Saturdays
May 6, 13, 20 & 27
6 pm - midnight
Veils and Vesper
John Luther Adams
The Veils fill time and space with enveloping atmospheres of colored sound.
Each of these three sound sculptures is composed from long strands of pink noise rising or falling slowly over the full range of human hearing. Shaping a counterpoint of these lines, I layer them into multiple choirs and then pass them through a series of ?harmonic prisms? (banks of filters tuned to prime number harmonics).
The resulting fields of sound fill the air with many tones sounding at any moment. But it?s often difficult to distinguish one tone from another. They tend to meld together into rich, ambiguous sonorities in which the higher tones sound like harmonics of the lower tones. The timbres are clear and slightly breathy, like human voices mixed with bowed glass or metal.
All the noise strands in a choir fall at a constant rate. But because the prisms are tuned to non-tempered modes, each harmonic interval is a different size. So as the noise floats through the prisms the uneven intervals cause the tones to emerge and recede in varied durations.
As with most of my music the Veils are composed in multiple layers of time, with each choir sounding at its own independent tempo. The tempos are very slow and the relationships are based on prime numbers up to 31. Each Veil takes 6 hours to complete one cycle.
The Veils saturate physical, tonal and temporal space. But rather than overwhelming the listener with sound, I want to seduce the listener to enter into the sound and remain there for extended periods of time. The melding of rhythm, pitch and timbre in the Veils creates unified fields of sound. My objective is to leave these fields as untouched as possible, letting them fill time and space with forms and colors as simple and as beautiful as they can be.
At Diapason, Falling Veil, Crossing Veil and Rising Veil are installed contiguously in the Main Space. The listener is free to linger within each harmonic field, or to move from one to another, shaping her own listening experience in time and space. In Vesper (installed in the small Gallery) the harmonic curtains are raised to reveal three choirs of virtual voices "singing" in the modes of the Veils.
- John Luther Adams
John Luther Adams:
From his home in Alaska, John Luther Adams has created a unique musical world grounded in wilderness landscapes and indigenous cultures, and in natural phenomena from the songs of birds to elemental noise. His music includes works for orchestra, small ensembles, percussion and electronic media, and is recorded on Cold Blue, Mode, Cantaloupe, New World, New Albion and other labels.
He is the author of Winter Music (Wesleyan, 2004), and his writings have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies, including The Best Spiritual Writing (Harper Collins, 2002) and The Book of Music and Nature (Wesleyan, 2000).
Adams has worked with many prominent performers and venues, including Bang On A Can, Other Minds, Almeida Opera, Steven Schick, the California E.A.R. Unit, FLUX Quartet, the Paul Dresher Ensemble, Percussion Group Cincinnati, the Sundance Institute and Arena Stage. He has received awards and fellowships from Meet the Composer, the National Endowment for the Arts, Lila Wallace Arts Partners, the Rockefeller Foundation, Opera America, and the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts.
JLA has served as composer in residence with the Anchorage Symphony, Fairbanks Symphony, Arctic Chamber Orchestra, Anchorage Opera, and the Alaska Public Radio Network. He has taught at the University of Alaska, Bennington College and the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and has served as president of the American Music Center.
Articles about John
Luther Adams and his music appear in The New Grove Dictionary of Music,
Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Music and Musicians, American Music
in the 20th Century (G. Schirmer), Music in the United States (Prentice
Hall) and The Avant Music Guide (Japan).
.
.
