DRAM News

The May 12, 2008 issue of The New Yorker features an article on the inimitable composer John Luther Adams, many of whose works are featured in DRAM from the New World, Mode, and Cold Blue labels.

Writer Alex Ross states, "[Adams is] one of the most original musical thinkers of the new century. At the age of fifty-five, he is perhaps the chief standard-bearer of American experimental music, of the tradition of solitary sonic tinkering that began on the West Coast almost a century ago and gained new strength after the Second World War, when John Cage and Morton Feldman created supreme abstractions in musical form.

Click below to access the complete article or to read an excerpt with links to some of Adams' works discussed in the article.

Letter from Alaska-Song of the Earth
By Alex Ross
The New Yorker (full article - May 12, 2008 issue)

By the nineteen-nineties, Adams had begun to carve out a singular body of work, which can be sampled on recordings on the New World, New Albion, Cold Blue, Mode, and Cantaloupe labels. First came a conceptual Alaskan opera entitled Earth and the Great Weather, much of which is given over to the chanting of place-names and descriptive phrases from the native Inupiaq and Gwich’in languages, both in the original and in translation. One mesmerizing section describes various stages of the seasons: “The time of new sunshine,” “The time when polar bears bring out their young,” “ The time of the small wind,” “The time of eagles.” The music runs from pure, ethereal sonorities for strings—tuned in a scheme similar to that of the Aurora Bells in “The Place”—to viscerally pummelling movements for quartets of drums.

In the next decade, Adams further explored the sonic extremes that he had mapped out in his opera. In the White Silence, a seventy-five-minute piece for harp, celesta, vibraphones, and strings, is derived from the seven notes of the C-major scale; in a striking feat of metaphor, the composer equates the consuming whiteness of midwinter Alaska with the white keys of the piano. “Strange and Sacred Noise,” another seventy-five-minute cycle, evokes the violence of changing seasons: four percussionists deploy drums, gongs, bells, sirens, and mallet percussion to summon up an alternately bewitching and frightening tableau of musical noises, most of which were inspired by a trip that Adams took up the Yukon River in spring, when the ice was collapsing. Whether unabashedly sweet or unremittingly harsh—Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing, a memorial to the composer’s father, manages to be both at once—Adams’s major works have the appearance of being beyond style; they transcend the squabbles of contemporary classical music, the unending arguments over the relative value of Romantic and modernist languages.