John Adams
Strange and Sacred Noise
** 2021 Stock ** John Luther Adams is an Alaskan composer. For Adams, Alaska is not a catalogue of ideas and sounds, instead, Alaska is a provocation. For all of its enormity, Alaska leans inward towards essential qualities and purified forces, and in Adams’ music we find this same sense of space and the same tendency inward towards the purified. His is an intimate and focused music that reverberates in a large place. Strange and Sacred Noise is a monumental work for percussion quartet in 9 move…
The Wind In High Places
The Wind in High Places is an elegant, haunting collection album containing three of John Luther Adams’s serenely powerful recent string works: (1) The Wind in High Places (2011), a three-movement string quartet commissioned to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Theodore Front Musical Literature, performed by JACK Quartet; (2) Canticles of the Sky, a four-movement piece for four cello choirs, performed by the 48-member Northwestern University Cello Ensemble, directed and conducted by Hans Jørgen …
Red Arc / Blue Veil
The four pieces that make up this CD—Dark Waves, Among Red Mountains, Qilyuan, and Red Arc/Blue Veil—are for various combinations of one or two pianos, percussion, and electronics. Each piece is built from a complex, polyrhythmic layering of voices that combine to form large, multi-arch musical shapes that explore a rich palette of harmonic and timbral colors, lush textures, and clear, simple compositional forms. This is music of broad strokes and ever-changing ebb and flow. John Luther Adams ha…