SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Imagine you're walking through Central Park. It's a beautiful day, and soothing music is playing in your headphones.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DETROW: You make a turn down a path you haven't taken before, and the music changes.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DETROW: You take another turn past the reservoir this time, with the skyline of the city reflecting off the water, and the music, it changes again.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DETROW: It's almost like the music is walking with you - because it is.
ELLEN REID: So it kind of follows you like a film score.
DETROW: That's Ellen Reid, the composer behind SOUNDWALK, a public art project made for parks around the world. The idea is this - you download an app, throw on your headphones, and the endless stream of music changes depending on your location in the park.
REID: I had the idea a few years before the pandemic, and then the pandemic hit. And we realized that this project could take on a new meaning at that time.
DETROW: Because at that point in time, everybody needed a good walk in the park. Reid is a prolific composer. In 2019, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in music for her opera called "P r i s m." And so far, she's composed music for soundwalks in more than a dozen places around the world, including Central Park, Griffith Park in Los Angeles, Regents Park in London and Ueno Park in Tokyo. And now she's giving those SOUNDWALK compositions a new life, reinterpreting them for a new album that just came out called "Big Majestic."
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
REID: I'm hoping that in the way that the music is composed, it'll transport the listener into that - the locations where the music was originally written on some level.
DETROW: A transporting effect but also maybe a calming effect, an effect that Reid said the album had on her, even as she was making it.
REID: You know, SOUNDWALK had a programming part of it, where I would program the back end of the installation that would then get translated into the app. And then we'd have to go test the app in person. So the programming aspect of the project was always pretty stressful. I could feel tension in my body rising and getting kind of, like, wound up in my head. And then the cool thing about making a soundwalk is then I got to go to these beautiful public parks and really feel the effect of the music on my body because I had been worked up from programming. And that was a really nice balance that the project had within it.
DETROW: It made it a - it made a less stressful association...
REID: Yeah.
DETROW: ...With the finished product.
REID: Yeah.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DETROW: You know, it's interesting. I lived in New York when that art exhibit The Gates went up in Central Park...
REID: Yeah.
DETROW: ...In 2005, where big, orange gates with nylon, orange, fluttering drapes were installed throughout the park and really transformed that public space. And what you were doing is kind of transforming this known public space in a similar way but wildly different because it's personal. It's a individual experience that each people are having on their own as opposed to this collective changing of the landscape.
REID: Yeah. You know, I was also in New York when The Gates was installed in Central Park, and I actually have a little square of it that I keep on my shrine in my studio.
DETROW: Oh, really?
REID: So this is - it felt like an interesting - like a project that was in my mind while I was working on SOUNDWALK.
DETROW: I got that swatch, too, and it's in a box somewhere.
REID: Really (laughter)?
DETROW: Truly. I might - I think I still have it. I had it for a long time, and then it got put in a box somewhere in move.
REID: Yeah.
DETROW: But yeah, I remember those - when they handed those out.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DETROW: So talk about the turn here. How did you get to the next step of, OK, we did this project, but there's something more here - I want to take these compositions and turn it into a standalone musical project, "Big Majestic"?
REID: So I was on a road trip with some friends in Colorado, and none of them had been able to see a soundwalk or hear a soundwalk because the only way you could experience the music was in the location of a soundwalk. And I threw on some of the music, and it was this Kronos Quartet, "West Coast Sky Forever." And we were driving through the mountains of Colorado, and feeling how that music resonated with the landscape in this context that I hadn't imagined it resonating with and seeing how happy it made my friends that I was with made me want to explore taking the music of SOUNDWALK, which is meant to never end, and creating these concise pieces of music that became "Big Majestic." And once I sat down to experiment with it, "Big Majestic" took on a life of its own.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
REID: And I see the album as one big soundwalk. It's a big composition where, for the first half of the album, you're going up a mountain, the sun's rising, and then you get to the peak of the mountain. And then the second half of the album, you're coming down the mountain, the sun's setting, and then we descend into the celebratory night.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DETROW: You've got a lot of great collaborators on this album. You mentioned Kronos Quartet. What was the directive that you gave them? What was the vision that you talked people through as you worked with them for this album? Or was it more open-ended?
REID: Was more open-ended, but every collaborator on this album had a different kind of relationship with that where - with Kronos Quartet, we talked about where the music was going to go, what it was going to do, and then I wrote a piece for them. With someone like the incredible multi-instrumentalist Shabaka Hutchings, it was a totally different story. I was actually a fan. I had followed his music for years, and I reached out through Instagram and said, hey - I'm doing this project in London; you want to collaborate? And he said yeah. So we got together in a studio, and I had brought a bunch of synth tracks to play with, and, you know, he whipped out one instrument after another, just laying down these gorgeous first takes. And then from there, kind of the music erupted into what became "Spiritual Sun" and "Primrose Hill."
DETROW: I'm really glad he checked his Instagram messages.
REID: I know. I'm impressed. I would have definitely missed it.
(SOUNDBITE OF ELLEN REID'S "PRIMROSE HILL")
DETROW: I do want to ask - your work over the past few years alone has spanned such a really impressive range. You know, the opera you wrote, "P r i s m," won a Pulitzer Prize in 2019. You've done these different projects, now this new album. Any general sense the direction you're thinking of going next, or is now not the time to ask that question when you're just getting something big like this to the finish line?
REID: Yes, and (laughter)...
DETROW: OK.
REID: You know, I love making music, and that's where I start from, and then I see where it wants to go. You know, I loved working in the more public art space of SOUNDWALK. I just finished a orchestra piece, which is going to happen at Carnegie Hall with a concerto bow (ph). I love the, you know, heady intensity of that. You know, I have to say something that this album did change was me being involved as a performer in the music. And that's something that I'm really looking forward to continuing and seeing where that goes because that hasn't been a part of my work for, you know, probably 15 years.
(SOUNDBITE OF ELLEN REID'S "SUNSET IN UENO PARK")
DETROW: Well, Ellen Reid's new album, "Big Majestic," is out now. Thank you so much.
REID: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF ELLEN REID'S "SUNSET IN UENO PARK") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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