Movement III: Linear Tableau With Intersecting Surprise

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxXBp9xlIos

The BQE is a modern classical album about an expressway in New York City, and that's ridiculous, except that it's also very, very good. The Brooklyn-Queens expressway itself is a gorgeous, surreal vista with views from the air of Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan. Oddly enough, this isn't the first romanticization of civil engineering/architecture. Public works often capture the public imagination (think Statue of Liberty, Central Park, etc). An expressway is an unconventional one, but... well, it just works.

It's not Sufjan Stevens' usual fare whatsoever. He is a pop musician who dabbles in classical, electronic, folk. This is a full classical album (with accompanying visuals): entirely instrumental.

My strongest memory of The BQE is driving along it at 3 AM, I think — to get back to Illinois after winter break, I had a 4 AM flight out of JFK, and we drove. It was the middle of the night, and foggy, so only the lights of the city were visible, not the content itself. I had burned this album to CD, and we were listening to it, and it just... it sort of matched up. It matched up perfectly. The beginning matched up with East Harlem, and then the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge over Randalls Island, and so forth until Jamaica Bay. And the music swelled and faltered as the road did, breaking into electronics as we went under another, taller expressway; swelling as the AirTrain joined us from the left, and building to a—

And then a postlude. The plane taxied and burst into the sky, through the thick cloud and rain, and the night turned to day — the sun was already up, above the fog cover.