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.