Knowing / Not Knowing (2024)

Sections
I. Infancy / Individuation
II. Nature / Experience
III. Imagination / Reality
IV. Science / Doubt / Authority
V. Stories / Suffering
VI. Darkness / Justice
VII. Determination
VIII. Truth / Integrity
IX. Communality / Knowledge

Composer note
What can I as an individual know? What seems out of reach? In fact, how does “knowing” come about? In everyday life, one faces such questions constantly. One is perplexed by events, by the opinions of others, with deciding how to act in circumstances with immediate or more long-term implications. In contrast, other moments can feel immediately “right.” There’s no friction. Living in this world of disrupted comfort, we seek perspective. Knowing / Not Knowing is an 80-minute musical work for narrator, recorded actors, live and filmed performers, projected imagery, San Diego’s SACRA / PROFANA Chorus, and 8-channel sound movement. The work’s text has nine sections spanning Infancy and Individuation through Communality and Knowledge. It is a montage of more than two dozen sources ranging from ancient Persian and Indian wisdom, through the contemporary voices of Chinua Achebe, Wallace Stevens, James Baldwin, Simone Weil, Albert Camus, Amanda Gorman, Carlo Rovelli, David Brooks, Toni Morrison and many others. Although their perspectives span time and arise from the living of contrasted lives, the composite weave feels natural: many voices speaking as one about the lives we all lead. “Trust implies a willingness to depend upon another.” … “Compassion is a miracle more astonishing than walking on water.” … “Make yourself into an agent – consistent, unified and whole.” … “Every human being is a miracle.”

Experiencing Knowing not only entails a kaleidoscopic array of observations, but frames and interconnects their content with a central musical score that stems from the world of lullabies: a mother singing to her child. Computer technologies allow individual phrases, nested dialogs, and shared ruminations to move choreographically across the performance space, circling around and through the audience. And what a listener experiences will not only come from the work’s sources and the efforts of those who realize it in performance, but will also include the literal voices of the community in which the finished work is heard. In a tenth section, the community speaks back to the work with its own voice.

Our diverse, dynamic, and turbulent world offers opportunity and peril in comparable proportion. If one cares about what they observe and wants to use who they are and what they can do to respond in useful ways, what to do? Knowing seeks to address our perplexing encounters with the world. It involves a process of investment that hopes to clarify terrain, diminish tensions, and enable action.

— Roger Reynolds