Endless Imagination: Claire Chase and Terry Riley’s The Holy Liftoff

On May 8, flutist Claire Chase, in collaboration with JACK Quartet, will be performing a new piece by acclaimed minimalist composer Terry Riley at Bing Concert Hall. This piece, commissioned in part by Stanford Live, is the latest installation in the ongoing, 24-year-long Density 2036 project. This initiative, spearheaded by Chase, seeks to reimagine what flute can sound like in the 21st century by commissioning and working collaboratively with different composers each year.

This year, the commissioned artist is Riley, a pioneer of minimalist composition and an important influence on experimental music. Chase is a huge admirer of Riley’s work: “I can’t imagine American music or any music, for that matter, without him and his influence,” says Chase.

Chase and Riley initially began a conversation about working on a piece together before COVID hit. However, over COVID, the pair maintained correspondence, and Chase sent Riley “sound postcards” of Bach chorales. These postcards were small, private creative projects that Chase worked on while stuck in her apartment during the pandemic. 

Riley shared this particular obsession at the time, and from the exchange of these postcards the idea for a new piece blossomed. The Holy Liftoff began with a 16-bar chorale that Riley improvised. Over a span of years, the two worked in an intensely collaborative manner: Riley would send Chase snippets of material in progress, and Chase would experiment with the material and send a recording back to Riley. 

The pair have been working together for years, though the most intense part of the preparation, starting about eight months ago, is still ongoing. Chase and Riley meet once a week on Zoom, and material is still being produced. “Just in the last six months, [Riley] has generated an incredible amount of material,” says Chase. 

Even now, the ink is still fresh on the compositions, and Chase hopes to discover the life of The Holy Liftoff when she finally performs it on stage during the New York premiere at Public Records on May 2nd, just days before the Stanford Live performance.

Riley’s composition leaves room for endless creativity. The score is made up of fully notated material, as well as graphic scores and evocative drawings that are jumping-off points for improvisation or even co-composition. The sheer quantity of material also allows for experimentation: the piece is made up of many different score pages and movements, and it is up to the performers to assemble the materials and decide which materials to use. Performers can also combine pages within movements with each other, overlaying one page of music onto another. “The assembly of all of these different bits and pieces is a kind of choose-your-own-adventure project,” says Chase.

Chase is clear about her admiration for Riley and his ethos of curiosity and discovery. “He is genuinely like a kid in a candy store. He’s like, let’s taste and explore all of the things we don’t know. And let’s go blindly, joyfully, ecstatically into this experience without having any idea what this outcome is going to be,” says Chase. “That kind of courage and that kind of trust and that joy in the creative process is absolutely infectious.” 

For the upcoming performances in New York and Stanford, Chase and the JACK Quartet engaged the composer Samuel Clay Birmaher to arrange, orchestrate, and “realize” a version of the piece that stays true to Riley's vision but adapts it for the unique instrumentation of flute and strings. Chase describes Birmaher as both intensely creative and imaginative, but also a thought partner in the practicalities of production constraints. Realizing a version of the piece prompted many questions: “How do we get an orchestral sound out of five instruments?” says Chase. “And that’s a really challenging question, but such an exciting question.”

Chase and her team have devised many creative ways to solve these questions. Sounds will be multiplied through the presence of layered recordings consisting of high and low flutes, stones, and birds, as well as Riley’s own spoken voice reciting the names of movements or lines he wants the audience to hear.

However, while this will be one realization and one performance of The Holy Liftoff, Chase hopes that the piece will ultimately live on to see many different reiterations and re-imaginings. The material itself can be endlessly re-imagined: a single movement, for example, can be spun out or realized to be a new 45-minute experience. Chase already sees endless possibilities: “I could imagine a version for a children’s choir, a version for a community ensemble, a version for a laptop orchestra, or a version for a congress of 300 violas,” says Chase. She also notes that there is so much material that there could perhaps even exist an iteration that goes all day or all night. 

“I hope it will be a jumping off point for all kinds of multi-directional, multi-practice, inter-genre, and of course intergenerational music making projects in the future,” says Chase.

Chase’s vision of an endlessly flexible, customizable composition also finds a model in the works of her collaborator Riley. Chase admires how In C, Riley’s seminal 1964 composition, has been endlessly re-imagined and re-interpreted: even a quick YouTube search yields south Indian Carnatic, new Irish trad, or Afrobeat versions. “It’s this music that’s both ecstatic and somehow serene,” says Chase. “And it can and should exist in the hands of all of these different traditions and practices. And I hope that The Holy Liftoff will be similarly capacious and abundant in its reach and in its welcoming ethos.”

Claire Chase and JACK Quartet can be seen at Bing Concert Hall on Wednesday, May 8 at 7:30 PM.