Browse by Artist: ADAMS, JOHN LUTHER

Artist:	ADAMS, JOHN LUTHER
Title:	The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies
Label:	CANTALOUPE
Format:	CD
Price:	$19.00
Catalog #:	CA 21034CD

"Born in 1953 and raised on the East Coast, composer John Luther Adams studied composition with James Tenney, Harold Budd, Leonard Stein, Morton Subotnick and Mel Powell. In the mid-'70s, he moved to Alaska, where he has lived ever since. An active environmentalist, Adams worked for several years as executive director of the Northern Alaska Environmental Center and has been a leader in the Green Party of Alaska. He has worked as a wilderness guide and traveled extensively throughout the far north, pursuing a strong love for wild places and indigenous Alaskan culture. Adams' music creates a unique musical world grounded in wilderness landscapes, indigenous cultures and natural phenomena from the songs of birds to elemental noise. His output includes works for orchestra, small ensembles, percussion and electronic media. Percussionist Steven Schick is an original member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars. This is his first full-length CD on Cantaloupe Music and it coincides with the release of his first book -- The Percussionist's Art which features Schick's keen insights about percussion music in the 20th-21st century. A former percussionist himself, Adams finds music from the earth and brings it to life in this composition. The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies is an unadulterated ambient soundscape that takes a journey through different sonic textures and environments, aided by a beautiful production and Schick's breathtaking performance."

Artist:	ADAMS, JOHN LUTHER
Title:	The Light That Fills The World
Label:	COLD BLUE MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	CB 010CD

"These three works exist amid an undeniable aesthetic spirit of the times -- the embracing of pre-compositional principles and structural processes in the service of a highly personal artistic statement. However, John Luther Adams' recent work tends to transcend his compositional devices -- it is simply potent, compelling music that is timeless in its sublimity. This is quietly expressive music in which process never intrudes on the music's 'sounding,' but churns away in the background, while the foreground shimmers with a simple yet great joy in the very making of sounds. It is a music that may be readily appreciated on both intellectual and sensual levels." 3 works from 1998-01, performed on bass clarinet, vibraphone, marimba, piano, electric keyboard, violin, doublebass.

Artist:	ADAMS, JOHN LUTHER
Title:	Red Arc/Blue Veil
Label:	COLD BLUE MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	CB 026CD

"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."

Artist:	ADAMS, JOHN LUTHER
Title:	Strange and Sacred Noise
Label:	MODE
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	MODE 153CD

Performed by Percussion Group Cincinnati. "John Luther Adams is an Alaskan composer. For Adams, Alaska is not a catalog of ideas and sounds, instead, Alaska is a provocation. For all of its enormity, Alaska leans inward towards essential qualities and purified forces. 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 space. Strange and Sacred Noise is a monumental work for percussion quartet in nine movements."

Artist:	ADAMS, JOHN LUTHER
Title:	In The White Silence
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80600CD

"Since 1978, Alaska has been John Luther Adams' (b. 1953) home and a major inspirational source for most of his compositions. Almost all of his compositions evoke natural phenomena, in particular the wintry Northern landscapes, light, and colors as well as elements of indigenous Alaskan cultures. Adams's music thus shares aesthetic features with nature-inspired works of such composers as Debussy, Ives, Sibelius, and Hovhaness. Due to the use of certain 'minimalist' strategies Adams's music is often classified as 'minimalist' or 'post-minimalist.' He avoids expressive musical rhetoric, prefers reduced and elementally simple musical material, and frequently uses sustained tones and static textures. Adams's compositions embrace just intonation, consonance, and modal harmony, and they often feature a meditative quality and extended length reminiscent of Feldmanesque dimensions. In the White Silence slowly unfolds over the course of about seventy-five minutes. The work's extended length and non-dramatic structure suggest the idea of music as an 'immeasurable space' and reflect the desire to transcend the conventional boundaries of musical composition. In the White Silence, a large-scale work of structural refinement, balance and arresting beauty, gently envelops the listener and thus becomes a 'musical presence equivalent to that of a vast tundra landscape'."

Artist:	ADAMS, JOHN LUTHER
Title:	For Lou Harrison
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80669CD

"Composed in 2003-2004, For Lou Harrison completes a trilogy of large-scale memorial works that also includes 'Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing' (1991-95) and 'In the White Silence' (1998). For Lou Harrison encompasses the most lush and active textures in my music to date, moving in four tempo layers (in the proportions 4/5/6/7) throughout. The work's two textures -- rising arpeggios over sustained harmonic clouds, and long solo lines over 'procession-like' material -- alternate in nine continuous sections, each of which is grounded in a different five-, six- or seven-tone harmony. The formal structures of the composition recur throughout the score, but the sound of the music is always changing. For Lou Harrison was not commissioned. I composed this work because I was compelled to do so in response to the death of one of the most important figures in my life. Amid the daunting realities of today's world, Lou Harrison and his joyful ecumenical life and music seem more vital and more pertinent than ever before." --John Luther Adams

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