george WASHINGTON (2012)

A Note Regarding the Multimedia Work: george WASHINGTON

While living three months a year in Washington DC, I visited and became interested in the nearby Mount Vernon estate. It has been cared for in a singularly thorough way by Washington admirers and has a timeless feel about it, allowing one, for a brief while, to feel what our first president must have as he rode out each morning across its landscape adjoining the Potomac. Preparations were then underway (2013) for the construction of what would serve as a Washington Presidential Library (now the Fred Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington). Conversations with the various stake-holders resulted in a commission for me to create a multimedia work that would be featured as the first event in the National Symphony’s 2013 season at the Kennedy Center.

I read widely about Washington and came to understand why he avoided public speaking (His voice had been hollowed out by early illnesses.) and why his statements in regard to the army were so, well, so “wooden”. It was rather, I discovered, in his letters and dairies late in his life that the eloquence and subtlety of his thinking become clear. Some of his thoughts have the poetic weight of Lincoln’s. Working with researchers at Mount Vernon, I fashioned a libretto in 5 parts: Origins, Martha, Engagement, Lafayette, and Reflection. His career involved such a relentlessly itinerant existence, that devising a serviceable chronology proved impossible. I rather concentrated on the three major periods of his life, and, as Intermezzi, portraits of two of those who were closest to him (Martha and Lafayette).

Collaborating with videographer Ross Karre, filming was done at Mount Vernon from sun rise to sun set in all four seasons of the year. This allowed triptych images to be projected on massive digital screens behind the orchestra in the Kennedy Center’s Concert Hall.

Collaborators Kucera, Reynolds, and Karre, preparing video materials.

The National Symphony Orchestra performing george WASHINGTON at the Kennedy Center, Christoph Eschenbach, conductor, with Mount Vernon imagery behind.

Three narrators (Washington at 16, in midlife, in his 60s) presented my montage of Washington’s words, sometimes for extended solo passages, and at others, interwoven.

Computer-manipulated and spatialized sounds contributed to the sense of timeless immersion the work sought. All of the components had to be precisely coordinated as Karre’s diagram below shows.

The experience of george WASHINGTON is immersive, unsettling and surprising, revealing that our initial leader was nourished in ways, and to a degree, by the natural world. We, in our troubled times, can still gain a sense of his grounding in another era

— Roger Reynolds