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