Score And Parts/Download-John Luther Adams: Dark Waves for two Pianos and Electronics (included as a download). Duration: 12 minutes. 'As I composed this music I pondered the ominousevents of our times: terrorism and war intensifying storms and wildfires the melting of the polar ice and the rising of the seas. Yet even in the presence of our deepening fears we find ourselves immersed in the mysteriousbeauty of this world. Amid the turbulent waves we may still find the light the wisdom and the courage we need to pass through this darkness of our own making.' - John LutherAdams
SKU: HL.231892
9.25x12.0x0.098 inches. English.
John Luther Adams' Dark Wind for instrumental quartet (Bass Clarinet, Piano, Marimba and Vibraphone). Score and parts. Dedicated to Marty Walker.
SKU: HL.263038
UPC: 888680952907. 12.0x16.5x0.565 inches.
“Over the years my orchestral music has become simpler and more expansive. Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing (1991-95) contains four different musical textures. In the White Silence (1998) has three. For Lou Harrison (2002) reduces this to just two. In Dark Waves (2007), I finally got to one. When I first heard that piece I began to wonder if I could sustain a similar sound for a longer span of time. The result is Become Ocean, a meditation on the vast, deep and mysterious tides of existence. The title is borrowed from a mesostic verse that John Cage wrote in honor of Lou Harrison's birthday. Likening Harrison's music to a river in delta, Cage writes: Listening to it we become ocean. Life on this earth first emerged from the sea. And as the polar ice melts and sea level rises, we humans find ourselves facing the prospect that once again we may quite literally become ocean.†John Luther Adams.
SKU: HL.233290
12.0x9.25x0.467 inches. English.
John Luther Adams' The Light That Fills the World for Chamber Ensemble (6 players). Duration: 13 minutes. The Light That Fills the World was written in late winter and early spring when - following the long darkness of winter - the world is still white and filled with new light. If the unrelenting texture of this music embodies stasis, I hope its prevalent tone evokes the ecstatic. The title of the piece is borrowed from an Inuit song which sings of the close relationship between beauty and terror, risk and revelation. - John Luther Adams, Fairbanks, Alaska, August 1999 Includes Score and parts plus spiral-bound keyboard part.
SKU: HL.234541
9.25x12.0x0.571 inches. English.
'Four Thousand Holes is my own effort to re-appropriate and reclaim for myself something of my own musical past. For the first time since my days as a rocker, I've chosen to restrict myself to major and minor triads - those most basic elements of Western music (both pop and classical). But I've tried to assimilate them fully into my own musical world. Approaching these simple chords as found objects, I've superimposed them in multiple streams of tempo, to create darker harmonies and lush fields of sound. In recent years, I've been fortunate enough to form a close musical partnership with Stephen Drury. Steve's extraordinary gifts inspired me to explore expansive forms and textures (similar to those of my orchestral music) with only one or two performers, In essence, Four Thousand Holes is a concerto. To begin I composed the score for the electronic tracks. Steve recorded all of the individual chords that occur in the score. I took these recordings, time-stretched them, reversed their envelopes, and knit the reversed sounds together with their original decays. The resulting waves of sound I layered into ten independent tracks to create the virtual 'orchestra'. Next I composed the Piano part, articulating the peaks of all the electronic tracks simultaneously - a feat of coordination that demands considerable virtuosity from the pianist. Finally I composed another multi-layered part for metallic percussion sounds that I think of as sparks emanating from the piano. In Four Thousand Holes, strong musical currents fall and rise, again and again, as points and lines are juxtaposed with heavy, hammered chords. The mix of 'live' and electronic sounds blurs the distinction between musical figure and ground. As in much of my recent music, I conceive of the entire piece as a single complex sonority that evolves slowly. As we settle into the sound, we begin to hear longer lines, counterpoint, and maybe even the occasional trace of a tune.' - John Luther Adams.
