Our crop of musical nonagenarians and soon-to-be-nonagenarians may be the busiest in history. Terry Riley, who turned 91 in June, has been preoccupied with the passage of his time on earth. “Everything will keep going up, and up,” he tells an interviewer in the liner notes of a new recording of his The Holy Liftoff, released July 17 on Sono Luminus. “I’m going to lift off, too, in the not-too-distant future,” he cheerfully and fatalistically adds. “I’m looking forward to that!”
The Holy Liftoff is not so much a fixed work as a loosely strung series of short, continuously played compositions that are meant to be open-ended. The flutist and entrepreneur Claire Chase has made this evolving project the 11th — and one of the lengthiest — installment of her 24-year Density 2036collection of commissioned flute pieces, not due to run its course until 2036.
At the 2025 Ojai Music Festival, where she served as music director, Chase and the JACK Quartet presented a preliminary version lasting three-quarters of an hour. This recording, made three months after the festival with the same players, stretches it to a full hour — and Riley is not through with it yet. He leaves it to present and future performers to interpret these compositions in the spirit of the drawings or “musical cartoons” that he provides for each movement. He calls it a “generative kit,” providing possibilities through drawings and printed notes for performers to develop their own notions of liftoff.
The versions heard at Ojai and on this recording are Riley's only in part; they are also realizations by Samuel Clay Birmaher, who developed and orchestrated the scores for eight-part flute choir (all flutes played by Chase) and string quartet, in close collaboration with Riley and Chase. The gentle, almost ghostly voice of the composer can be heard announcing the titles of many of the pieces.
We enter Riley’s universe with “The Holy Liftoff Chorale,” a gorgeous thing for multi-tracked harmonized flutes, with the JACK Quartet echoing Chase’s ever-rising progression up the scale. About halfway through, “C Major Ishi” — ishi is the Japanese word for “stone” — revolves around minimalist ostinato patterns set up by the strings for Chase’s repetitively floating solo flute.
Suddenly the music becomes almost inaudibly quiet (“The Realm of the Silver Balloons”) and descends into an anguished threnody, “The Tragedy of What We Lost,” a memorial to the 21 victims of the May 2022 Uvalde, Texas school shooting — lifted off, in Riley's terms, long before their time.
The music climbs from that darkness with touches of raggy syncopations that recall Riley’s days as a barroom pianist. The final movement, “Escape,” is also the most interesting as the flutes and strings first rev up the engines of liftoff with thrumming, digital-delay tremolos, then recall the ethereal opening movement — and with some effort, finally leave the earth.
As at Ojai, what nearly all these lovely pieces have in common is a ceaseless flowing motion like that of a river, moving horizontally and vertically at once. Of all the pieces from Density 2036 that have been recorded and released so far, this sprawling suite is the most immediately appealing.
