John Luther Adams: Arctic Dreams

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Composer John Luther Adams created and honed a distinctively American, rather Ivesian brand of minimalism, with a strong environmentalist bent. Arctic Dreams offers an ideal introduction to his work. It's in seven movements, all but the last for voices and an ensemble of four string players, retuned and manipulated by electronic delay effects that make them sound like a much larger ensemble. The seven movements depict places and sensations experienced in the Arctic, where Adams spent some years as an environmental researcher, and they'll be strikingly evocative even for listeners who don't normally cotton to these kinds of textures. The most minimalist music is reserved for the haunting third movement, "The Circle of Suns and Moons," which cannot help but bring a picture of the solstices of the far north to the listener's mind but works equally well as an abstract composition. The four voices intone only intermittently intelligible names of places, plants, birds, weather, and seasons, in Alaskan Native languages, and they have to master non-sung effects that bring quite a bit of difficulty. Synergy Vocals, which has previously specialized in vocal music of Steve Reich, is ideal for this task, and the various engineering layers are cleanly fused by the Cold Blue Music label's Nathaniel Reichman. Those already attuned to Adams' unique world will have been awaiting this release; those new to him are recommended to check it out.
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