Out of this world.(DV / Orchestra Concert)

An international tour by the Kronos Quartet combined music, science, and DV technology during its performance of new age composer Terry Riley's Sun Rings, a multimedia extravaganza of string-quartet music, chores, space sounds, and video. Commissioned by the NASA Art Program to champion space exploration and to commemorate Voyager's 25 years in space, the recent concert featured the sights and sounds of outer space set to a stringed accompaniment. And, the timing couldn't have been better for the audiences, as the topic of Mars dominated the news when its orbit brought the planet in close proximity to the Earth.

The person responsible for the visual and musical collaboration was visionary designer Willie Williams, who has worked on video stage presentations for U2 and the Rolling Stones, among others including the dance troupe La La La Human Steps (featured in Part 2 of this series). The fact that someone with video expertise like Williams got involved with a production of this nature represented a major departure for a live classical music stage production such as this. That's because until recently, high costs have kept video out of the price range of most performing groups, especially non-profit musicians such as Kronos, notes Punk Films director Mark Logue, whose studio edited the imagery for the concert. But with the arrival of powerful laptops and relatively inexpensive editing software, that situation has changed.

For the Sun Rings production, Williams culled rare video footage of astronomic phenomena filmed in space and provided by NASA, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the University of Iowa, and the University of Alaska to accompany Riley's approximately 90 minute work, which was performed without interruption. After Williams selected the archived imagery, Punk Films in London edited the video and generated related visuals of space ships, planets, diagrams, equations, and photos, all of which were projected onto a large screen at the rear of the stage. Among the treasures Logue worked with was footage from a satellite launched in 1998 that captured close up video of the sun's surface, which served as the foundation for many of the projected sequences. "I'd never before seen images like these," he says. "They were stunning."

As Logue points out, the digital video was an accompaniment to the music, not a simple visual collection that was projected onto a screen, "We listened to the music as we edited the selections," he explains. "We approached each as a separately composed structured edit--as though we were making a film--as opposed to looping abstract graphics that bore no relation to the instrumentals. We timed and structured the edits so they matched the pauses, quiet pieces, and busy segments, and as a result, the imagery worked in tandem with the music."

This was important, Logue says, because the music of a quartet rises and falls to where "you can hear a pin drop," and the visuals had to follow that rhythm without overtaking the music. Conversely, rock music is loud, lending itself to "louder" imagery that can be looped, he notes, drawing on Punk Films' experience of creating stage visuals for recent concert tours by Queen, Aerosmith, U2, and the Rolling Stones. While the type of music and visuals may vary, Logue contends that the imagery must adhere to one basic rule: It cannot upstage the band.

Space-Age Techniques

Many of the "space ...