John Luther Adams - In the White Silence

Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble (Artist, Performer), John Luther Adams (Composer), Tim Weiss (Conductor), Arturo Araya (Performer), Catherine Barrett (Performer), David Schotzko (Performer), Michael LaMattina (Performer), Michael Judge (Performer), Felix Petit (Performer), JiSun Yang (Performer) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Performer: Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble, Arturo Araya, Catherine Barrett, David Schotzko, Michael LaMattina, et al.
• Conductor: Tim Weiss
• Composer: John Luther Adams
• Audio CD (April 29, 2003)
• SPARS Code: DDD
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: New World Records
• ASIN: B00008Z452
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #165,266 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

1. In The White Silence - Adams

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars astounding, life-changing beauty, December 4, 2004

By 

Glenn Becker (Arlington, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: John Luther Adams - In the White Silence (Audio CD)

This music might not be to everyone's taste. The piece is 75" long and in some ways it could be said that it does not really "go" anywhere. It attempts on one level to evoke an arctic landscape -- which can appear monotonous, too, to eyes not used to really looking. But to these ears, weary of election-year arguing and backbiting and invective and the minutiae of work and personal life, this is the most searingly beautiful, tear-evoking music I have heard in a long, long time.

I cannot comment on this music in a formal or musicological fashion because I don't have the training. All I can say is that this piece (and its realization here) is like an hour and a quarter of sheer, boundless radiance. If the light off snow could be heard it would sound like this. It is less like being inside a bell than like being the bell itself. Please, please listen to the music of John Luther Adams and begin to ring.

I'll be snapping up everything I can find by this amazing American composer.

29 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars As It Was in the Beginning, Is Now, and Ever Shall Be, November 8, 2003

By 

Nicholas Croft (New York) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: John Luther Adams - In the White Silence (Audio CD)

John Luther Adams conceives his musical compositions in a small one room cabin studio, located deep in the snow covered woods, near Fairbanks, Alaska. He has spent many years in that simple room, in hermit like solitude, contemplating the stark beauty of his surrounding landscape. A pregnant form of pantheistic spirituality, successfully transmitted within this delicate recording, comes gradually to those nurturing an interior life amidst such an isolated, pristine setting.

Perhaps, it is through his deeply contemplative nature, combined with the commitment of decades of compositional exploration, that Mr. Adams has become one of the leading voices of natural beauty within the artic regions.

In the structural center of 1998's "In the White Silence", a string quartet, celeste, harp and vibraphone each transmit echoes of a cleanly resonant luminosity, amidst sensual drone like clusters of sustained string work. In these lush sustained string clusters, the listener is drawn gently into the spirit of the work's intoxicatingly ethereal presence.

As the poetic title of the piece implies, the work is about the experience of silence. About realms beyond the inadequacy of words. Words are, at best, only pointers to complex realities and the feelings that such realities give rise to. Indeed, one can see that Mr. Adams has maintained a consistency of theological aesthetic in the past few years, as is evident on his 1997 recording "Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing".

In the beginning, there was an empty silence. And that silence was infused with a lonely, yet radiant, spiritual presence. We can, if we wish, come to be one with her and her longing, through and with this inspired music. It is a quietly passionate mystical letter, sent with abandon to all, in a darkly mysterious time.