John Luther Adams (1953-)
The Farthest Place (2001)
The Light That Fills the World (1998/2001)
The Immeasurable Space of Tones (1999/2001)

Marty Walker, Amy Knoles, Bryan Pezzone, Nathaniel Reichman, Robin Lorentz, Barry Newton

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. Adams’s work from this period tends to transcend his compositional devices—which churn away in the background while the surface shimmers with a simple joy in the very making of sounds. It is compelling, quietly expressive music that seems timeless in its sublimity. The Light That Fills the World , 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 (a la some of Henry Cowell’s theories)—with higher notes moving with smaller subdivisions of the bar—providing a natural polyrhythmic motion. The Farthest Place 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, 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. [CD and folder in jewel case]