|
|
5.0étoiles sur 5
As It Was in the Beginning, Is Now, and Ever Shall Be, Nov. 8 2003
John Luther Adams conceives his musical compositions in a small one room cabin studio, located deep in the snow covered woods, near Fairbanks, Alaska. He has spent many years in that simple room, in hermit like solitude, contemplating the stark beauty of his surrounding landscape. A pregnant form of pantheistic spirituality, successfully transmitted within this delicate recording, comes gradually to those nurturing an interior life amidst such an isolated, pristine setting. Perhaps, it is through his deeply contemplative nature, combined with the commitment of decades of compositional exploration, that Mr. Adams has become one of the leading voices of natural beauty within the artic regions. In the structural center of 1998's "In the White Silence", a string quartet, celeste, harp and vibraphone each transmit echoes of a cleanly resonant luminosity, amidst sensual drone like clusters of sustained string work. In these lush sustained string clusters, the listener is drawn gently into the spirit of the work's intoxicatingly ethereal presence. As the poetic title of the piece implies, the work is about the experience of silence. About realms beyond the inadequacy of words. Words are, at best, only pointers to complex realities and the feelings that such realities give rise to. Indeed, one can see that Mr. Adams has maintained a consistency of theological aesthetic in the past few years, as is evident on his 1997 recording "Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing". In the beginning, there was an empty silence. And that silence was infused with a lonely, yet radiant, spiritual presence. We can, if we wish, come to be one with her and her longing, through and with this inspired music. It is a quietly passionate mystical letter, sent with abandon to all, in a darkly mysterious time.
|
