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 ...
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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...
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