John Luther Adams

"Darkness and Scattered Light" is an album of composer John Luther Adams’s darkly beautiful, mesmerizing, virtuosic music for double bass (two solos and a bass quintet), performed by the late bassist extraordinaire Robert Black (1956–2023).

Acclaimed by the New York Times as "an alluring, mystical new work" when it premiered outdoors at the city's Lincoln Center in July 2014, John Luther Adams' Sila: the Breath of the World is so carefully orchestrated that the recording itself pushes the limits of how to capture multiple ensembles of musicians in one setting. Thanks to modern technology and the magic of multi-tracking (with producers Doug Perkins and Nathaniel Reichman at the controls), Sila maintains the composer's vision as a grand invitation to the listener "to stop and listen more deeply." Put simply, like Inuksuit (2009), widely known as Adams' large ensemble piece for percussion, no two performances of Sila are ever the same, due in part to the freedom that is given to the musicians, each of whom plays or sings a unique part at his or her own pace.

John Luther Adams won a Pulitzer for his 2013 orchestral work Become Ocean, highlighting the threat of rising seas from melting ice caps. In his 40-minute, one-movement Become Desert, Adams turns his attention to our parched landscapes. This is music that embodies the sweltering sun, the morning dew evaporating with the dawn, and the airless environment. Adams’ expansive music—scored for five ensembles (and choir), each moving at different speeds—swells and dissipates, growing inexorably. The music reaches suffocating levels of intensity at its climax, brass piercing the textures like waves of heat. Night, and relief from the sun, eventually come, a tiny bell ringing out as the sun drops below the horizon.

Composer John Luther Adams is one of today’s most original voices, often finding a common ground between nature and music, as in his deftly sculpted, Pulitzer Prize-winning orchestral soundscape Become Ocean. In Everything that Rises, written for the JACK Quartet, Adams sets his four musicians on an ever-upward hour-long trajectory as they journey towards, and dissolve into, eternity. The work makes use of both complex harmonics and “just intonation,” a tuning system whose intervals are rooted in earth, corresponding with the vibrations found in everyday physical objects. The resulting sense of timelessness is both unsettling and mesmerizingly beautiful.