The Day the Earth Stood Still

"We have come to visit you in peace—and with good will…"

Some 30 years before E.T. touched down on these earthly shores—and promptly decided to phone home—the far more dapper space alien Klaatu and his trusty robot, Gort, arrived with a simple message for the people of Earth:

"Your choice is simple. Join us and live in peace or pursue your present course and face obliteration. We shall be waiting for your answer. The decision rests with you."

Of course, by the time Klaatu delivers these fateful words in Robert Wise's 1951 sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still, the well-meaning extraterrestrial has already been shot by us trigger-happy humans (twice). But then again, Klaatu had put humanity a bit on edge, given his sudden arrival in a sleek flying saucer, Gort's habit of reducing rifles and tanks to scrap metal, and, most panic-inducing of all—that spooky theremin music!

The man behind the haunting strains of theremin—that early electronic instrument with the appropriately unearthly sound—was the great American composer Bernard Herrmann. Throughout the film's score, Herrmann accompanied his portentous horns and ominous strings with the quavering tones of two theremins, one each for low- and high-register parts. The sound eerily resembled the human voice—so eerily, in fact, that Herrmann's electronic sounds in The Day the Earth Stood Still would go on to set the standard for alien visitation in a generation of science fiction soundtracks.

Before composing the unforgettable score of this Cold War cautionary tale, Herrmann had already earned a reputation as one of the finest composers writing for film. His early credits included Orson Welles' landmark debut feature, Citizen Kane (1941), as well as scores for such 20th Century Fox films as Jane Eyre (1943) and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947). He went on to even greater fame through his long and fertile collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock in films like The Trouble with Harry (1955), Vertigo (1958), and North by Northwest (1959). In 1960, he once again sent chills down moviegoers' spines with perhaps his most celebrated work of all—the score for Hitchcock's terrifying Psycho. He concluded his prolific career in 1975 with music for a new breed of American psychopath in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.

Responsible for transforming Herrmann's symphonic music for The Day the Earth Stood Still into this program's quartet arrangement is the composer, pianist, and conductor Stephen Prutsman. A frequent Kronos collaborator, Prutsman arranged several pieces on the quartet's 2002 CD, Nuevo, and also contributed arrangements to the quartet's recent collaboration with singer Dawn Upshaw. In March of 2001, in the inaugural concert of The Silk Road Project, cellist Yo-Yo Ma performed a Prutsman arrangement with the New York Philharmonic. Stephen Prutsman is an Avery Fisher Career Grant recipient, as well as a past medalist at the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition and the Queen Elisabeth International Music Competition (Belgium). He is also the founder of the International Chamber Music Festival in El Paso, Texas, for which he began serving as festival director in 1991.

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