John Luther Adams: Everything That Rises
Cold Blue

As Everything That Rises so remarkably illustrates, John Luther Adams possesses an uncommon gift for translating a concept or idea into musical material. Eschewing the familiar multi-movement form of a string quartet composition, his fourth quartet is performed by the JACK Quartet (violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell) as a single-movement, fifty-six-minute work.

For many years Adams, a long-time associate of Cold Blue and 2014 recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in Music, was based in Alaska, an experience that saw his creative output deeply affected by the region's expansive natural spaces and character; though he now splits his time between New York City and Mexico's Baja California, his works continue to reflect the influence of the wide-open spaces of the Alaskan setting that exerted such a huge impact on his sensibility; distancing himself from the usual centers of artistic activity for many years no doubt helped Adams develop his distinct artistic voice. The New Yorker's Alex Ross has called him “(o)ne of the most original musical thinkers of the new century,” a statement that probably would qualify as hyperbole when applied to another but in the case of Adams seems apt.

Structurally, the piece comprises sixteen harmonic clouds that patiently and inexorably rise. The strings' ascending movements grow ever more transfixing as this elegant work advances, and the minutes melt away as the staggered phrases, their ascents punctuated by fluttering, vocal-like trills, spiral continually upwards. Executed so subtly it verges on imperceptible, diminutions in volume occur in tandem with the gradual ascensions of pitch. Never is the work's effect more exquisite than during the final minutes when the strings constitute little more than a ghostly whisper until the material expires, an end logically foretold from the first moment. The effect is so powerful, one visualizes an entire audience spellbound as the piece approaches its resolution.

Put simply, Everything That Rises is a mesmerizing work stunningly realized by the JACK Quartet. Certainly incredible degrees of control and concentration are required to execute a work whose dynamics and development are so precisely calibrated. That the quartet is able to sustain such an equally incredible degree of almost unbearable tension for the full measure of the performance is remarkable in itself; one imagines that the musicians, especially when each of the four plays as a soloist throughout, must have been completely spent once the last note sounded.

March 2018