Waves and Particles
John Luther Adams
(Cold Blue Music)
 

Simon Duff recommends a new string quartet work from one of America’s leading composers.
    
COLD BLUE MUSIC is a Southern Californian label releasing contemporary classical and experimental electro acoustic works. Founded by composer and producer Jim Fox in the early 1980s, with political and environmental concerns to the fore.

Composer John Luther Adams’s 11th album for the label is a work for strings performed by the Jack Quartet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnLVGZn_r0s. Set over six movements, it is inspired by quantum physics, fractal geometry and notions of sonic exploration, that the quartet are able realise to full force.

Like a lot of John Luther Adams music, central to his creative philosophy is an ability to seemingly stretch and play with time in a highly original manner.

Speaking ahead of the album’s release the composer summarised his approach: “Music is audible physics and much of my music is grounded in the elemental power of sound to touch and move us in profound ways.

“I work a bit like a sculptor, shaping sound, space, and time into the simplest, most inevitable forms possible. Each of the six pieces on the album traverses its own geometric form, as a singular sounding image.

“Quantum physics tells us that the universe is more like music than matter. And the musical material of this piece crosses a continuum from silence articulated by points of sound to rolling waves of pitch, timbre intensity and velocity.”

Particle Dust opens, a nine-minute fast tempo piece, full of emotional depth and intellectual vigour. Based on the Cantor dust, a simple but paradoxical 19th-century fractal that slowly dissolves toward nothingness, but never quite arrives.

Notions of bustling modern transportation rhythmic dystopia are exploited to the full as bass heavy cellos take the lead and as sections break down to slower tempos single line violin and viola explore melodic themes prior to an end flourish.

Next up Spectral Waves slowly drifts in and out of focus, working into deep thought. The Jack Quartet take on board the composer’s ambition and meet it with a high sense of adventure.

He adds: “From the moment I first heard the Jack’s, I realised that here was a new generation of musicians who could and would play anything that I might imagine. As one of my composer friends observed recently, they have become a kind of muse for me.

“The piece uses a form that I’ve employed in a number of my earlier works, including a previous album Become Ocean, in which harmonic waves with time periods of 1, 3, 5, and 7 rise and fall in and out of sync with one another, cresting together in one central moment.”

Velocity Waves brings back fast pace cello bass bursts, inviting deep space noise exploration, mirrored by viola and violin. At the end a hypnotic intensity and high pitched rhythmic physical drama ensues using accelerating and decelerating sonorities.

Triadic Waves moves into calmer waters, based on the Sierpinski Gasket fractal shape, a kind of Eiffel Tower of interwoven pyramids. Sound waves oscillate and diverse, shifting string pitches and new computer ideas inspire the piece.

Think Bernard Hermann let loose on a future Kubrick AI movie set 300 years in the future. Murmurs in a Chromatic Field, likewise a Sci-Fi exploration, uses deep bass explorations and mid frequency drone chords.

A deep concern for the state of the earth and the future of humanity drives Adams. As he puts it: “If we can imagine a culture and a society in which we each feel more deeply responsible for our own place in the world, then we just may be able to bring that culture and that society into being. This will largely be the work of people who will be here on this earth when I am gone. I place my faith in them.”

The final movement Particles Rising fuses solo violin and rhythmic bursts from viola and a curious well thought out main theme with tints of a staccato country and western barn dance drive.

An important album of shimmering beauty, complexity and ambition, confirming John Luther Adams as a hugely important composer, successfully pushing boundaries and creating new territory for deep listening.