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ADAMS, JOHN LUTHER 7 Titles


Artist	Title	Format	Label	Catalog #

Artist	Title	Format	Label	Catalog #
ADAMS, JOHN LUTHER	Four Thousand Holes	CD	COLD BLUE MUSIC	CB 035CD
$13.00 NOT IN STOCK, SPECIAL ORDER "Four Thousand Holes is a sometimes lush, sometimes fragile, rhythmically complex and technically demanding work for piano and mallet percussion (performed by the extraordinary pianist Stephen Drury and percussionist Scott Deal) and ghostly electronic 'auras'--electronic sounds created by processing the acoustic instruments' sonorities. Unlike Adams's other works, the pitch material used in Four Thousand Holes is drawn exclusively from Western music's most basic elements: major and minor triads. In this case they are superimposed upon one another in multiple tempo streams, creating a beautiful yet continuously fracturing sound world--from splintering glass shards to nearly seismic disturbances. The other work on this CD, '...and bells remembered...,'performed by the Callithumpian Consort, is a more introspective piece."

Artist	Title	Format	Label	Catalog #
ADAMS, JOHN LUTHER	The Place We Began	CD	COLD BLUE MUSIC	CB 032CD
$13.00 NOT IN STOCK, SPECIAL ORDER "The Place We Began" contains four mysteriously evocative electro-acoustic works that the composer built from short recorded moments -- audio fragments -- of his early music (circa the early 1970s). This is not a trip down memory lane: In the place we began, Adams has reappropriated and transformed these sonic fragments into completely new works that speak to his current musical interests and directions, especially his recent installation pieces, and refer to his past only in ways that are highly personal and conceptual. Realized by the composer at his studio outside Fairbanks, Alaska. The composer writes: 'Last summer in my studio I discovered several boxes of reel-to-reel tapes that I'd recorded in the early 1970s. Using those 'found objects,' I sculpted these new soundscapes from fragments of my past. The tape that got me started was labelled 'Scrap. Unknown.' When I listened to it, I could neither tell which direction was forward nor determine its proper playback speed. In both directions and at high and low speeds the sound was intriguing. After trying it all four ways, I began to superimpose tracks. Then I began exploring the other found tapes. 'In A Room' is composed from raw material I recorded on a summer afternoon in 1972. With two cheap speakers and a microphone, I used electro-acoustic feedback to explore the resonant frequencies in a room with hardwood floors and lots of windows. Thirty-six years later (using tools I couldn't have imagined back then) I shaped that recording's sounds into a twelve-part motet. 'At The Still Point' is a tempo canon that sustains the relationships 13/14/15/16 throughout. The piece is made primarily from two tapes I recorded in 1974 on my Fender Rhodes electric piano. The first was a through-composed piece I eventually withdrew. The second was an improvisation in the spirit (if not the sound) of Feldman's 'Piece for Four Pianos' -- a work that changed my musical life. The opening of at the still point incorporates a moment from another 1974 recording, this one of a small tam-tam I bought for $50. Today, the Rhodes is long gone. But I still own that tam-tam. 'In The Rain' begins with fragments from a recording I made in 1973. That tape was made in a gentle spring shower, during which I set pots and pans out in the yard, adding their metallic voices, one by one, to the sounds of the rain and blue jays. I've now re-used those sounds and their spectral after images to create 'veils' that rise and fall, revealing and concealing the taped traces of one of my early ensemble pieces recorded in 1974. 'The Place We Began,' a second twelve-part motet composed from the 1972 recording used for in a room, closes this cycle of works. Where the first piece rises, the place we began descends into subsonic depths, revealing previously inaudible quavering harmonics.' -- JLA, 2009"

Artist	Title	Format	Label	Catalog #
ADAMS, JOHN LUTHER	Red Arc/Blue Veil	CD	COLD BLUE MUSIC	CB 026CD
$13.00 LOW STOCK LEVEL "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	Title	Format	Label	Catalog #
ADAMS, JOHN LUTHER	For Lou Harrison	CD	NEW WORLD RECORDS	NW 80669CD
$15.00 LOW STOCK LEVEL "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

Artist	Title	Format	Label	Catalog #
ADAMS, JOHN LUTHER	Strange and Sacred Noise	CD	MODE	MODE 153CD
$15.00 NOT IN STOCK, SPECIAL ORDER 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	Title	Format	Label	Catalog #
ADAMS, JOHN LUTHER	In The White Silence	CD	NEW WORLD RECORDS	NW 80600CD
$15.00 NOT IN STOCK, SPECIAL ORDER "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	Title	Format	Label	Catalog #
ADAMS, JOHN LUTHER	The Light That Fills The World	CD	COLD BLUE MUSIC	CB 010CD
$13.00 LOW STOCK LEVEL "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.