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!