Further inspiration for the visuals came quite directly from the Voyager missions. I discovered that there is informational material on board the spacecraft called “The Golden Record,” which is addressed for the attention of anyone they happen to run into along the way. The extraordinary optimism of providing such material is only outweighed by the confidence of including diagrammatic instructions for said aliens as to how to playback videotape and vinyl recordings. The information package includes drawings of what human beings are and where our planet is located. Along with this there are photographs of everyday scenes from around the world—people, houses, roads, cars, animals, musical instruments—presenting the world as it was in 1977. (Several of the actual images from the Golden Record appear in the final movement of Sun Rings.) The two Voyagers have now traveled far beyond our solar system, so I began to think of them as eccentric emissaries from our world, carrying information about us into deep space, not knowing that they have already become an anachronism; like senior citizens carrying school photographs of their grandchildren unaware that those they hold so dear have already grown up and changed beyond recognition.

I’ve had a life long fascination with astronomy, both in the very practical sense of spending nights stargazing and in a more personal sense, building my own picture of a relationship be tween cosmology and theology. Facing the enormity of the universe produces emotions that range from comforting awe to hopeless insignificance and Terry Riley’s composition speaks to both these extremes. The nature of the subject matter always indicated that Sun Rings would be a contemplative work, but combined with Terry’s response to 9/11, the piece walks the line between supplication and mourning, perhaps even verging on despair, whilst somewhere in space there is a permanent memory of more comfortable, more innocent times.

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