David: The entire Sun Rings piece is something that emerged over several years. I think it was in September of 2000 when NASA invited Terry and me to a launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger. We were able to go down and have a sense of what the team work involved in what NASA was. We were checking them out.(laughs) Terry didn’t start writing the piece until August of 2001, at that point we know what happed in September 2001. So the piece got derailed for a few months. In a sense derailed, in another sense Terry recorded from the radio the American poet Alice Walker who was chanting, "one earth one people one love". That became the lyrics for the last movement. That is called One Earth One People One Love. The piece began to take shape in his mind in November -December 2001. That was when I got a call from him, "This quartet is going to need a large choir". A subsequent call he said, "You know, I’m kind of imagining a visual element to Sun Rings". So pretty soon the piece began to take an a dimension unlike any other piece in our experience.

I should backtrack a little. When we first received the call from NASA, from Burt Ulrick who is the arts program director for NASA. His question to us was," Would Kronos be interested in incorporating some of the sounds from the Voyager Expedition in our concerts?" I for one didn’t know that there were any sounds in space. I certainly had not heard them and I didn’t know NASA had recorded anything. I immediately wanted to hear what was available. Shortly after that phone call we received from NASA a cassette tape. I found that amazing that with the technology they have we end up with a cassette tape. (Laughs) The sounds were amazing! I have a substantial collection of environmental sounds but I have never heard anything quite like I heard on this tape. Immediately it was very intriguing. Then I found out that the man who invented the Plasma Wave Receptor who’s name is Dr. Donald Grunet lived in Iowa City. I called him and made arrangements for me to meet him and later for Terry meet him. Both of us found him amazingly intriguing, he cast quite a large spell. You can feel like you understand the entire universe when your talking to Donald Grunet for a while. His explanations of things are so exciting and interesting. This piece has quite a background before the music starts.

David: Well, I’m the kind of guy that reads the science page all the time. I make sure that I have the New York Times Science Times every Tuesday. Even when I’m on tour I make sure I have a copy of it. I try to stay up on some of the things as much as I can. I find myself fascinated by the intersection of music and different forms of expression and science. I have to say that Don Grunet’s office and Laboratory is one of the few labs that I’ve been in recently and was incredibly intriguing. I think he was surprised that I considered him to be an instrument maker. His Plasma Wave Receptor in a way is an instrument and this instrument records plasma waves. It turns them into radio waves. I find it fascinating.

David: Well it was interesting in that respect because we didn’t have a director and we didn’t feel we need one. The team was assembled in a very organic way. Ok, so I hear this tape in June of 2000. I knew we would be seeing Terry a couple weeks later and I waited to ask him. Immediately when I heard the tape I thought Terry Riley is the person that should bring this sound world into our sound world. I had no question about that. At that point he had written about twenty-two pieces for us. We worked very close together for many years and I knew his interest in sonic’s and cosmology. I wanted to wait so I can see his instinct response to the question. We were recording the Requiem for Adam when I asked him if he would be interested in this. The look on his face told the whole story. So he joined the team. A few weeks later he and I were visiting Don Grunet and he became our scientific consultant. You hear Don’s voice in the beginning as we walk out. We recorded some of his comments on space. After Terry mentioned a visual aspect it was Janet Cowperthwaite the manager of Kronos who suggested Willie Williams. Janet saw his work with U2 at a show in San Jose, California and was really impressed with the way Willie turned a huge cavernous space into an intimate atmosphere. Janet figured out how to reach Willie and he jumped at the opportunity.

So basically we had our team. The way it worked, was that the visuals were all a result of the music so Willie assembled the visuals from a mock up of the piece that Terry had put together. Then when we ended up rehearsing together and staging and putting everything in place with a choir in Iowa City. That was the summer and fall of 2002. You would have thought there needed to be a director. But there wasn’t! Everybody knew what they needed to do and everybody involved respected everyone opinion. It was just an amazing experience.

David: The video elements come in at specific points and rarely is it totally sequenced and when it needs to be totally sequenced there’s a click track. So the coordination that might seem totally impossible has actually been worked out. Our lighting designer Larry Neff is in charge of lighting at the end and beginning of movements and our sound man Brian Moore starts each movement at precise moments and coordinates them with lighting and occasionally with the video. There’s a lot of people that have to be coordinated. It’s been working out really well.

David: Well yeah, that is complex its not something we’ve been doing since teenagers. There is a certain amount of staging and moments when we’re not playing, for example there’s one amazing moment in Prayer Central, it’s the video element that bridges the two parts of Prayer Central. Every time I look at it, it’s awe inspiring. It’s vintage video of close ups of the sun. It’s like you’re looking into a giant seething cell. You just have a sense of awe about nature and everything emanating from the sun. One thing Willie contributed is a beautiful speech that Neil Armstrong gave about what it’s like to turn around in a space and seeing the Earth. It is so Chilling and inspired.