John Adams

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 has created a unique musical world rooted in wilderness landscapes and natural phenomena. His music includes works for orchestra, chamber ensembles, soloists, and electronic media, and is recorded on the Cold Blue, New World, Cantaloupe, Mode, and New Albion labels. His book Winter Music is published by Wesleyan University Press, and his writings about music and nature have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies.

In 2006 Adams was named one of the first United States Artists fellows. Previously he has received fellowships from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Rasmuson Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has served as composer in residence with the Fairbanks Symphony, Anchorage Symphony, and Alaska Public Radio, and has taught at the University of Alaska, Bennington College, and the Oberlin Conservatory of Music.



“Intelligent and evocative.” —Sonic Curiosity

“Adams strives to create musical counterparts to the geography, ecology, and native culture of his home state [Alaska]…by literally anchoring the work in the landscapes that have inspired it…. Adams’s major works have the appearance of being beyond style; they transcend the squabbles of contemporary classical music, the unending arguments over the relative value of Romantic and modernist languages.” —Alex Ross, The New Yorker