John Luther Adams In a Treeless Place, Only Snow
Philip Glass Piano Quintet no. 1 “Annunciation”
David Felberg, Ruxandra Marquardt violin
Laura Steiner viola
Dana Winograd cello
Luke Gullickson piano
Anna Hamrick harp
Jeff Cornelius, Diana Sharpe vibraphones
Malena Morling spoken word
Presented in collaboration with the University of Iowa String Quartet Residency Program and Center for New Music
The venturous quartet follows up last year’s John Zorn concert with music by John Luther Adams and Elliott Carter.
The members of JACK Quartet—champions of contemporary music and musicians of prodigious talent—return to play compositions by two towering giants. John Luther Adams—whose work Inuksuit is central to Steve Schick’s October residency—invites listeners to slow down and share a specific time and space together. Meanwhile, Elliott Carter’s fifth quartet opens a window on the compositional process.
“It's hard to think of another string quartet that plays ... ferociously contemporary repertoire with their impeccable precision.” — San Francisco Classical Voice
PROGRAM:
John Luther ADAMS: Lines Made by Walking
Elliott CARTER: String Quartet No. 5 (1995)
Following her thrilling 2023 recital debut with pianist Julius Drake, Singaporean-British mezzo Fleur Barron returns to PCMS with the “fearless, yet probingly beautiful” (The Strad) Parker Quartet. Their collaboration includes the premiere of a new song cycle for string quartet and voice by Anthony Cheung (co-commissioned by PCMS), as well as arrangements of Brahms’s and Mahler’s songs, and John Luther Adams’s stunningly serene The Wind in High Places.
Brahms: Im Herbst from Fünf Gesänge, Op. 104 (Arr. Parker Quartet)
J. L. Adams: The Wind in High Places
Cheung: The Field Remembers Philadelphia Premiere/PCMS Co-Commission
Mahler: Der Einsame im Herbst from Das Lied von der Erde (Arr. Cheung)
Brahms: String Quartet in B-flat Major, Op. 67
Running time: 1 hour and 45 minutes (including intermission)
A DAY OF NEW MUSIC
Art Installations, Deep Listening, Food Trucks, Beer Garden, and more!
The line-up includes performances of Dark Waves (Vicki Ray) and Canticles of the Sky (Calder Quartet).
The LA Phil's new-music marathon includes 12 hours of live performances and art installations in every corner of Walt Disney Concert Hall. This year's festival, curated by Pulitzer-prize winning composer Ellen Reid, explores the intersections of art, technology, and nature through the theme of field recordings, the act of capturing audio in natural or built environments outside of a studio setting. Noon to Midnight: Field Recordings is an invitation to experience how sound changes us by participating in deeper forms of listening.
Live at the Pulitzer
Outside In
Kaija Saariaho Six Japanese Gardens
John Luther Adams Selections from The Wind in High Places
Samuel Adams Sundial
? This concert takes place at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation
Alexander Meagher, Percussion
Liam Wooding, Piano
Program:
John Luther Adams 4,000 HOLES
Alvin Lucier NOTHING IS REAL
Thierry de Mey SILENCE MUST BE
A multi-sensory presentation for percussion and piano, accompanied by surround-sound technology and coloured light auras. The compositions draw inspiration from the Beatles' psychedelic music of the 1960s, with 4,000 Holes based on "A Day in the Life" and Nothing Is Real on "Strawberry Fields Forever".
RANDALL CRAIG FLEISCHER -
Athabaskan Prayer Song from Echoes
JOHN LUTHER ADAMS - An Atlas of Deep Time
BEETHOVEN - Symphony No. 6
The piece ASO Music Director in Memoriam called "One of the highlights of my tenure (and life)," Randy's Echoes features Alaska Native and Native American indigenous music, including an Athabaskan Prayer Song.
John Luther Adams paints a mesmerizing sonic landscape of the vast expanse of geological time, evoking a sense of awe and wonder through its gradual shifts and resonant textures.
Beethoven's "Pastoral Symphony" evokes nature's beauty and tranquility and the joyfulness and energy it summons within us.
Music by John Luther Adams, Christopher Rountree, Nathalie Joachim, CJ Camerieri, Trever Hagen, and Vicky Chow
Produced by Liquid Music
On October 25, 2025, conductor Christopher Rountree known for his “elegant clarity” (New York Times), prestigious French choreographer Dimitri Chamblas, and powerhouse section leaders Sidney Hopson (percussion), Nathalie Joachim (winds), C.J. Camerieri and Trever Hagen (brass) will guide an acoustic ensemble of 36 local musicians in an ultimate rendering of Pulitzer Prize-winning environmentalist composer John Luther Adams’s Crossing Open Ground in the majestic setting of Southern Utah (site to be announced).
Ahead of this singular experience, producer Liquid Music introduces the artistic team to the Kayenta community with works by the Crossing Open Ground musicians, special guest Vicky Chow, and John Luther Adams—hosted by Rountree. Liquid Music artistic director Kate Nordstrum will share insights on the development of Crossing Open Ground for the uniquely inspiring environment of southwestern Utah.
NFM Wroclaw Philharmonic and the NFM Choir plunge into two parts of John Luther Adams' Become cycle. The choir and orchestra of the National Forum of Music in Wroclaw, Poland, present these works as a special immersive experience. DE SINGEL’s Blue Hall will be fitted with three additional stages. On them, the choir and the orchestra will surround the audience. In the midst of the sound that will be coming at you from all sides, you will experience Adams’ music even more intensely, and it will literally become a living landscape. Exactly as Adams intended. After all, in most of his works the American composer transforms the landscape into sound, structure and music. Adams wrote Become Desert for choir and orchestra after leaving Alaska for the solitude of the Sonoran Desert in Mexico.
Amateur horn players, accompanied by the Korpus Horn Quartet (Reindert Geirnaert, Guillaume Michiels, Jonathan van der Beek, Jason Enuset), perform the composition Across the Distance by American composer John Luther Adams. Adams, who lived in Alaska for nearly 40 years, was initially active as an environmentalist. Starting in the 1980s, he devoted himself entirely to composing, staying true to his original, inner drive: namely, he wants to improve the world. In his music – often intended for outdoor performance – Adams therefore seeks authenticity and connection, with space, nature, the elements, the earth, humanity.
Across the Distance is a composition Luther Adams wrote in 2015, for one or more groups of eight horns. In May, Musica launched an appeal to (amateur) horn players from near and far, from the DKO, active in harmonies and brass bands, … to participate in the performance of this composition during OORtreders. After two extensive rehearsal moments, Across the Distance resonates throughout Het Klankenbos: natural tones, played by many horns – the instrument of nature par excellence – rise from a central point in the Het Klankenbos. The natural tones are non-tempered, acoustically perfect intervals, grounded in the natural harmonic series.
Over the course of the performance, the players spread out in space and mingle among the audience, who are free to move among the performers. In this way, the sounds of nature disperse in the space and, embracing the audience, move out into the wider world.
As part of Sounds Now, co-funded by the European Union’s Creative Europe program.
On view through Tuesday to Saturday, 1:30 p.m.-6:30 p.m., October 19-November 2.
The encounter between a musical composition by John Luther Adams and an architectural intervention by Diogo Aguiar Studio, in a game of correspondences that both evokes the landscapes of Alaska and invites us to follow the paths suggested by the sound - between loss, longing, consolation or even peace. A commission by Aveiro 2024 – Portuguese Capital of Culture, with musical curation by Martim Sousa Tavares.
John Luther Adams (musical composition)
Diogo Aguiar Studio (stage device)
Martim Sousa Tavares (musical curatorship)
Aveiro 2024 - Portuguese Capital of Culture / Teatro Aveirense / Câmara Municipal de Aveiro (commissioned)
On June 29, 2009, 18 intrepid percussionists premiered John Luther Adams’s Inuksuit at the “Roots and Rhizomes” percussion course at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Inuksuit, designed to be performed outdoors with as many as 99 percussionists, is aimed at exploring the sound of a place. The percussionists move while playing, and the audience can move with them or find a shady spot to sit and listen to the whole. Through the music, the sounds of the place assert themselves—birds, wind, water, children playing. At the premiere only six intrepid listeners gathered in a driving rain in the high Canadian Rockies. Now, on its 15th anniversary, audiences are no longer so small. After hundreds of performances on five continents, Inuksuit comes to Iowa City where Schick will be joined by nearly a hundred percussionists from around the Midwest to celebrate this music and its legacy.
The goal of Inuksuit has always been to focus our ears on the world, and by doing so, to bring the lives of humans closer to the life of our beautiful and scarred planet. In Iowa City, itself a place radically shaped by natural events, Inuksuit will come alive again and will help us hear the world and each other. It has become an anthem: for humans who wish to live in greater harmony with our planet; for musicians who believe that music can happen far from concert stages, and for listeners who wish to find beauty in the small sounds of everyday life.
What is INUKSUIT?:
Inuksuit — a 70-minute piece — has been described by the New York Times as “the ultimate environmental piece,” while the New Yorker’s Alex Ross hailed it as “one of the most rapturous experiences of my listening life.”
The performance on Sunday, October 6 will feature roughly over 100 percussionists dispersed throughout Iowa City’s City Park and along the banks of the Iowa River.
“Each performance of Inuksuit is different,” Adams explains, “determined not just by the ensemble but by the topology and vegetation of the site — even by the songs of the local birds. The musicians are dispersed throughout a large area, and the listeners are free to discover their own individual listening points, which actively shapes their experience. This work is intended to expand our awareness of the never-ending music of the world in which we live, transforming seemingly empty space into a more fully experienced place.”
The RSNO returns to Sonica Glasgow 2024 with the Scottish premiere of John Luther Adams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Become Ocean, an ebbing and flowing sonic journey and a meditation on the vast, mysterious tides of existence. Arpeggios rise and fall through sumptuously dark sound; we swim towards shimmering light and the blinding light of monumentally towering icebergs – before a great wave of swirling, rumbling turbulence pulls us down and under and inwards once more. In Adams’s words: ‘As the polar ice melts and sea level rises, we humans find ourselves facing the prospect that once again we may quite literally become ocean.’ Responding to the music in real time, Alba G. Corral paints detailed, large-scale kaleidoscopic digital landscapes for a truly immersive experience.
Exquisite, virtuosic music from Los Angeles’s Cold Blue Music record label, a source of
remarkable new music with a West Coast slant for more than 25 years.
Performances by Vicki Ray, John Schneider, Alma Lisa Fernandez, and Christopher Roberts,
including a Los Angeles premiere (Adams) and a world premiere (Garland). Works for piano
with “cascading echoes,” solo double bass, solo viola, and voice with just-intonation National
steel guitar. Also heard will be a short recorded work by the late composer and instrument
builder Chas Smith.
National Symphony Orchestra
Ryan McAdams conductor
Elaine Clark violin
Philip Glass Violin Concerto No. 1
John Luther Adams Become Ocean
Culture Night is permission to try something new. Something that might astonish you. Like two very different living American musical giants.
The First Violin Concerto by Philip Glass is a loving remembrance of his father, as moving as it is modern.
John Luther Adams describes Become Ocean as ‘a meditation on the vast, deep and mysterious tides of existence’. The New Yorker said it ‘may be the loveliest apocalypse in musical history’.
Chief Conductor Umberto Clerici will be captain of this voyage to some of the wildest natural places. John Luther Adams’ visceral work Become Ocean does more than evoke the pull of the tides. It invites you to become one with the sea itself – to remember life’s humble beginnings on our water-based planet and ponder a future in which we return to its depths. Equally as evocative is Nigel Westlake’s Spirit of the Wild, brought to life by Australian oboe royalty Diana Doherty. Her vivid performance will transport you to Tasmania’s rugged South West wilderness where nature reigns supreme. This existential program exudes chaos of epic proportions with stirring music from Haydn’s The Creation.
Joseph Haydn
The Depiction of Chaos from The Creation
Nigel Westlake
Spirit of the Wild
John Luther Adams
Become Ocean
To Stare Astonished at the Sea – Lois V Vierk
Paradise Lost* – Erik Griswold (world premiere)
Nunataks – John Luther Adams
And No Birds Sing* – Somei Satoh (world premiere)
Shattered Apparitions of the Western Wind – Annie Gosfield
Coney Island sous l’ Eau – Michael Wookey
0’00” – John Cage
Margaret Leng Tan has established herself as a major force within the American avant-garde; a highly visible, talented and visionary pianist whose work sidesteps perceived artificial boundaries within the usual concert experience and creates a new level of communication with listeners. Embracing aspects of theater, choreography, performance and even “props” such as the teapot she “plays” in Alvin Lucier’s Nothing is Real, Tan has brought to the avant-garde, a measure of good old-fashioned showmanship tempered with a disciplinary rigor inherited from her mentor John Cage. This has won Tan acceptance far beyond the norm for performers of avant-garde music, as she is regularly featured at international festivals, records often for adventurous labels such as Mode and New Albion and has appeared on American public television, at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall.
Born in Singapore, Tan was the first woman to earn a doctorate from Juilliard, but youthful restlessness and a desire to explore the crosscurrents between Asian music and that of the West led her to John Cage. This sparked an active collaboration between Cage and Tan that lasted from 1981 to his death, during which Tan gained recognition as one of the pre-eminent interpreters of Cage’s music, partly through her New Albion recordings, Daughters of the Lonesome Isle and The Perilous Night/Four Walls. She has subsequently recorded Works for Piano 4 and Works for Piano 7 for Mode Records’ Complete John Cage Edition. After Cage’s death in 1992, she was chosen as the featured performer in a tribute to his memory at the 45th Venice Biennale.
Tan takes a lively interest in the musical potential of unconventional and unlikely instruments, and in 1997 her groundbreaking CD, The Art of the Toy Piano on Point Music/Universal Classics elevated the lowly toy piano to the status of a “real” instrument. Tan is certainly the world’s first professional toy piano virtuoso. Since then her curiosity has extended to other toy instruments as well, substantiating her credo “Poor tools require better skills” (Marcel Duchamp). She Herself Alone: The Art of the Toy Piano 2, Ms. Tan’s latest toy instrumental album (mode 221 CD/DVD), has been called “one of this year’s finest treasures of new music” (Downtown Music Gallery).