condition (record/cover): NM / NM (in shirink)
The Nonesuch recording was made on 23 March 1985 at Davies Hall, two days after the world premiere of 21 March. Adams was the San Francisco Symphony's composer-in-residence, Edo de Waart conducted, engineer John Newton wrapped the session in a single day.
Adams took his title from Arnold Schoenberg's 1911 treatise on tonal harmony, published the year before Schoenberg crossed into atonality: a position statement that reattached minimalism to the late-Romantic tradition. The first movement opens with hammered E minor chords in inverted-arch form. The slow movement, The Anfortas Wound, draws on Jung on the Fisher King and quotes the opening of Mahler's unfinished Tenth. The finale Meister Eckhardt and Quackie ends on an E-flat major pedal under a tidal-wave brass climax. Carin Goldberg sleeve design, William Clift photograph.
