Three darkly textured pieces for bass clarinet, marimba, vibraphone, piano, organ, violin, and double bass: The Light That Fills the World, The Immeasurable Space of Tones, and The Farthest Place. It is compelling, quietly expressive music that seems timeless in its sublimity.
Performances by Marty Walker (bass clarinet), Robin Lorentz (violin), Barry Newton (double bass), Amy Knoles (vibraphone and marimba), Bryan Pezzone (piano), Nathaniel Reichman (electronic keyboard and sound design).
The Light That Fills the World (1998/2001), which was commissioned by the Paul Dresher Ensemble, develops via ever-expanding musical intervals in each of its instrumental parts, forming something of an arch, pivoting around the tritone, and at the same time a continuous ramp—the smaller intervals steadily giving way to the larger. The rhythmic subdivisions of the bars reflect the tessitura of each part’s pitches in a broad harmonic spectrum—with higher notes moving with smaller subdivisions of the bar—providing a natural polyrhythmic motion.
The Farthest Place (2001) develops in a way that is consistent with the architecture of The Light That Fills the World, but here the harmonic world is pentatonic rather than diatonic.
The Immeasurable Space of Tones (1999/2001), the largest and most complex of the three pieces, might be considered five joined-at-the-hip movements, each of which has an interval expansion and contraction life of its own, yet also falls within a larger overall scheme of interval growth.
REVIEWS:
“Landscape pieces, long, sustained harmonies with puffs of arctic winds blowing the sound one way or another…as much snow-strewn color as sound (but pleasurable in either guise)…beautifully played.” —LA Weekly
“Darkness and light are defining realities for the people, plants and animals who live in far northern climes and the abrupt and possibly deadly boundaries that separate these two extremes lie at the heart of Adams austure music. Brillant, crystalline waves of sound conjure a deceptively beautiful landscape in which light is life and darkness can quickly lead to extinction. Adams’ music is never less than spellbinding.” —Sequenza21/Contemporary Classical Music Weekly
“Landscape pieces, long, sustained harmonies with puffs of arctic winds blowing the sound one way or another….[A]s much snow-strewn color as sound (but pleasurable in either guise)…beautifully played. —Alan Rich, LA Weekly
“Amazingly beautiful, peaceful, and reflective—shimmering like the unusual landscape in which this composer resides.” —Chamber Music magazine
“An unbroken, slowly shifting, many-hued sound texture. Frequently energized by internal ripples and coruscations…major sevenths, ninths and higher combinations sounding as massive harmonic suspensions and conveying, metaphorically, a sense of enormous, uninhabited open space in which the only event is the slow and constant play of changing light upon an immense sky and a glacial landscape.” —Int’l Record Review
“The sound of this music is that of overlapping planes of sound, almost as though upper and lower overtones of some immense background fundamental pitch (or pitches) were whistling by…. [I]t gives the listener a sense of amplitude and space that is heartening. It both relaxes and invigorates…. [T]his is music from someone who knows who he is and what he wants…. I appreciate Adams’s devotion to his art and generosity of spirit. The musicians (most of them from the elite California EAR Unit) perform with similar devotion. —Robert Carl, Fanfare magazine
“The three pieces on this CD…are each very similar, perhaps like three views of the same icy landscape…. Time seems frozen…. In this long walk in the snow, each boot step takes more time, and sound itself is suspended in the cold air. The sound and performance on this CD is exquisite.” —Richard Friedman, Shuffle Boil
“Three compositions by Adams that confirm his marvelous, chilly sense of northern space. The Farthest Place is a lush, brightly elegant, somewhat Steve Reichian piece that puts the listener firmly in the arctic, the keyboardists and Knoles providing a luminous bed of rhythms. A bright discovery. The title work is less sumptuous than this because it’s mysterious and withholds something. But it’s just as enjoyable and near-zero. The Immeasurable Space of Tones is somewhere between the first and second pieces, again filling the listener with a sense of great space, cold and wonder. In fact all three tracks seem like parts of a larger piece. Their titles don’t exaggerate, and they would, like many Cold Blue releases, appeal to fans of holy minimalism, even though I haven’t seen any info that specifically indicates that any of the label’s composers are mystics. —Richard Grooms, The Improvisor
“Rapturous piano…a lush wash…a multi-level sound bed…an ambient art fixture and a pretty one.” —Exposé
“The Farthest Place opens the disk with a pleasantly percolating 11-minute long wisp of sound comprised of piano, electric piano, vibes, marimba, violin and doublebass over a comfy bed of bass clarinet. The title track ebbs for a couple of minutes longer and comes complete with a generous portion of low-end electronic hums. The third and final track, The Immeasurable Space of Tones, stretches out to nearly a half hour, and really expands upon and drives home the sonic properties contained in the first two. The influence of the landscape of Adams’s Alaska home—from the subterranean rumbling of its volcanic magma to the highest crags of its soaring peaks—transfers into a most lovely, blasting mist of flowing, human sound.” —Arcane Candy
“This [The Light That Fills the World] is from 2002, but I discovered it this year [2009] and I listen to it constantly. It’s immensely, transcendently beautiful. Also really fascinatingly and subtly structured so that it has the effect of being a sprawling, drifty ambient record yet with this thorough sense of movement and purpose.
—thetorturegarden.blogspot.com
released November 5, 2002
Recorded, edited and mixed by Scott Fraser, Architecture, Los Angeles, CA, August 2002.
Mastered by Kevin Gray, AcousTech, Camarillo, CA.
Produced by John Luther Adams and Jim Fox.
Funded in part by The Aaron Copland Fund for Music.
The Light That Fills the World was commissioned by the Paul Dresher Ensemble, with funding from Meet the Composer.
Special thanks to Richard Martinez.
All music © Taiga Press (BMI).
This disc p & © 2002 by Cold Blue Music. All rights reserved.
www.coldbluemusic.com
Cover design: Jim Fox.
Cover photo © 2002 by Anthony Worby (refreezing fracture in the Antarctic sea ice, May 1993).
Other photographs courtesy of John Luther Adams.
