Experience John Luther Adams’s Prophecies of Fire, which had its world premiere by Sandbox Percussion in 2024 and makes its New York premiere at The New School.

*

ABOUT PROPHECIES OF FIRE

...and I come back to find
the stars misplaced,
and the smell of a world that has burned.

—Jimi Hendrix

My earliest musical awakening was as a drummer. From rock bands to playing timpani in a symphony orchestra, my deepest physical connections to music have been through percussion. Over the past five decades, my life’s work has led me to compose music for orchestra, string quartet, human voices, piano, electronics, and a wide variety of other media. Now, in my 70s, I’ve returned to the place where I began.

Prophecies of Fire is a perpetual acceleration canon —unbroken streams of rhythm inexorably rising in pitch and growing brighter, always seeming to get faster while never quite arriving. The musicians should surround the listeners, enveloping them in a maelstrom of tones and timbres, dynamics and velocities —like the wildfires and superstorms, the turbulent seas and waves of heat now rising all around the earth. But beyond any metaphorical associations, Prophecies of Fire is a celebration of the elemental power of sound itself to touch, to move, and perhaps even to transform human consciousness.

— John Luther Adams