Overture Magazine - 2015-2016 Season November-December 2015 | Page 19
program notes {
fly too close to the sun; instead, he flies
near a black hole. And what happens there
is that real physics — the real discoveries of Einstein and his general theory of
relativity — wind up being the lynch pin
of the narrative and science dictates what
happens next. The boy returns from his
journey to the black hole and finds that
although he spends an hour there, it turns
out 1,000 [actually 10,000] years have
passed for everybody else. So there’s a
brand new reality for him to cope with.”
Greene cited two reasons for his recasting of the ancient myth. “The first is that
when I first was introduced to Icarus as a
kid, the story always bothered me. Here
you have a young boy. He goes against
authority, he does what he’s not supposed
to do, and … he pays with his life for it.
Whereas when I got older, … it was so
clear to me that the way you change the
world, the way you make great discoveries
is by doing just that. …
“And that’s what makes a great scientist.
It’s not that you pay for such revolutionary
acts with your life, but you do, however,
sometimes change the world in a very
traumatic way, and you may have to cope
with a very unfamiliar reality based on
your own exploration.
Greene continues, “The second reason
for doing this is that I so want kids to
realize that science is not just a subject
they study in the classroom. I want them
to see science as a wonderful, dramatic
adventure story.”
Early on, Greene saw multi-media potential in his small book. He had already
turned his 1999 bestseller The Elegant
Universe into an Emmy Award-winning
three-part program on PBS’ Nova series.
Now he approached Philip Glass, with
whom he had been friendly for years,
about the idea of creating a film treatment of Icarus at the Edge of Time with an
original Glass score.
It didn’t take long for Glass to agree to
the plan, for the composer has had a deep
interest in science all his life. “I’ve always
thought that scientists were really poets,”
said Glass in an interview in London’s
The Guardian. “When I was a boy, I was
doing both music and science. I belonged
to an astronomy club … When I got to
university, I couldn’t keep up with the
mathematics. But the passion for science
hasn’t left me, and I began to use it to
write operas and tell stories.”
The English experimental filmmakers
Al Holmes and Al Taylor (Al + Al) were
signed on to create the film, and Tony
Award-winning playwright David Henry
Hwang (M. Butterfly) helped Greene
create a narrator’s script. The work was
co