Australian Ensemble Plays John Luther Adams

Cover design for the album being discussed (from the Amazon.com Web page)

In reviewing my past articles, it appears that I have been doing my best to keep up with releases of music composed by John Luther Adams and produced by Cold Blue Music. However, my last article seems to have been written in May of 2024, meaning that there has been a hiatus of almost two years since then. The good news, however, is that the latest Adams album, entitled Horizon, showed up today on its own Amazon.com Web page.

The album presents a two-movement composition making virtuosic demands on a string orchestra. The album title shows up in the title of both of the movements: “Visible Horizon” and “True Horizon.” The composer provided notes to elaborate on these titles. The distinction between these two titles is described as follows:

1. “The visible horizon is what we see from where we look.”
2. “The true horizon is the full extent of all that we might possibly see, an unobstructed view of the enveloping circle where the sky meets the earth or the sea.”

Adams composed Horizon on a commission by the Australian Chamber Orchestra. The recording process for the album took place in Chatswood, New South Wales, on October 14 and 15 of last year. The ensemble then gave its first performance before an audience at Newcastle City Hall this past February 5.

My Blogger search tool informs me that I have used some form of the word “texture” in writing about five past recordings, the earliest of which was the first Cold Blue release: The Light That Fills the World. On the other hand, there seems to be no sign of my ever referencing the opening measures of Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold, the first of the four operas given the collective title Der Ring des Nibelungen. It would be fair to say that Wagner’s prologue depicts the emergence of life itself out of pure nothingness. Adams seems less interested it how things come to be and more interested in how we cultivate our awareness of them.

I must confess that I find myself curious to see the score for Horizon. On this album, there are seventeen musicians in the Australian Chamber Orchestra, ten violins, three violas, three cellos, and one double bass. My guess is that the engaging textures that emerge from Adams’ score are the production of providing each instrument with its own part. This might make for challenging score-following, but the listener has the luxury of allowing his attention to “wander about,” exploring one sonority and then moving on to another.

This was the way in which I dealt with a performance of “Inuksuit” in the summer of 2017. The work was an “open-ended” composition, which had more to do with establishing an environment, rather than unfolding a path from beginning to end. The piece had a three-part structure. However, the music was scored for 9 to 99 percussion players; and the score pages were distributed among them. The performance took place at Lands End with the permission of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. One might say that the performance was less a matter of listening and more one of “being there.”

A recording, on the other hand, encourages one to prioritize listening over being. I have now listened to Horizon several times. Each new experience tends to have its own “being,” rather than stimulating memories of the last listenings. My guess is that this is how one should approach any of the albums of Adams’ compositions.

John Luther Adams: More Quartet Music

Those who have followed this site for some time are probably aware of the close relationship that composer John Luther Adams has with the JACK Quartet, whose members are violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Richards, and Jay Campbell on cello. Indeed, the ensemble performed in Herbst Theatre this past October, presenting a program consisting entirely of Adams’ music. Those that enjoyed that encounter will be happy to know that, this coming Friday, Cold Blue Music will release a new CD of the ensemble playing Adams’ recent efforts.

Cover of the album being discussed (from its Amazon.com Web page)

The title of the album is Waves and Particles, and Adams conceived it as a suite of six movements. He describes the composition as “inspired by quantum physics, fractal geometry, and noise—which function as elemental metaphors in my music.” He further observes that each of the six movements is structured by a “simple fractal form.” In some respects this calls to my own mind the recollection of John Cage’s goal of “making more and more with less and less.” It would be fair to say that fractal geometry is representative of complexity emerging from simplicity.

Given my own credentials in mathematics and applied mathematics, one might expect that I would be happy as a pig in you-know-what with this new release. On the positive side I am still taken in with Adams’ capacity to evoke imaginative sonorities, delivered with compelling clarity by the JACK players. However, I must confess that there were times over the course of the listening experiences that left me wondering if “more and more” had gone over the brink into “too much.”

To some extent I am reminded of “Take a Pew,” Alan Bennett’s solo routine for Beyond the Fringe, which emerges as a hilarious parody of a sermon. Towards the conclusion, Bennett muses, “Life, you know, is rather like opening a tin of sardines. We are all of us looking for the key.” Fractal structures present complexity emerging from a simple key. However, once we have that key, there is little more that we can do other than eat those metaphorical sardines.

Perhaps my misgivings emerge from the fact that, while each of the suite’s six movements has its own “key,” after one or two of them have run their respective courses, I begin to think little more than “I get it.” Taken as a whole, the suite may be too much of a good thing. Thus, while I cannot fault the technique of the JACK Quartet in bringing the score to life, I suspect that, in the future, I shall be more interested in experiencing each of the movements individually.

JACK Quartet Revisits John Luther Adams CDs

JACK Quartet members Austin Wulliman, Jay Campbell, John Pickford Richards, and Christopher Otto (photograph by Shervin Lainez, courtesy of San Francisco Performances)

Last night in Herbst Theatre the JACK Quartet returned to San Francisco Performances with its first Shenson Chamber Series performance. This followed two appearances in the PIVOT series, the first in March of 2016 and the second in April of 2021, which, due to COVID, was a streamed presentation. The quartet members are violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, sharing the position of first chair, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell.

The program consisted entirely of compositions by John Luther Adams that they had previously recorded for Cold Blue Music. The earliest of those recordings accounted for the concluding work on last night’s program, “The Wind in High Places.” The more recent recording coupled “Lines Made by Walking” with untouched. The program began with the “Rising” movement from untouched, followed by the “three-movement journey” of “Lines Made by Walking.”

All three of these selections presented Adams’ passionately informed interest in sonorities, particularly those that can be traced back to “natural” sources. This made “Rising” an apposite approach to beginning the entire program. Simply put, the composition evoked the synthesis of bell-like sonorities using only the auditory qualities of the four string quartet instruments. This requires skilled musicianship on the part of the JACK players, but it also presented Adams’ deep understanding of the spectral qualities of the underlying sounds.

However, beyond the nature of the sounds themselves, Adams developed his own approach to progression, departing entirely from anything taught to music students about harmonic progressions. Indeed, it would be fair to say that, taken as a whole, “Lines Made by Walking” is a single progression in three movements. First it ascends a mountain, then it follows a ridge at the height it had achieved, after which it follows a path of descent. What makes the entire composition so engaging is that this “journey” unfolds entirely through the progression of sonorities that depart entirely from the rhetoric of harmony.

That sense of journey is equally evident in “The Wind in High Places.” Each of the three movements establishes its own “high place.” This is made explicit through the titles assigned to the movements:

1. Above Sunset Pass
2. MacLaren Summit
3. Looking Toward Hope

Admittedly, those unfamiliar with Alaskan geography may not “get the message” of these titles. However, after having experienced “Lines Made by Walking,” the attentive listener can easily apprehend the same sense of journey in “The Wind in High Places,” even if the specific locations are unfamiliar.

The JACK Quartet has championed Adams’ string quartet repertoire for quite some time, and it was a thorough delight to experience in performance what had previously been available only on recordings.

Double Bass Music by John Luther Adams

courtesy of A440

This coming Friday Cold Blue Music will release its latest album devoted entirely to music composed by John Luther Adams. As usual, Amazon.com has created a Web page to process pre-orders. Darkness and Scattered Light consists of three compositions, all of which were recorded by the late Robert Black, who was one of the founding members of the Bang on a Can All-Stars.

The first and last of the selections, Three High Places and Three Nocturnes, were composed for solo bass. Between them is the performance of “Darkness and Scattered Light,” scored for five double basses with all parts played by Black. Completed earlier this year, this was the most recent work on the album.

The nocturnes set was composed during the previous year on a commission by the Moab Music Festival. Three High Places, on the other hand, is much earlier, having been completed in 2007. It was originally composed for solo violin and has also been performed by violists and cellists. Adams composed this work to avoid any stopped tones (those that result from pressing a string against the fingerboard). As a result, all of the sonorities are the result of either open strings or by touching the string to evoke the pitch of a natural upper harmonic.

While the strings of violins, violas, and cellos are all tuned in fifths, the strings of the bass are tuned in fourths. Thus, the upper harmonics afforded by the tuning of bass differ from those of the other instruments in the string family. The only way in which Black could provide Adams with the “correct” sonorities would be to retune his instrument in such a way that the pitches of the four open strings are an octave lower than those on the cello. Many readers probably know by now that I am a devout acolyte in the temple of natural harmonics, so it did not take much for me to find myself hooked on the sonorities of Black’s retuned instrument. Ironically, Nocturnes was later composed to deal with the alternative intervals of natural harmonics arising from a set of strings tuned in fourths, meaning that only the bass can play that score.

“Darkness and Scattered Light,” on the other hand, is based on both the “natural” harmonic series, consisting of rising intervals, and the “subharmonic” series of descending intervals. One might say that the latter is a product of mathematics, while the former is one of physics. However, because the subharmonic series is not natural, the intervals and progressions that emerge are more challenging for the attentive listener to “parse.”

In other words the attentive listener needs to approach the landscape of intervals in “Darkness and Scatter Light” in a way that differs from listening to the High Places and Nocturnes suites. Readers may recall that this is not the first time that I have suggested that one has to invest a generous amount of time in adjusting mind to Adams’ artifacts. Personally, I just go on listening, allowing the interplay between acoustic phenomena and mental perception to run its proper course!

An Album of Electro-Acoustic “Found Objects”

Readers may recall that the last article on this site about a new release on Cold Blue Music of the work of John Luther Adams was filed a little over a year ago on May 21, 2021. That album was devoted entirely to a single composition entitled “Arctic Dreams,” in which he drew upon the resources of four string players, four singers, and three layers of digital delay to evoke what he called the “‘aeolian’ sound world” of the reverberations of wind harps on the tundra. It appears that, after having finished his work on “Arctic Dreams,” Adams decided to take a more direct approach to those “aeolian” sonorities.

from the Barnes & Noble Web page for the album being discussed

The result is a new composition, entitled “Houses of the Wind,” which was completed earlier this year. Adams provided his own account of how this music was created as follows:

In the last two decades of the 20th century, I made field recordings of elemental sounds all over Alaska—fire, ice, thunder, glaciers calving into the sea. Recently, I transferred those aging tapes to more stable media. Listening to the very first segment of a small aeolian harp, recorded in the Arctic in the summer of 1989, I was captivated. The voices of the wind singing through the strings of the harp brought back vividly the clarity of light, the sprawling space, and the sense of possibility I had felt.

Houses of the Wind (2021–22) is composed entirely from that single ten-and-a-half-minute recording, transposed, layered on itself, and sculpted into five new pieces of the same length. The world has changed since then, in ways we couldn’t have imagined. The winds rushing around us now seem darker, more turbulent and threatening. Yet still, if this music is haunted by feelings of loss and longing, I hope it also offers some measure of consolation, even peace.

There is nothing new about using tape music techniques to take one form of sound and transform it into another. This as a compositional practice that dates back at least as far as the Forties when it was developed by Pierre Schaeffer, who called the practice musique concrète (i.e. the transformation of natural, or “concrete” sounds into music). My first serious effort at composition involved taking a tape of sounds created by the frequency modulation synthesis technique developed by John Chowning at Stanford University in the Sixties. Like Schaeffer, I used that tape as a source that I then subjected to transformations of my own design.

What makes “Houses of the Wind” interesting is that Adams took a single source and subjected it to transformation five different times in five different ways. The result is his latest Cold Blue Music album, also entitled Houses of the Wind, consisting of five tracks, all of roughly the same duration and each named after a particular type of wind phenomenon:

1. Catabatic Wind
2. Mountain Wind
3. Tundra Wind
4. Canyon Wind
5. Anabatic Wind

To be honest, I am just beginning to appreciate the qualities that endow each track with its own unique characteristics; but the listening experience is engaging enough that this exercise strikes me as totally worth the time invested in it!

Houses of the Wind is currently scheduled for release this coming Friday, June 17. As seems to be the case more and more often, Amazon.com has not yet acknowledged the existence of this recording. Once again, the day has been saved by Barnes & Noble, which has created a Web page for processing pre-orders. Currently, the album is only available as a “physical” CD; but the album jacket includes Adams’ commentary on how the content was created.

LCCE to Present Rescheduled Program

Percussionist Loren Mach, featured soloist in “I prefer living in color” (photograph by Vivian Sachs, courtesy of LCCE)

Readers may recall that, at the beginning of this year, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble opted to reschedule its January program, Living in Color, given the impact of the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. That rescheduled performance will take place later this month. The title of the program was inspired by Sarah Gibson’s “I prefer living in color,” scored for percussion and ensemble, which won the 2019 Left Coast Compositions Competition.

The remainder of the program will reflect both recent compositions and those from earlier in the twentieth century. The older of these works dates from 1915. “La Fontaine d’Aréthuse” (the fountain of Arethusa) is the first movement in a suite by Karol Szymanowski scored for violin and piano. The other composition from this period is Gabriel Fauré’s only piano trio, his Opus 120, which was first performed in 1923. Szymanowski’s mythic evocation will be paired with a more recent suite by John Luther Adams, Three Canticles of the Birds. The other recent works on the program will be “The 3 G’s” by Kenji Bunch and Errolyn Wallen’s “Dervish.”

The rescheduled date for the San Francisco performance will be Monday, May 23. It will begin at 7:30 p.m.; and the venue will still be the Noe Valley Ministry, located at 1021 Sanchez Street, between 23rd Street and Elizabeth Street, a short walk from the trolley stop at 24th Street and Church Street. Tickets are being sold for $30 with a $10 rate for students. A Web page has been created for purchasing both categories of tickets.

John Luther Adams’ Mix of Natural and Synthetic

from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording being discussed

One week from today Cold Blue Music will release its latest album of music by John Luther Adams. The entire album is devoted to a seven-section composition entitled “Arctic Dreams.” Adams describes the piece as having been based on listening to the reverberations of wind harps on the tundra, which he describes as his “‘aeolian’ sound world.” The performance of “Arctic Dreams” requires four string players, four singers, and three layers of digital delay, which contribute to the creation of 32-part canonic structures. As usual, Amazon.com has created a Web page to process pre-orders for this new release.

The music itself is derived from natural overtones. A low D on a double bass serves as the fundamental for the first seven odd-numbered harmonics above that pitch. If my fingers to not fail me, that means the third, fifth, seventh, ninth, eleventh, thirteenth, and fifteenth harmonics, all of which may be familiar to listeners of adventurous compositions for natural horn. On the other hand the textures arising from blending the eleven different pitches tend, for the most part, to be thick, suggesting that Adams does not expect listeners to distinguish specific overtones. In other words one is readily aware of a gradual flow of change in sonority without having to be aware of the specific factors responsible for those changes.

Similarly, one can be aware of vocal sounds without having to worry about what is being sung. The words of the texts are all names of Arctic places, plants, birds, weather, and seasons; but none of them are in English. Rather they are from two languages likely to be encountered north of the Arctic Circle, Iñupiat and Gwichʼin. By way of disclaimer, I knew nothing about either of these languages before reading the notes for this album, which then led to my consulting Wikipedia; so I doubt that I would be able to recognize the vowel sounds of either of them! I would thus conjecture that the vocal work contributes as much to that aforementioned blend as do the instrumental sonorities.

Each of the seven sections is given an evocative title, which is probably applied to associate sounds with settings. However, while the sections are designated as separate tracks on the album, the transitions themselves tend to be subtle. Those determined to “parse” the performance into its component parts will probably need to hone their auditory skills through a series of listening experiences. There are usually noticeable pauses, but the distinguishing factor is a shift in timbral qualities. Personally, I find that I can listen to the piece in its entirety without worrying too much about its “syntactic joints!”

“Become” Becomes a Trilogy

John Luther Adams on the back cover of his Become Trilogy album (courtesy of Naxos of America)

John Luther Adams is probably best known for creating musical compositions that reflect on natural surroundings in different environments, pursuing a technique that he has called “sonic geography.” That technique can be traced back to the Songbirdsongs collection, composed between 1974 and 1980. Most readers known that Olivier Messiaen was similarly inspired, eventually transcribing birdsongs into the mammoth ten-movement “Catalogue d’oiseaux” (catalog of birds) for solo piano. Adams chose to realize the transcriptions of Songbirdsongs by scoring them for piccolos and percussion.

Since that time his interest in natural sources has expanded as much as his diverse approaches to instrumentation. His pursuits would lead, in June of 2013, to the premiere performances of “Become Ocean” by the Seattle Symphony conducted by Ludovic Morlot. The score was awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music, and the recording based on those performances won the 2015 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. Furthermore, it was reported in December of 2015 that Taylor Swift was so impressed by the music that she made a $50,000 donation to the Seattle Symphony.

What is less known is that, while he was working on “Become Ocean,” Adams found himself in conversation with composer Steven Schick. He tells the story as follows:

… I went on at length about the music I’d begun to imagine [for “Become Ocean”]. “So you’re already composing a symphonic ocean,” Steve said. “Maybe for a smaller orchestra you could go ahead and compose that river in delta.” He had me, and I knew it. Within a week I’d begun work on Become River.

As a result, a little less than a year after “Become Ocean” had been premiered, Schick conducted the premiere performance of “Become River” with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra on April 3, 2014. Adams would then compose a “sequel” to “Become Ocean,” entitled “Become Desert,” which he scored for five ensembles. This was again premiered by the Seattle Symphony, this time on March 29, 2018, again conducted by Morlot.

All three of these compositions have now be packaged as a trilogy by Cantaloupe Music, including the first recording of “Become River” with Morlot again conducting members of the Seattle Symphony. Furthermore, the previous recordings of “Become Ocean” and “Become Desert” were remastered for the new release by Nathaniel Reichman. That new release will be available one week from today; and, as expected, Amazon.com has created a Web page for pre-orders.

Sadly, none of these pieces have been given a concert performance here in San Francisco. On the other hand, in July of 2017 we all had an opportunity to experience an outdoor performance of “Inuksuit,” produced through a partnership between SFJAZZ and the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. The fact is that spatial factors often play a significant role in the performance of Adams’ music, particularly where large ensembles are concerned. In “Become Ocean” one can appreciate those spatial qualities through the video account of its performance by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leonard Slatkin in February of 2019. While the video had some serious shortcomings, one could still acknowledge Slatkin’s efforts to direct listener attention to the significant role of those spatial qualities.

As a result, for all of the ingenuity that Reichman brings to remastering his sources, I doubt that even the best acoustic gear can do justice to any of the three compositions in this trilogy. To be fair, this is not to dismiss the recording experience entirely. Given an opportunity to attend a concert performance of any one of these works, the serious listener would do well to become acquainted with the thematic molecules of the score and the overall architecture of the entire composition. The fact is that, at the level of the details, there is more to an Adams score than mind can grasp during a single listening opportunity. The least one can do is prepare for the thematic context before experiencing the spatial realization of that context.

John Luther Adams’ String Quartet “Journeys”

from the Amazon.com Web page for the album being discussed

This Friday Cold Blue Music will release a new album of two string quartets by John Luther Adams. The title of the album is Lines Made by Walking, which is also the title of the first of the quartets to be presented. Completed in 2019, Adams counts it as his fifth quartet. (All of Adams’ quartets have titles, rather than numbers.) The second quartet on the album is “untouched,” which he composed in 2016 and identifies as his second quartet. As expected, Amazon.com has created a Web page to process pre-orders for this new release.

“Lines Made by Walking” is structured as three movements that basically outline a journey:

1. Up the Mountain
2. Along the Ridges
3. Down the Mountain

In Adams’ own words for the album jacket, composition is based on a technique “in which a single melodic line is superimposed on itself at different speeds.” These superpositions amount to “tempo canons;” and, in “Lines Made by Walking,” those canons consists of five, six, and seven independent layers. The attentive listener should have no trouble apprehending how these canons evoke slow ascent during the first movement. However, the “lateral traversal” in the second movement is a bit trickier, since it basically involves the superposition of ascending and descending lines (there being no “sideways” in sequences of different pitches). The final movement then amounts to a reflection of the opening in which all of the layers are descending.

The other quartet on the album, “untouched,” was the second of two quartets that Adams’ composed based on natural harmonics. The first of these was “The Wind in High Places,” written in 2011. As Adams put it, he “imagined the quartet as a single sixteen-string Aeolian harp.” The title of “untouched,” completed in 2016, reflects the fact that, in order to allow natural harmonics to sound, the musicians must avoid touching the fingerboards of their respective instruments. “untouched” is also in three movements, whose titles basically parallel those of the first composition on the album:

1. Rising
2. Crossing
3. Falling

Both of these quartets require intense focus on individual sonorities and the relationships that unfold as they are superposed. The performers on this album are the members of the JACK Quartet: violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell. They had recorded “The Wind in High Places” on an earlier Cold Blue Music album, which also included the suite Canticles of the Sky and “Dream of the Canyon Wren.” (Adding their album of the one-hour “Everything That Rises,” results in six quartets that Adams composed. My guess is that the relatively short “Dream of the Canyon Wren” was the one that was not included in his “string quartet count!”) What is important is that the JACK players have cultivated a “collective ear” for Adams’ approach to “natural” sonorities, particularly where intonation is concerned. Through these recordings the attentive listener should also be able to cultivate the necessary “ear for perception,” which makes the encounter with the music such an engaging one.

DSO Fumbles Significant Video Opportunity

Every now and then an instrumental composition arises that practically calls out to be supplemented with visual stimuli. I am not talking about works that accompany activity on a stage (as in opera or ballet) or a screen (as in movie soundtracks). I am talking about a concert experience that engages the eye as much as the ears. One of the best examples is probably Benjamin Britten’s Opus 34 “The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra,” which was originally commissioned for an educational documentary about the instruments of the orchestra but manages quite well in the concert hall where members of the audience can easily view “where the action is” as the variations for different instruments unfold.

“Become Ocean,” which won John Luther Adams the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music, has the potential to be such a composition. Many of Adams’ works seem to have been conceived as reflections on his natural surroundings in environments such as Alaska. However, “Become Ocean” was conceived on a more global scale, best expressed by the text that was included with the album of this composition performed by the Seattle Symphony conducted by Ludovic Morlot:

Life on this earth first emerged from the sea.

Today, as the polar ice melts and sea level rises,

we humans face the prospect that we may once again,

quite literally, become ocean.

When I wrote about this recording for Examiner.com back in November of 2014, I approached the music as a more extended approach to a technique that Arnold Schoenberg had explored in 1909, which he called “Chord-Colors.” When Leonard Slatkin preceded his performance of “Become Ocean” with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO) in February of 2019, he began by emphasizing the significance of auditory coloration in the score, perhaps overshadowing the more familiar factors of what we tend to recognize as themes. Slatkin’s performance was given video documentation, and that video is now part of the DSO Replay archive on the DSO Web site.

Leonard Slatkin’s “visual design” for his performance of “Become Ocean” (from the Web page for the performance being discussed)

For that performance Slatkin rearranged seating in such a way that different sections could be highlighted through lighting of different colors. The strings occupied the front. Behind them, to the left, were the winds, mirrored by the brass on the right. Two harps sat “at the boundary” between the strings and these two other sections, while the rear was occupied by the percussion.

I would like to believe that between the geometry of the layout and the lighting design, those in Orchestra Hall could follow all the activity churning behind Adams’ rhetoric of gradually changing sonorities and dynamics. Sadly, being there seems to have been the only way to appreciate the rich relationships between what one could see and the associated acts of listening. Those that decide to sample the resulting video are likely to find themselves somewhere along the scale between confusion and frustration.

The good news is that Slatkin’s conducting was clearly sensitive to the physical layout of all the factors that contribute to the overall sonorities. Between his conducting and no end of attentive balancing by his audio engineers, one could not only appreciate the “progression” of those “Chord-Colors” but also discern the “mixture of components” producing each of those colors. Sadly, such discernment would have been better facilitated by keeping one’s eyes closed. More often than not, the camera cues were looking in the wrong place, often observing musicians just sitting there and sometimes looking at a performer relegated below the range of audibility by the audio team. Particularly frustrating was the handling of the two harps, each of which had a distinctively different part to play; and almost always the camera was looking at the wrong one!

Thus, while Slatkin’s opening remarks could not have been more informative and while his overall management of the score was equally impressive, particularly in the few episodes of major shifts in dynamics, where the video is concerned, this is a performance that is best heard without being seen.

Cold Blue to Release 6th John Luther Adams CD

from Amazon.com

This Friday Cold Blue Music will release its sixth album consisting entirely of the music of John Luther Adams. This past July, prior to the John Luther Adams Festival organized by SFJAZZ, this site discussed the preceding five of these recordings prior to a “Listening Party” offered as part of the festival. The most recent of those five was The Wind in High Places, featuring the JACK Quartet, which participated in the festival, performing two of the selections on the album, the title composition and “Dream of the Canyon Wren.” The new recording consists of only a single piece, not quite an hour in duration, “Everything That Rises,” which was commissioned by SFJAZZ to be performed by the JACK Quartet, currently consisting of violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell. As usual, Amazon.com is taking pre-orders for this recording.

Adams makes several appearances in Lou Harrison: American Musical Maverick, the authoritative and comprehensive biography by Bill Alves and Brett Campbell. Adams shared Harrison’s interest in just intonation, founded on the premise that intervals should be based on integer ratios, in contrast to the proportions based in irrational numbers required for equal-tempered tuning. “Everything That Rises” is Adams’ latest effort to explore to sonorous possibilities behind those integer ratios; and the result may well be described as a lyric poem in honor of the natural harmonic series.

Since there are an infinite number of natural harmonics (the “enumerable infinity” of the natural numbers, for those with enough mathematics to know that there is more than one kind of infinity), Adams clearly could not take in the entire series. However, by choosing a fundamental pitch that is below the range of audibility (C0), he allows himself enough scope to take in a generous sector, which extends so high that the intervals between the upper harmonics are almost no longer distinguishable. Furthermore, the listener appreciates the onset of this condition, because the entire composition is based on pitch sequences that rise through the harmonic series.

These ascents take the form of what Adams calls “clouds.” They are realized by score pages that lack both time signatures and bar lines. All that is indicated is the ascent through the harmonic series; and that ascent emerges as a (cloudy) cluster in which each of the four instruments rises at roughly (but not exactly) the same pace. The overall structure consists of sixteen of these rising clusters, which unfold over that roughly hour-long duration. As the final cluster rises to its ultimate height, the very sense of pitch “evaporates into the cloud” through bowing that no longer yields a pitched vibrating string but, instead, a sigh-like sound of “pre-vibration.”

My guess is that, at this point, there will be skeptical readers, who already know most of my thoughts about recording technology, wondering whether any recording can do justice to such a prodigious theoretical vision. Indeed, the same question may even be asked about concert performances. “Everything That Rises” was given its premiere performance as part of that SFJAZZ Festival. By now anyone familiar with concert venues in San Francisco knows that the Robert N. Miner Auditorium of the SFJAZZ Center is, for all intents and purposes, entirely devoid of natural acoustic qualities, meaning that all listening is mediated through electronic technology. Thus, for a piece like “Everything That Rises,” quality of listening is likely to be always (or almost always) dependent on the quality of that mediating technology, whether at a public performance or in the privacy of one’s own listening room.

With that as a disclaimer, I think it is important to credit the full spectrum of production values assumed by Cold Blue in creating this release. The attentive and sympathetic listener should have no trouble apprehending what Adams’ wished to achieve; and this is due to not only capture and reproduction but also the keen sensitivity to natural harmonics cultivated by all four of the JACK players. Perception might not take in every last detail of the physical signal that Adams aspired to generate; but there is definitely enough there to “get the message.”

What about the duration? By all rights sitting still for an hour should be no big deal. Most “feature-length” movies require at least that much attention, not to mention individual acts in an opera by Richard Wagner or a full symphony by Gustav Mahler. When it comes to “extreme listening,” “Everything That Rises” is a walk in the park when compared with Morton Feldman’s second string quartet, whose performance requires a little over six hours! However, as Philip Campbell observed in reporting on the JACK premiere performance of “Everything That Rises” for The Bay Area Reporter, Feldman may provide the appropriate mindset for listening to this Adams composition. Campbell cited “the almost painful beauty of slow musical evolution and the silence between the notes” in Feldman’s scores; and, while I do not find Adams’ music painful, I would credit it with a poignancy, which I suspect arises from the sense the listener gets of how small (s)he is in the presence of the composer’s attempt to evoke a vision of cosmic proportions.

Reflecting on Brian Brooks’ Reflections

Brian Brooks and Wendy Whelan (courtesy of San Francisco Performances)

Last night in Herbst Theatre, choreographer Brian Brooks returned to San Francisco Performances, again with with dancer Wendy Whelan, to give the first of two performances of his one-hour composition Some of a Thousand Words. (The second performance will take place tonight, again at 7:30 p.m.) The entire stage was exposed and empty, except for a rectangle of what may best be described as wallpaper hanging at the back. Also, at the very rear of the stage area, music stands had been set up for the members of the Brooklyn Rider string quartet, violinists Johnny Gandelsman and Colin Jacobsen, violist Nicholas Cords, and cellist Michael Nicolas.

Some of a Thousand Words was structured in four movements followed by a coda. That coda had the title “First Fall;” and it was the duet, set to Philip Glass’ third (“Mishima”) string quartet, that was included in the program when Whelan and Brooks gave their first SFP recital in 2015. The heart of the full composition was its third movement, for which Jacobsen wrote “BTT” and led the Brooklyn Rider performance. (Gandelsman was first violin for the rest of the evening.) Each of the other four movements was structured around the work of the different composer. The first movement was set to “Arches,” a cello solo by Jacob Cooper. This was followed by Tyondai Braxton’s “ArpRec1,” which was played by Brooklyn Rider without either dancer appearing. The fourth movement set the last two of the three sections of John Luther Adams’ The Wind in High Places, “Maclaren Summit” and “Looking Towards Hope.”

Brooks is an abstractionist with a keen eye for detail, and those details permeated his duo work with Whelan throughout the evening. The evening began with the two of them executing a series of motions that combined the casual with the stylized. Both of them were staring intently out into the audience, keeping their gaze fixed for much of the first movement. It would not have taken long for those familiar with Jerome Robbins’ “Afternoon of a Faun” to realize that the dancers were not staring into empty space (or, for that matter, at the audience). Rather they were looking into a large mirror on the wall of the studio in which this choreography was constructed.

On my way back from the concert, I began to reflect (word chosen deliberately) on how much of Brooks’ choreography seemed to be derived from the idea of reflection and the much broader construct of symmetry. Those who think that symmetry is a relatively simple concept would do well to appreciate that the mathematician Hermann Weyl wrote an entire book on the topic, classifying a rich typology of symmetries on the basis of their respective underlying constructs based on abstract algebra. Many of those constructs were on display, not only in the choreography but also in the repeated design and design elements of that wallpaper. I would therefore venture to guess that the overall scope of Some of a Thousand Words involved a “tour” of many of those different instances of symmetry, all realized in terms of the relations between the two dancers.

However abstract this all may sound, there was nothing mechanical about how the dancers realized the choreography. The narrative may not have had any of those personality types that we associate with “story” ballets; but, if the choreography was “about” anything, it was about the different ways in which two individuals can relate to one another. That goal was realized strictly through movement, however, since facial expressions never intruded upon the unfolding of Brooks’ language of patterns.

For that matter, the music also refrained from intrusion. Cooper’s piece was perfect for laying the groundwork, since the cellist gradually unfolded the exploration of upper harmonics based on a single fundamental drone as Whelan and Brooks established their initial relationship with their “virtual mirror.” It would probably also be fair to say that, as the choreographic structures began to explore less familiar varieties of symmetry, the music ventured into more elaborate relationships between pitch classes and rhythms. Indeed, to the extent that the perspectives on symmetry were at their richest in the third movement, I would not be surprised if Jacobsen developed his score in conjunction with Brooks’ evolution of his choreography.

Nevertheless, there were times when I realized that taking all of this in was more demanding that I had anticipated. Indeed, I had to content with the fact that I often wanted to shift my attention to the music, simply because both the scores and their respective interpretations were so alluring. I then realized that any such shift of attention might take me away from the many fascinating details in Brooks’ choreography. The fact is that I really wanted to get better acquainted with both the choreography and the music, and it has been quite some time since I came out of a dance concert feeling that way.

Visiting the Cold Blue Music Vault

It took this past summer’s John Luther Adams Festival organized by SFJAZZ to get Jim Fox’ Cold Blue Music label on my radar. The label provided me with a generous sampling of Adams’ compositions that served my writing a background article about the composer. Since that time I have sampled recent releases more sporadically than I would have wished without giving much thought to the aesthetic compass that has guided Fox’ production values in his choice of repertoire. Fortunately, Fox was kind enough to provide me with two of his earlier anthology releases. To some extent these now serve a bit like a time machine; but I should begin with the disclaimer that they take me to a past that I enjoyed very much back when it was the present.

According to background material that Fox provided, most of the works that show up on these anthology recordings collect compositions that were composed specifically for the CD being released. The earlier of the recordings I have now encountered is basically a collection of six pieces featuring the talents of clarinetist Marty Walker, who plays bass clarinet as well as B-flat clarinet. The disc is structured around four pieces, each by a different composer, with two very short “Interlude” pieces (which may well have been improvisations) inserted into the sequence.

I should begin with my one issue of discontent with this album, which is the absence of any useful background material about the pieces being performed. That includes instrumentation, with the qualifier that most listeners will be able to figure that out for themselves. The very first track is Adams’ “Dark Wind,” which seems to have been scored for bass clarinet, piano (Bryan Pezzone), and a percussionist (Amy Knoles) playing both vibraphone and marimba. The “Interlude” pieces are solos; and the remaining compositions are for clarinet and string quartet, the performers being the members of the Amelite Consortium Strings. They include violinists Maria Newman and Peter Kent and violist Valerie Dimond. Greg Gottlieb plays cello for Fox’ own contribution to the album, “Between the Wheels.” The cellist for the other two pieces, “Thread of Summer” by Michael Jon Fink and “When April May” by Rick Cox, is Dan Smith.

The overall rhetoric across the entire album is one of quietude. Listening to these tracks will be served best by a setting with as little interference as possible. This contrasts significantly with pieces like Adams’ “Inuksuit,” which is supposed to be performed in an setting in which the music that is performed is enhanced by the natural sounds of the physical environment. “Dark Wind,” on the other hand, requires the listener to be keenly aware of the work’s subtle textures. The recording was made in 2001, meaning that the piece is, in many respects, a predecessor of “Dark Waves,” based on a similar approach and composed in 2007. (As was previously observed, “Dark Waves” can be taken as “preparatory material for “Become Ocean.”) One might almost say that the Adams composition orients the attentive listener in preparation for the pieces by Fink, Cox, and Fox that follow it on the album.

The later anthology, which is entitled simply Cold Blue Two, is based on recording sessions that took place between 2008 and 2012; and the album itself was released in November of 2012. Each of the fourteen tracks is by a different composer; and the four composers that contributed to Walker’s clarinet album are all included, as is Daniel Lentz, whose single-composition album River of 1,000 Streams was discussed on this site about a month ago. This, too, is an album that deserves attentive listening in the absence of any external interference.

In this case I have to confess that I have some personal favorites among the contributing composers, particularly Gavin Bryars and Larry Polansky, both of whom I have been following in a variety of different settings. Bryars’ “It Never Rains” is scored for electric guitar (Cox) and low strings (Alma Lisa Fernandez on viola, Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick on cello, and James Bergman on bass). Bryars does not waste any time prioritizing the bass part, which will be clear to anyone who knows that the bass is his own instrument. Polansky, on the other hand, also has a Cold Blue album of his own, freeHorn, which was released this past August and provides some excellent examples of his technique in working with natural harmonics. His “Eskimo Lullaby” is performed by John Schneider playing a National Steel guitar specifically designed for just-intonation tuning. In a similar vein it is worth observing that Polansky’s track is preceded by James Tenney’s “Mallets in the Air,” which requires a string quartet (violinists Andrew McIntosh and Andrew Tholl, violist Mark Menzies, and cellist Ashley Waters) to play with a just-intonation instrument, the diamond marimba designed by Harry Partch (played by Erin Barnes).

Brooklyn Rider will Make its SFP Debut in the Dance Series

As was observed this past June, this season’s Dance Series presented by San Francisco Performances (SFP) will involve more than the dance. The Brooklyn Rider string quartet will make its SFP debut by providing “live” music for the performance of Some of a Thousand Words. This is a full-evening composition created by choreographer Brian Brooks, which he will perform as a duet with former New York City Ballet star Wendy Whelan.

This will be the second time that Whelan and Brooks will present a program for SFP. Their debut recital included the duet “First Fall,” which has now been incorporated into Some of a Thousand Words. Brooks created his choreography working closely with Brooklyn Rider, whose members are violinists Johnny Gandelsman and Colin Jacobsen, violist Nicholas Cords, and cellist Michael Nicolas. The resulting score includes a new piece that Jacobsen composed for Brooks, along with selections from works by John Luther Adams, Tyondai Braxton, and Philip Glass.

Some of a Thousand Words will be given two performances, both at 7:30 p.m., on Wednesday, November 29, and Thursday, November 30, respectively. The venue will be Herbst Theatre, whose entrance is the main entrance to the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue, located on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. The venue is thus convenient for public transportation on both north-south and east-west Muni lines. Ticket prices are $40 for the Balcony and the side areas of the Dress Circle, $55 for the remainder of the Dress Circle except for the front rows, the rear of the Orchestra, and all of the Boxes, and $65 for the remainder of the Orchestra and the front of the Dress Circle. City Box Office has created separate event pages for the Wednesday and Thursday performances, each with an interface to the seating diagram that facilitates the ability of visitors to select their seats. A discussion with the artists will take place immediately after the Thursday performance.

This will be the first of only two offerings in the Dance Series. As a result, subscriptions for the full series are still on sale at the respective prices of $70, $100, and $120. However, because the second concert will take place in the YBCA Theater, there will be a different relationship between price and location in the house. Unfortunately, these subscriptions are not available for online purchase. However, they can be purchased by phone by calling 415-677-0325.

John Luther Adams’ “Inuksuit” at Lands End

This afternoon John Luther Adams’ “Inuksuit” was given the sort of outdoor performance that the composer had intended by virtue of a partnership between SFJAZZ and the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. As had been previously observed, this is an open-ended composition whose score pages may be distributed among 9 to 99 percussionists. Taken as a whole, the piece has a three-part structure.

The first section may be said to be “about” air. It involves different approaches to amplifying human breath, but some of the performers play whirly tubes and other objects that only make sound when spun at a rapid pace. All the performers began in a single location and gradually dispersed themselves to a variety of “percussion stations” situated throughout much of Lands End:

One of the "percussion stations" for "Inuksuit" (photograph by James Parr)

This made for a gradual transition into the second section, which consisted primarily of playing drums, cymbals, and gongs. I also heard one of those sirens operated by a hand-crank from a distance; but I took that to be one of the last vestiges of the first section. Another gradual transition led into the final section, which consisted primarily of metallophones but with some lingering presence of the cymbals and gongs.

Those present for this occasion were not given any “instructions.” Indeed, the most ideal audience members were probably those who encountered this performance by accident, having planned merely to take a hike in the park. However, it was clear that the word had gotten out about this event, because I have never before seen Lands End as crowded as it was this afternoon. The good news was that, for the most part, this audience “got” that this was music to be experienced as physical sensations distributed over a large space, rather than sit-still-and-listen concert music. Many were there with their dogs; and even the dogs seemed to “get it” (except for those who got too close to a really loud cymbal crash).

On the other had there was a downside to this impressive turnout. The Conservancy has some very strict rules about where visitors to Lands End should and should not go. They believe that “good fences make good neighbors;” and any do-not-pass signals are easily recognized. Unfortunately, some of the percussionists were playing on the other side of a few of those fences. The result was that there were a fair number of listeners who felt that, if the performers go could there, they could too. My guess is that the Conservancy was not terribly happy about this state of affairs; but, for the most part, disruption was kept pretty minimal.

As to the act of listening, I came away with the strong sense that every listener was entitled to make whatever (s)he wished out of being in the presence of the performers. Personally, I found myself wandering from one “station” to another. At any particularly station, I would try to get at least a brief look at the score and then try to relate what I saw to what I was hearing. I would then pay more attention to how this “local listening” fit into the context of other stations that were audible but not necessarily visible. Having dealt with listening both in-the-small and in-the-large, I then moved on to another station and repeated the exercise. This kept me rather absorbed into the entire composition all the way into the transition to the metallophones. After checking out a few of the metallophone players (whose sounds did not tend to carry very far), I felt I had experienced enough, allowing the act of taking my leave to be situated in those sound-making processes that were still active. (For the record, when I was leaving I also saw one percussionist stowing his gear!)

Having then boarded the Geary bus, I felt a warm sense of satisfaction over having had the opportunity to experience “Inuksuit,” presumably in the sort of setting that Adams had intended for the composition.

John Luther Adams and the Act of Attentive Listening

A little less than a week ago, I wrote about the outdoor performance of “Inuksuit” that will be given as part of the John Luther Adams Festival organized by SFJAZZ in conjunction with the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. The other concerts in this series will be preceded by a “Listening Party” that will be held in the Miner Auditorium of the SFJAZZ Center, which Adams himself has curated and will introduce. I must confess to a bit of skepticism where this idea is concerned.

I have pursued a generous number of Adams recordings that go all the way back to a vinyl of songbirdsongs that I had to sacrifice when I gave up my turntable while downsizing for my current condominium accommodations. I do not regret that loss, only because there was too much subtlety in Adams’ music to be captured by the equipment used to make that recording. Digital technology enabled significant improvements in capture technology; and, as a result, if one had the proper playback, one could at least begin to appreciate what made Adams’ music so special. Nevertheless, for the better part of his catalog, there is no substitute for being in the presence of musicians performing his scores.

Having said all that, I should still reiterate what regular readers of this site already know. If one is planning to attend a performance of a piece not previously heard, there is much value in a good recording that will provide some basic orientation and probably set more than a few expectations. It is thus important to note that the first actual concert in the Festival, on Thursday, July 27, in Miner Auditorium, will present the JACK Quartet playing the three selections on The Wind in High Places. They recorded two of those selections for a Cold Blue Music album, which was released in January of 2015. Those pieces are the title composition and the final track, “Dream of the Canyon Wren.”

I have previously written about how Adams shared Lou Harrison’s interest in the use of just intonation. “The Wind in High Places” takes that interest to a more refined level. The members of the string quartet performing the piece play only on open strings, touched only at nodal points to yield the pitches of the natural harmonics of the overtone series. As Adams’ put it in his notes for the album, the string quartet serves as as a sixteen-stringed Aeolian harp, translating the wind of the composition’s title into the vibrations of overtones on one or more of those strings.

This can be a challenge for many listeners. This site previously cited the psychological phenomenon of “categorical perception,” which fools mind into “hearing” the pitches of an equal-tempered piano when the frequencies differ by a small amount. Thus, when listening to “The Wind in High Places,” the cerebral cortex has to do more than a little work to keep the auditory cortex from incorrectly classifying the pitches of those vibrating strings. A recording provides one way to “train” mind to accept that it is listening to “the right thing” and must “disable” any attempt at categorical perception. Personal experience has taught me that this is best achieved on one’s own, rather than as part of an audience, which advocates “private listening” the the Cold Blue Music album.

Private listening is also likely to serve better any preparation for “Dream of the Canyon Wren.” From a personal point of view, this piece took me back to the songbirdsongs album, which was based on bird songs Adams had encountered in rural Georgia during the late Seventies. We tend to associate Olivier Messiaen with making music out of transcriptions of birdsong. However, once the mind behind the ear comes to accept Adams’ conscious decision to move beyond the limitations of equal temperament, there is no confusing his music, whatever instrumentation he may engage, with Messiaen’s!

The album The Wind in High Places also includes Canticles of the Sky, a suite in four movements that was written originally for the Calder Quartet. Adams subsequently rescored this piece for an ensemble of cellos with sixteen separate parts. That is the version on the recording, performed by the Northwestern University Cello Ensemble, conducted by Artistic Director Hans Jørgen Jensen. Each of this suite’s movements amounts to a musical impression of different visual features observed in the sky in different geographical settings. The textures of the cello version are clearly thicker than those of the string quartet version, and Adams seems to have exploited this difference to provide clearer distinctions across the visual impressions. Nevertheless, the album should go a long way towards preparing those listening to the string quartet version, which the JACK Quartet has included on its program, particularly when it comes to orienting those subtle changes through which Adams distinguishes motion from stasis.

Another Cold Blue album will serve to prepare listeners for the final Festival concert in Miner Auditorium on Sunday, July 30. Percussionist Doug Perkins, who will be organizing and directing Saturday’s performance of “Inuksuit,” will join forces with pianist Adam Marks for a performance of “Red Arc/Blue Veil.” Given how much attention has been given to Adams’ interest in natural harmonics, it may seem more than a little ironic that he would devote such attention to the piano. However, “Red Arc/Blue Veil” requires electronic processing of both the piano and the vibraphone and crotales played in the percussion part. This is as much a piece driven by the pursuit of unique sonorities as “The Wind in High Places” is; and the curious listener will definitely be introduced to those sonorities through the Cold Blue album, which was also given the title Red Arc/Blue Veil.

Indeed, this album is also a valuable source of orientation for what has become Adams’ best-known composition, his “Become Ocean,” which won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music and whose recording received the 2015 GRAMMY Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition. This piece, whose duration is about 40 uninterrupted minutes, amounts of an auditory reflection on large masses of water in the same way that Canticles of the Sky looked upwards, so to speak. While the album Become Ocean is still readily available, it is worth noting that many of that piece’s contrapuntal textures can be traced back to “Dark Waves,” which Adams composed in 2007 for two pianos and electronic sounds. This piece, which is about one-third the duration of “Become Ocean,” occupies the first track of the Red Arc/Blue Veil album, on which it is performed by pianists Stephen Drury and Yukiko Takagi.

The album also provides one of the most fascinating efforts by Adams to evoke diverse sonorities from limited resources. “Qilyuan” is scored for four bass drums, played by Scott Deal and Stuart Gerber. Adams is far from the only composer to appreciate and explore just how diverse the bass drum can be; but “Qilyuan” is definitely one of the most compelling expressions of that appreciation. The album also includes Drury playing “Among Red Mountains,” a rich and rhythmic evocation of full-handed chords. As was the case with birdsong, one can appreciate Adams following a direction similar to that of Messiaen’s approach to large stone masses of geographical features; but here, again, Adams’ voice will never be confused with Messiaen’s.

On the other hand Adams’ use of such chords can be found in an entirely different context in “Four Thousand Holes,” the title track of another Cold Blue Music album. In this case Drury is accompanied by Deal playing vibraphone and orchestra bells, while Adams himself provides an electronic drone, which he calls an “aura.” In his notes for the booklet, Adams explains that this piece is based on “the most basic elements of Western music—major and minor triads and four-bar phrases.” One may be reminded of how triads emerge as the “punch line” of “Grand Pianola Music” by “that other John Adams;” but, in “Four Thousand Holes,” the triads constitute the alpha and the omega, so to speak, rather than the exclamation mark in the finale. The Four Thousand Holes album also includes Drury conducting his Calithumpian Consort in a performance of Adams’ “…and bells remembered…,” composed in 2005 and scored for percussion ensemble.

Since plans for a listening party served to trigger writing this article in the first place, listeners should be advised that Cold Blue Music is definitely one of the best sources for those curious about Adams. To date five albums have been released, each devoted entirely to his compositions. Thus it seems fair to accord the other two at least a brief summary:

1. The Light That Fills the World is the earliest of the Cold Blue releases. The booklet offers little background information; but the Amazon.com Web page provides a Product Description beginning with “Three darkly textured pieces for bass clarinet, marimba, vibraphone, piano, organ, violin, and doublebass.” All three of these piece were written within the relatively short interval of time between 1998 and 2001.
2. the place we began, on the other hand, is a single composition that consists of four tape-based soundscapes. In this case Adams provided a brief note for the booklet, explaining that his source material came from “several boxes of reel-to-reel tapes that I’d recorded in the early 1970s.” He did not mention that this would have been when he was a student at the California Institute of the Arts, where his composition teachers were James Tenney and Leonard Stein. On the other hand he does explain the title of the composition. It turns out to be a misquotation of T. S. Eliot, but the actual source is just as relevant. It comes from the beginning of the final stanza of “Little Gidding,” the last of the four poems that Eliot published as Four Quartets:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Parks Conservancy will Enable Outdoor Performance of John Luther Adams

Yesterday this site wrote about the close relationship between Lou Harrison and John Luther Adams and their shared interest in composing music based on the use of just intonation. That account overlooked the extent to which Adams’ imaginative approaches to composing were complemented by his passionate interest in environmental issues. Thus, after graduating from the California Institute of the Arts, Adams took a “day job” in environmental protection; and it was through that job that he first traveled to Alaska in 1975. The natural settings in that state became an inspiring influence on his work as a composer, and he ended up living there between 1978 and 2014.

For better or worse, composers only seem to come to public attention after some major prize has been awarded. In Adams case it was the conjunction of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music and the 2015 GRAMMY Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition. The work that garnered both of these awards was “Become Ocean;” and, before it thrust him into a bright public spotlight, the composer was known to a relatively limited few, who found that they had to refer to him as “the other John Adams.”

from YouTube

“Become Ocean” was one of a series of compositions inspired by the “classical” elements. Completed in 2013, it was followed in 2014 by “Sila: The Breath of the World,” depicting the element of air. It had been preceded by the depiction of earth in 2009 by “Inuksuit.” (Around the time that Adams completed “Become Ocean” for full orchestra, he also completed a chamber orchestra composition entitled “Become River.”)

There is an old joke (that I have to hear all too often) that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. It would not be out of the question to assert that, in “Inuksuit,” Adams found that he could write about geography through the medium of music. The title is an Inuit noun that refers to large stone makers that would be placed by different indigenous communities in the northern polar regions to provide orientation in the vast and otherwise featureless Arctic spaces.

The composition was scored for 9 to 99 percussion players, but the most significant specification is that the performers should be widely dispersed in an outdoor area. Ironically, it’s first performance in New York took place indoors at the Park Avenue Armory:

from YouTube

Adams used rhythmic patterns and their distribution among the performers to depict the orienting markers. However, at the same time, the flexibility of the score allows for an open-ended interpretation, which reflects the vastness of the space in which those markers have been situated.

At the end of this month “Inuksuit” will come to San Francisco. Its performance will take place as part of the John Luther Adams Festival organized by SFJAZZ, which will run from Wednesday, July 26 to Sunday, July 30. However, thanks to the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, the score will be given the sort of outdoor performance that the composer had in mind. Doug Perkins will serve as director and will be responsible for situating the placement of percussionists at Lands End and the Sutro Baths, both situated at the western end of Geary Boulevard. Listeners will then be able to explore the geography of the region guided by the auditory cues provided by the percussionists.

Lands End, courtesy of SFJAZZ

As might be anticipated, this performance will be offered free to anyone happening to be in the right place at the right time. This is due in part to support from Art in the Parks, one of the programs affiliated with the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. The performance will begin at 1 p.m. on Saturday, July 29. Adams did not provide any constraints on the composition’s duration.

Two Generations of Just Intonation Composers on MicroFest

I have not written about MicroFest Records since the first round of releases came out in the final quarter of 2015. However, as result of my recent interest in Lou Harrison’s interest in the use of just intonation and recent appearance of the Partch ensemble on the album Color Theory released by the PRISM Quartet, I have been seeking out listening experiences involving intervals based on integer ratios. My quest took me to another early MicroFest release entitled Just Strings, which couples several of Harrison’s pieces with two works by John Luther Adams. Harrison sat on a jury that gave Adams a composition award in 1973, the year in which he graduated from the California Institute of the Arts; and Harrison would subsequently become both role model and friend to Adams.

The album is named after a trio of members of Partch. These are guitarist John Schneider, who founded Partch, harpist Alison Bjorkedal, and percussionist T.J. Troy. The name (clearly) does not refer to all members playing string instruments. Instead, it refers to the group playing music written in just intonation with all strings tuned to provide intervals based on integer ratios.

The Adams selections are two suites of five dances each, based on songs in two of the indigenous languages of North America, Athabaskan and Yup’ik. In both of these collections, Adams uses the simplest approach to tuning that involves more than the octave: All intervals involve ratios of integers constructed from multiples of 2 and 3. Such an approach is sometimes called Pythagorean tuning.

The Harrison pieces, on the other hand, are far more diverse in both tuning and styles. Much of the album is devoted to his two harp suites, neither of which were initially conceived as such. The first suite is a collection of pieces composed between 1952 and 1977, and the second consists of works composed between 1951 and 1992. The album also includes “Lyric Phrases,” composed in 1972, and “In Honor of the Divine Mr. Handel,” composed in 1991.

A significant percentage of the tracks on this album were recorded for the very first time. That includes the entirety of the two Adams collections. Two of the tracks, one movement from the second harp suite and the Handel homage, also involve accompaniment by the Harvey Mudd College American Gamelan.

In contrast to the Adams selections, every one of the Harrison tracks involves a different tuning system. (These are all enumerated with all of the corresponding interval ratios in the booklet essay provided by Bill Alves.) It is thus no surprise that, when Meredith Clark played Harrison’s music in the second concert of the Other Minds 22 festival entitled Just 100: Homage to Lou Harrison, she played only one solo selection on a diatonic harp, the “Threnody to the Memory of Oliver Daniel,” which was included in the second suite.

Why should there be such diversity in tuning? While Alves’ booklet notes focus the attention on “the sweet harmonies that result” from integer-based tuning, my guess is that both Harrison and Adams were as interested in departures from our expectations as they were in having consonances that were … more consonant. As was previously observed, such a departure was most evident when Britten explicitly called for the thirteenth harmonic in the solo horn fanfare that begins his Opus 31 serenade. In Adams’ system, which is based on C, the initial semitone to C-sharp is clearly audible as different from the equal-tempered semitone. Similar differences are also evident in some of Harrison’s favorite ratios, including 5:4 (the major third) and 7:4 (the minor seventh). (There is some argument over whether 7:4 is the “blue” seventh, which supposedly originated in the Mississippi Delta and found its way into jazz. I am not knowledgeable enough to offer a considered opinion; but I am pretty confident that, when I am listening to recordings of Bessie Smith, she is not singing equal-tempered intervals, regardless of what her pianist may be doing!)

Both Harrison and Adams seem to have come to their interest in using integer ratios from a common source, the recognition that, when we consider cultures other than our own and think, instead, in terms of “world music,” there is nothing “sacred” about equal-tempered tuning. This is not to imply that Western music is some sort of “outlier” in its use of equal temperament. Harrison’s interest in Indonesian music led him to the slendro, a pentatonic scale in which all of the intervals were very close to identical. In 1960 he followed up on that discovery by writing a “Concerto in Slendro,” scored for violin, two tack pianos, celesta, and percussion. In addition Harrison realized that music he wrote on commission would inevitably involve performers whose listening was biased in favor of equal temperament.

Thus, the Harrison selections on this album reflect pieces he wrote to satisfy his own interests. For example, “Music for Bill and Me,” which is in the first harp suite, was written in such a way that he and William Colvig, his life partner, could play it as a duet on diatonic harps. The Adams collections, on the other hand, can probably be taken as the results of “field studies,” similar to those conducted by Zoltán Kodály and Béla Bartók in Eastern Europe. The value of this album is that, through the wide diversity of its relatively short tracks, it acclimates the “mind behind the ear” to accept these “unconventional” intervals as just another approach to “being natural.” Those willing to approach those tracks with attentive listening may find themselves listening to more “traditional” equal-tempered compositions with a new perspective.