"Time/Light/Place" Works by Composer John Luther Adams Slated for Two Concerts:
			Cleveland Museum of Art Friday, November 5 7:30 p.m. First Church of Oberlin Monday, November 8 8 p.m. Both concerts are free and open to the public. "Like the most exhilarating metaphor, his music is a parallel presence... Whenever I hear this music I am mesmerized by something I can only call the truth." - Barry Lopez The work of John Luther Adams, associate professor of composition at the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, will be showcased in two concerts. The first concert is scheduled for the Cleveland Museum of Art, 11150 East Blvd., Friday, November 5, 7:30 p.m., in Cleveland. The second concert is slated for Monday, November 8, 8 p.m., at First Church of Oberlin, located at Main and Lorain streets, on the town square. The Program: "Time Undisturbed" - for piccolo, alto flute, bass flute, three harps and sustaining keyboard. This piece was commissioned by the Kanagawa Cultural Council (Japan) for the Monophony Consort. It will receive its premiere on Japanese instruments on December 5 in Kanagawa, Japan. "The Light That Fills the World" - for violin, vibraphone, marimba, bassoon and organ. This piece was commissioned by the Paul Dresher Ensemble, who will perform it on electronic instruments, in San Francisco, in mid-November. "In A Treeless Place, Only Snow" - for harp, celesta, two vibraphones and string quartet. This one is commissioned by The Third Angle New Music Ensemble (Portland, OR). That group will perform it in Portland and Eugene, Oregon, next month.
			Composer's notes for "The Light That Fills the World"
			The Light That Fills the World My fears, those small ones that I thought so big, for all the vital things I had to get and to reach. When, in fine weather, I drifted out too far in my kayak And thought myself in danger. And yet there is only one great thing, the only thing: To live to see in huts and on journeys the great day that dawns, and the light that fills the world. - Inuit song For much of the year, the world in which I live is a vast, white canvas. Last winter, as I read art critic John Gage's essay Color As Subject, I was struck by the equivalence between the view out my window and Mark Rothko's use of white in his paintings. The exquisite colors on the snow and those in Rothko's translucent fields suggested to me broad diatonic washes suffused with slowly-changing chromatic harmonies. Slowly, faintly, I began to hear a new music stripped to its most essential elements: harmony and orchestration, density and texture, resonant space, and what Morton Feldman called "time undisturbed". For me, composing is not about finding the notes. It's about losing them. Over the years, I've moved away from working with audible compositional processes (an inheritance of mimimalism) toward an increasing focus on the musical material - that is, the sounds themselves. My work is less and less a matter of performing operations on notes, imposing compositional processes on sounds, or working within a syntax of musical "ideas". I now concentrate primarily on asking questions about the essential nature of the music, and what it wants to be. The instruments determine the sounds which, in turn, determine the form - how the music unfolds in time. The ideal of the sublime landscape has long been an obsessive metaphor for my work. But the resonances of my recent musical landscapes are more interior, a little less obviously connected with the external world. If in the past the melodic elements of the music have somehow spoken of my own subjective presence in the landscape, in the newer music there are no lines left…only slowly-changing light on a timeless white field. All the edges are blurred. Individual sounds are diffused into a continuous texture, with a minimum of what the art critics call "incident". All the sounds meld into one unbroken aural horizon. Harmony and color become one with space and time. Listening to these "allover" textures, it's difficult to concentrate for long on a single sound. The music wants to move us beyond syntactical meaning, even beyond images, into the experience of listening within an enveloping whole, a transpersonal presence. These seemingly-static fields of sound embrace constant change. But rather than moving on a journey through a musical landscape, the experience of listening is more like sitting in the same place as the wind and weather, the light and shadows slowly change. The longer we stay in one place, the more we notice change. For many years now Paul Dresher and I have been friends, and I've greatly admired his work as a composer and as an advocate for new music. So I welcomed the opportunity to compose a new piece specifically for Paul and the extraordinary musicians of his ensemble. At the same time, I was a bit daunted by the prospect. Most of my recent music is expansive in scale - scored for large ensembles and long durations - and I wasn't at all certain I could write a successful shorter work for a smaller ensemble. Initially, I thought of writing a fast, rhythmic piece in the style of my percussion music. But Paul challenged me to risk trying something in my more atmospheric "orchestral" style. I'm very grateful that he did. The title of the piece is borrowed from an Inuit song which sings of the close relationship between beauty and terror, risk and revelation. The Light That Fills the World was written in late winter and early spring when - following the long darkness of winter - the world is still white and filled with new light. If the unrelenting texture of this music embodies stasis, I hope its prevalent tone evokes the ecstatic. - John Luther Adams, Fairbanks, Alaska, August, 1999
			About the composer
			John Luther Adams Almost twenty-five years ago, composer John Luther Adams made his home in the boreal forest near Fairbanks, Alaska. From there, he has created a unique musical world, grounded in the elemental landscapes and indigenous cultures of the North. Adams' music embraces a wide range of media - including works for orchestra, chamber ensembles, radio, film, television, and theater - and is recorded on New World, New Albion, Opus One, Owl and Centaur. His latest CD - Strange and Sacred Noise - performed by Percussion Group Cincinnati, will be released on a surround-sound recording by Mode Records, in March 2000. In the coming season, performances of JLA's music will occur throughout the world, including premieres of new works commissioned by The Paul Dresher Ensemble, the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble, and The Third Angle New Music Ensemble (Portland, OR) and Monophony Consort (Kanagawa, Japan). In the past, he has worked with many prominent performers and presenters - including Bang On A Can, New Music America, the Sundance Institute, the California E.A.R. Unit, Perseverance Theater, The Children's Theater Company, and Present Music. Adams studied composition with James Tenney and Leonard Stein at the California Institute of the Arts, where his other teachers included Harold Budd, Mel Powell, and Morton Subotnik. He also attended Wesleyan College, Mercer University, and Georgia State University. He has received awards and fellowships from Meet the Composer, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lila Wallace Arts Partners Program, the Rockefeller Foundation, Opera America, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, the American Music Center, and the Alaska State Council on the Arts. Adams has served as composer in residence with the Anchorage Symphony, Fairbanks Symphony, Arctic Chamber Orchestra, Anchorage Opera, and the Alaska Public Radio Network, and has taught at the University of Alaska and Bennington College. He has also worked as executive director of the Northern Alaska Environmental Center, as a wilderness guide in the Arctic, as a producer and music director for public radio station KUAC-FM, and as timpanist and principal percussionist for the Fairbanks Symphony and the Arctic Chamber Orchestra. Currently, Adams is associate professor of composition at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and serves as president of the American Music Center. Articles about 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), and Music in the United States (Prentice Hall). About his work, Adams says: As a composer in the far North, I hope to make music which belongs here, somewhat like the plants and the birds...music that somehow resonates with all this space and silence, cold and stone, wind, fire, and ice."
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