Waves and Particles CB0069
The music
In six movements:
- Particle Dust
- Spectral Waves
- Velocity Waves
- Triadic Waves
- Murmurs in a Chromatic Field
- Particles Rising
Adams writes about the music:
“Waves and Particles was inspired by quantum physics, fractal geometry, and noise—which function as elemental metaphors in my music. Quantum physics tells us that the universe is more like music than matter. And the musical material of this piece traverses a continuum from silence articulated by points of sound to rolling waves of pitch, timbre, intensity, and velocity.
“A simple fractal form shapes each of the six movements, which I hope imparts a quality less like personal expression than like inevitable force. The noise I had in mind was as an acoustician might define it: complex aperiodic sound.”
The composer
John Luther Adams, winner of a Pulitzer Prize in music (2014) and a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition (2015), and a 2022 inductee into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, was for many years based in Alaska, where his work derived much of its unique character from the landscape and weather of the Great North. About a half-dozen years ago, he moved from Alaska, living in various desert and mountain areas in South and Central America—places that also inspired and found expression in his music. He currently resides in rural New Mexico.
Described by The New Yorker’s Alex Ross as “one of the most original musical thinkers of the new century,” Adams composes for orchestra, chamber ensembles, and electronic media and has worked with many prominent performers and venues, including the New York Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Seattle Symphony, the International Contemporary Ensemble, eighth blackbird, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Alarm Will Sound, the California E.A.R. Unit, Bang on a Can, Percussion Group Cincinnati, Other Minds, the Sundance Institute, Almeida Opera, SFJazz, and the Radio Netherlands Philharmonic.
Adams has written three books, including Silences So Deep: Music, Solitude, Alaska (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020) and Winter Music: Composing the North (Wesleyan University Press). He has received numerous awards and grants, including the Heinz Award for his contributions to raising environmental awareness. His music has been released by a number of record labels, including Cold Blue, which has ten CDs devoted to his work, including Darkness and Scattered Light (CB0067), Houses of the Wind (CB0063), Arctic Dreams (CB0060), Lines Made by Walking (CB0058), Everything That Rises (CB0051), The Wind in High Places (CB0041), The Light that Fills the World (CB0010), Red Arc/Blue Veil (CB0026), the place we began (CB0032), and Four Thousand Holes (CB0035), as well as two of his shorter works on the anthologies Adams/Cox/Fink/Fox (CB0009) and Cold Blue Two (CB0036).
“His music becomes more than a metaphor for natural forces: it is an elemental experience in its own right.”—Tom Service, The Guardian
“His music has repeatedly conjured up visions of limitless expanse.”—The Wire
“Adams’ manner is that of Thoreau—to be in a place, incorporate it into his memory and values, and recreate that through music. . . . Adams is changed by nature and his music is a catalogue of the places that changed him. . . . Adams [is] an important and necessary musician for our time.”—New York Classical Review
“The music of John Luther Adams is simply beautiful. It . . . sounds like it has nothing to accomplish. It simply exists, hanging in mid-air, waiting to be listened to.”—AllMusic Guide
“Out of many eligible composers of his generation, John Luther Adams is the greatest proponent of the American experimental tradition, a lineage that includes Ives, Cowell, Varèse, Partch, Nancarrow, Cage and Tenney.”—Sequenza 21
“[T]he sense of space is an Adams thumbprint—as is the spiritual aura that comes as a consequence.”—Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle
“It is impressive to imagine anyone actually following such conceptual virtuosity . . . creating the seamless, seemingly organic layers of sound Adams lays out over his structurally precise and infinitely flexible power grids.”—Gramophone
The performers
JACK Quartet (violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell) has been deemed “superheroes of the new music world” (Boston Globe), “the go-to quartet for contemporary music, tying impeccable musicianship to intellectual ferocity and a take-no-prisoners sense of commitment” (The Washington Post), and “a musical vehicle of choice to the next great composers who walk among us” (Toronto Star). The group is focused on the commissioning and performance of new works, leading it to work closely with composers John Luther Adams, Derek Bermel, Chaya Czernowin, James Dillon, Brian Ferneyhough, Beat Furrer, Georg Friedrich Haas, Vijay Iyer, György Kurtág, Helmut Lachenmann, George Lewis, Steve Mackey, Matthias Pintscher, Steve Reich, Roger Reynolds, Wolfgang Rihm, Salvatore Sciarrino, Julia Wolfe, John Zorn, and many others.
JACK has recorded three earlier albums of Adams’s music for Cold Blue: Lines Made by Walking (CB0058), Everything That Rises (CB0051) and The Wind in High Places (CB0041).
The JACK Quartet electrifies audiences with its “explosive virtuosity” (Boston Globe) and “viscerally exciting performances” (The New York Times). David Patrick Stearns (Philadelphia Inquirer) proclaimed a JACK performance as “among the most stimulating new-music concerts of my experience.”
Recipient of Lincoln Center’s Martin E. Segal Award, New Music USA’s Trailblazer Award, and the CMA/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, JACK has performed to critical acclaim at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Wigmore Hall (UK), Suntory Hall (Japan), Salle Pleyel (France), Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ (Netherlands), La Biennale di Venezia (Italy), the Lucerne Festival (Switzerland), Bali Arts Festival (Indonesia), Reykjavik Arts Festival (Iceland), Festival Internacional Cervatino (Mexico), Kölner Philharmonie (Germany), Donaueschinger Musiktage (Germany), and the Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik (Germany).
“The string quartet may be a 250-year-old contraption, but young, brilliant groups like the JACK Quartet are keeping it thrillingly vital.”—The Washington Post
Reviews
“Plenty of composers have drawn upon either nature or mathematics as generative material for their music, but few have been able to achieve such consistently rich, thoughtful results as John Luther Adams. Over the years, he’s built deep working relationships with a select cast of interpreters, few more versatile and daring than JACK Quartet, who bring this latest work to life with precision and nuance. The six parts of Waves and Particles use quantum physics and fractal geometry as formal models, translating shapes and patterns into sound. In some ways the music recalls the early work of the electronic duo Autechre, as cycling patterns shaped by the strings change slightly with each repetition of a particular phrase—including the opening movement ‘Particle Dust,’ which is based upon a fractal called Cantor dust, where a specific shapes breaks down further and further in fixed proportions. I’m not a mathematician and I have no idea how that process plays out, but I can hear how Adams translates those shifts in sound. It opens with the furious thrum of Jay Campbell’s cello, which carves space for intricate, quietly voiced violin lines articulated by Christopher Otto and Autsin Wulliman, who sometimes double up on the cello attack. The music isn’t symmetrical, but you can literally hear how the shapes are sonified. Other movements are built from sound waves, such as the clustered tones that swell and ebb throughout ‘Spectral Waves,’ as the strings seem to shape-shift electronically. This creative partnership produces knockout after knockout”. —Peter Margasak, Best Contemporary Classical on Bandcamp
“Countless composers have drawn inspiration from nature—Debussy, Smetana, and Messiaen spring to mind—but no composer has incarnated natural forces into his music more completely than John Luther Adams. His work, like that of any artist, has been influenced by the places he’s lived, from the landscapes in Alaska and South America to the rural New Mexico setting he currently calls home. The music he’s created in these places hasn’t been just a response to the geography of the locale, however, but instead out-of-time material that somehow plays like a symbiotic, primordial, and elemental manifestation of the physical realm. Adams is a true original, though the term hardly seems adequate.
Adams is joined on Waves and Particles by the ever-intrepid JACK Quartet, as perfect a match between composer and performer as could be imagined. Comprised of violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell, the group’s passionate commitment to new music is shown in the large number of pieces it’s commissioned from contemporary figures such as Julia Wolfe, Vijay Iyer, György Kurtág, Steve Reich, Wolfgang Rihm, and others. Premiered by JACK Quartet in November 2021 and recorded at Mount Vernon’s Oktaven Audio in June 2023, Waves and Particles is the fourth collaboration between the quartet and Adams, with Lines Made by Walking, Everything That Rises, and The Wind in High Places the group’s earlier releases for Cold Blue of the composer’s music.
“A cursory scan of the six movement titles suggests that Adams has burrowed beneath the surface of things to focus on matters that, even if invisible to the eye, account for physical phenomena. Here there is no wind generating sound across a string instrument’s open strings but rather an attempt to render into musical form activity occurring at a sub-atomic level. On the release’s inner sleeve, Adams clarifies that it was “inspired by quantum physics, fractal geometry, and noise” and that the musical content of the work “traverses a continuum from silence articulated by points of sound to rolling waves of pitch, timbre, intensity, and velocity.” Such a panoramic field encourages all manner of creative invention, and to that end the music extends from moments of stillness to tectonic intensity.
“Each movement pursues its concept to an uncompromising end. ‘Particle Dust’ opens the work with furious bowing, the strings roaring with machine-like combustion and the music expanding and contracting. Monotone pitches dominate and melody’s eschewed for relentless rhythmic thrust. After a violin part exudes a rustic, fiddle-like quality reminiscent of country music, the playing gradually slows until the initial ferocity reinstates itself with relentless force. ‘Spectral Waves’ presents a peaceful contrast to the opener in the slow-motion shimmer of its crystalline tendrils. After beginning at a furious clip, ‘Velocity Waves’ alternate between acceleration and deceleration, with the players layering their parts at different tempi. Whereas groaning, siren-like glissandos lend ‘Triadic Waves’ a sea-sickly queasiness, hushed tremolos give ‘Murmurs in a Chromatic Field’ a ghostly, mysterious character. ‘Particles Rising’ revisits the tone and style of ‘Particle Dust’ to close out the work with more flurries of aggressive bowing and quiet interludes.
“When composing the work, Adams deployed formal strategies so as to accentuate the music’s elemental force and keep personal expression at arm’s length. Maybe so, but Waves and Particles still has his fingerprints all over it. It hardly needs be said that no other string quartet, past or present, sounds even remotely like this one.” —Ron Schepper, Textura
“There’s nothing particularly novel about the fact that both new Cold Blue releases deal in opposites. What sets them apart may involve a dedication to scientific principle via the poetic abstraction of thought and word, which says nothing of their power. While Christopher Cerrone’s The Beaufort Scales channels the creative energies inherent in wind and water through art-scientific writings about them, John Luther Adams’s Waves and Particles, performed by the magnificent JACK Quartet, attends to sound and silence in the service of fractal geometry. Here again, I remember György Ligeti exploring the poeticization of fractals in the 1980s, but what is remarkably fresh about Adams’s six-movement quartet is an elemental directness masking processes of staggering complexity. In Ligeti’s work, as in Conlon Nancarrow’s, complication is a large part of the point. Adams sublimates complexity, rendering it subservient to the natural processes he rhapsodizes.
“To suggest that the quartet’s end is in its beginning, while true, would be far too simplistic. The stacked fifths and seconds slamming the music into fraught existence do return at pivotal moments, most notably as the whole thing grinds to a halt. However, digging deeper into those vertical sonorities brings the totality of JACK’s achievement into sharp focus. First of all, to keep those rapid-fire rhythms in place is no mean feat, but each shift in register, no matter how subtle, is attended by a shower of overtones! Each iteration of that cosmic power chord (I have no better descriptor!) acts similarly, threatening to relegate all surrounding it to near impalpability. It pulses and throbs with accented regularity, and that’s why the sudden stops, like the inaugural one at 1:47, are so effective. Constructed of similar pitch material, the moments of pitched respite inculcate an entirely different mode of listening, one that informs the rest of the piece as regularity and staticity are deconstructed.
“The opening opposites clashing in such stark contrast give way to what Swiss pianist Nik Bärtsch might refer to as models. Each movement is a process, or maybe several juxtaposed processes, like the gradual tempo shifts in ‘Velocity Waves.’ The power chord fragments and dissolves, with each pitch bit and interval bob floating across a constantly rippling surface, just as in ‘Triadic Waves’ contrapuntal glissandi are the order of the day. While the sudden stops can be disconcerting, the gradual increase and decrease, whether in the pitch or pulse domain, can produce dizziness and nausea. Only as ‘Particles Rising’ assembles itself do its components become familiar. We’ve heard those stabbing quartals in the first movement. The quartet reveals itself to be the cyclic entity it’s always been. Throughout, especially in earlier movements, notions of pause are foregrounded to create yet another layer of listening. Anyone familiar with Wandelweiser knows that silence, that falsely described disruptor, comes in as many shades as sound. Adams’s silences might be gulfs or passages, depending on performative context.
“Speaking of which, the JACK Quartet is going to be a nearly impossible act to follow for an ensemble confronting the challenges of any Adams quartet, let alone this one! Their ensemble power and rhythmic precision are formidable, but the staggering nuance they bring to every gesture threatens enforced critical silence. Approach with caution, just as an example, the luffing motions of ‘Murmurs in a Chromatic Field,’ the quartet’s penultimate movement. They moan, shudder, and quake their high-energy, low-volume way through music that rises and falls in slowly lapping spirals, the perfect blending of opposites as wave and particle eradicate their boundaries. Each gesture dances forward while somehow barely moving. Quietly ecstatic and then simmering with Angst, the movement is among the most exquisitely unified to grace an Adams quartet, the capper to yet another triumph for composer and label.” —Marc Medwin, Fanfare
“This new album by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Adams explores the deeper levels of elemental nature through extraordinary musical expression. The composer writes: ‘Waves and Particles was inspired by quantum physics, fractal geometry, and noise—which function as elemental metaphors in my music.’ This is realized by the renowned JACK Quartet who artfully extract new and exceptional sounds from the standard string quartet.…
“This album is full of remarkable sounds that the composer extracts from the conventional string quartet. Quantum physics, fractal geometry, and noise are part of the natural world, yet we know of them only abstractly by scientific observation and measurement using complicated machines. Can these phenomena be treated in the same way as mountains, forests, rivers and oceans? The music in this album, although often powerful, is never distant or intimidating. Rather it shares the same welcoming warmth of other string quartets by Adams, inspired by the conventional natural world. Waves and Particles makes a strong case that we need to embrace the totality of nature, even down to its elemental particles.” —Paul Muller, Sequenza21
“I am a longtime fan of Pulitzer prize-winning composer John Luther Adams. I own most and still enjoy each of his more than 30 releases, going all the way back to ’Songbirdsongs’, released in 1982, more than 40 years ago. “Waves and Particles” is performed here with the great JACK string quartet and it was inspired by quantum physics, fractal geometry, and noise. Each of the six pieces was based on simple fractal forms. ‘Particle Dust’ is first and it is a busy blur of intense activity. The density slowly shifts between a quieter section and more intense sections, the balance feels right. There is an internal pulse pounding which reminds me of the way many people see what has unfolded throughout the 20th century, one conflict after another. ‘Spectral waves’ starts out calmly and slowly with notes turning into drones and expanding over time. There are several waves or currents which are moving slowly around one another. “velocity waves’ erupts most intensely and is somewhat brutal in its force. It slowly calms back down yet soon builds up again which feels like the sound of a triumphant return. ‘Triadic Waves’ has the strings moving back and forth in harrowing waves, it feels as if we are losing balance as we tip from side to side in our unsteady boat or raft. ‘Murmurs in a Chromatic Field’ has a most eerie vibe as if some spirits or ghosts are peeking through windows to our souls. Although this piece is quite restrained, there is a feeling of unsettled vibes flowing underneath. The final piece is called ‘Particles Rising’ and although it starts off slowly, the violinists are soon banging with their bows on their strings with the cello soon joining in, their lines sound like Morse code trying to tells something like a warning for things to come. The main thing that I like about much of what John Luther Adams does is that he is able to tap into the elemental forces of Mother Nature. Many of his pieces have a visceral quality, awesome and organic. When I listened to this disc all the way through, I heard a force or power being unleashed like a storm coming and being swept away by fierce winds, with occasional moments of calm or grace to balance us between. This is strong sonic medicine for times which need to be balanced against the extreme forces which surround us every day.” —Bruce Lee Gallanter, Downtown Music Gallery Newsletter
“Waves and Particles is a work for string quartet dating from 2021. About this work, composer John Luther Adams has written that it ‘was inspired by quantum physics, fractal geometry, and noise—which function as elemental metaphors in my music. Quantum physics tells us that the universe is more like music than matter. And the musical material of this piece traverses a continuum from silence articulated by points of sound to rolling waves of pitch, timbre, intensity, and velocity. A simple fractal form shapes each of the six movements, which I hope imparts a quality less like personal expression than like inevitable force. The noise I had in mind was as an acoustician might define it: complex aperiodic sound. Composing Waves and Particles in this time of cultural disintegration, I also remembered Jacques Attali, who heralded music as prophetic noise that can signal creative disruption.’ Adams closes with a quote from French economic and social theorist Attali: ‘What is noise to the old order is harmony to the new.’ I hope that I will be forgiven for quoting Adams so extensively. I did so not out of laziness, but because Adams had a very specific idea in mind when he composed this work, and he articulated that idea better than I know how to.
“So Johnny, what are we going to be listening to this evening? ‘Oh, just some complex aperiodic sound.’ This is not, I would say, the most inviting description for unfamiliar music, but stick with this work and I daresay you will find it interesting and even pleasant, as long as you don’t expect pretty tunes lullingly played. True, the music in Waves and Particles is impersonal, but so are machines, chemical reactions, and science films of amoebae digesting algae, and all of these can be engrossing and even fun to watch. I don’t think Adams would mind us having an emotional response to this work; I just don’t think giving us ‘the feels’ was his priority.
The movements are titled ‘Particle Dust,’ ‘Spectral Waves,’ ‘Velocity Waves,’ ‘Triadic Waves,’ ‘Murmurs in a Chromatic Field’ (a gloss on Morton Feldman?), and ‘Particles Rising.’ The outer movements irregularly alternate heavy motoric passages with quiet, sustained chords. “Triadic Waves” is a movement dominated by glissandi, and ‘Murmurs in a Chromatic Field’ is the most beautiful of them all, with its quietly breathing tremolo figures. For me, it is hard not to hear weird expectation in this movement, but there I go again, having an emotional response to music where none is required, probably. I find something Bartók-like about it—night-music squared?
“The JACK Quartet has had an ongoing relationship with Adams, and nothing suggests to me that this recording in any way fails to live up to the composer’s expectations. Adams was one of the recording’s producers, which seems like an even stronger stamp of approval.
“You don’t have to be a physicist to appreciate this music. (I was going to add ‘but it doesn’t hurt,’ but that’s probably not even true.) You don’t even have to understand the movement titles. All you really need to do is listen, and listening well takes an effort. In the long run, you might not enjoy what you hear, but chances are that you will respect it. This gets a nod of approval, then.” —Raymond Tuttle, Fanfare
“Music inspired by Cantor dust, Sierpinski Gasket and intense concern for humanity.
“Cold Blue Music is a Southern Californian label releasing contemporary classical and experimental electro acoustic works. Founded by composer and producer Jim Fox in the early 1980s, with political and environmental concerns to the fore. Composer John Luther Adams’s 11th album for the label is a work for strings performed by the Jack Quartet. Set over six movements, it is inspired by quantum physics, fractal geometry and notions of sonic exploration, that the quartet are able realize to full force.
“Like a lot of John Luther Adams music, central to his creative philosophy is an ability to seemingly stretch and play with time in a highly original manner. Speaking ahead of the album’s release the composer summarized his approach: ‘Music is audible physics and much of my music is grounded in the elemental power of sound to touch and move us in profound ways.
I work a bit like a sculptor, shaping sound, space, and time into the simplest, most inevitable forms possible. Each of the six pieces on the album traverses its own geometric form, as a singular sounding image. Quantum physics tells us that the universe is more like music than matter. And the musical material of this piece crosses a continuum from silence articulated by points of sound to rolling waves of pitch, timbre intensity and velocity.’
“Particle Dust opens, a nine-minute fast tempo piece, full of emotional depth and intellectual vigor. Based on the Cantor dust, a simple but paradoxical 19th-century fractal that slowly dissolves toward nothingness, but never quite arrives. Notions of bustling modern transportation rhythmic dystopia are exploited to the full as bass heavy cellos take the lead and as sections break down to slower tempos single line violin and viola explore melodic themes prior to an end flourish. Next up Spectral Waves slowly drifts in and out of focus, working into deep thought. The Jack Quartet take on board the composer’s ambition and meet it with a high sense of adventure. He adds: “From the moment I first heard the JACKs, I realized that here was a new generation of musicians who could and would play anything that I might imagine. As one of my composer friends observed recently, they have become a kind of muse for me.’ ’The piece uses a form that I’ve employed in a number of my earlier works, including a previous album Become Ocean, in which harmonic waves with time periods of 1, 3, 5, and 7 rise and fall in and out of sync with one another, cresting together in one central moment.’
“Velocity Waves brings back fast pace cello bass bursts, inviting deep space noise exploration, mirrored by viola and violin. At the end a hypnotic intensity and high pitched rhythmic physical drama ensues using accelerating and decelerating sonorities. Triadic Waves moves into calmer waters, based on the Sierpinski Gasket fractal shape, a kind of Eiffel Tower of interwoven pyramids. Sound waves oscillate and diverse, shifting string pitches and new computer ideas inspire the piece. Think Bernard Hermann let loose on a future Kubrick AI movie set 300 years in the future. Murmurs in a Chromatic Field, likewise a sci-fi exploration, uses deep bass explorations and mid frequency drone chords.
“A deep concern for the state of the earth and the future of humanity drives Adams. As he puts it: ‘If we can imagine a culture and a society in which we each feel more deeply responsible for our own place in the world, then we just may be able to bring that culture and that society into being. This will largely be the work of people who will be here on this earth when I am gone. I place my faith in them.’ The final movement Particles Rising fuses solo violin and rhythmic bursts from viola and a curious well thought out main theme with tints of a staccato country and western barn dance drive.
“An important album of shimmering beauty, complexity and ambition, confirming John Luther Adams as a hugely important composer, successfully pushing boundaries and creating new territory for deep listening.” —Simon Duff, Morning Star (UK)
“Cold Blue Music is a label based in Southern California that specializes in contemporary classical and experimental electro-acoustic works. It was founded in the early 1980s by Jim Fox and music with political and environmental concerns have always been a focus. It is therefore no surprise to find that this is their eleventh album featuring music by John Luther Adams.
“The composer has said of his work ‘Music is not what I do. It’s how I understand the world.’ … His music is certainly not in line with the American avant-garde nor even minimalists, confusion has sometimes arisen with the other more famous John Adams. John Luther Adams is his own man. He discovered the string quartet genre quite late in life writing his first work for this grouping The Wind In High Places in 2011. This present work is his ninth for string quartet.
“Waves and Particles consists of six movements, and so the composer tells us “is inspired by quantum physics, fractal geometry and notions of sonic exploration.” … The composer has said of the players ‘From the moment I first heard the Jack’s, I realized that here was a new generation of musicians who could and would play anything that I might imagine.’
“The playing of the JACKs is beyond reproach. They are the composer’s performers of choice, and he has worked with them for a number of years. Like the Arditti Quartet with, say, works by Ferneyhough, one cannot imagine a better performance.” —Paul RW Jackson, MusicWeb International (UK)
“Who is Taylor Swift’s favorite composer? Perhaps the unlikely answer is 71-year-old John Luther Adams, the creator of vast epics inspired by the natural world. His breakout success was 2013’s Become Ocean—a 45-minute flood of sound that, at its midpoint, runs in reverse order, like the tide returning to the shore. When Swift heard it she was so impressed that she made a $50,000 donation to the orchestra that had given its premiere..… Newly out is a premiere recording of Waves and Particles, Adams’s mesmerizing 2021 string quartet. The JACK Quartet do astonishing things with this work, which is apparently based on subatomic analysis, but you don’t need to know anything about that to enjoy — or at least succumb to — its juddering collisions, icy interludes and, in the end, intoxicating pulse.” —Neil Fisher, The Times (London) “Best Classical Albums so far in 2024”