Four Thousand Holes

And though the holes were rather small, They had to count them all. —John Lennon, “A Day in the Life” John Luther Adams writes music that draws much of its inspiration from earth’s primal forms and forces. These large, elemental concepts are never far below the surface of the music on “Four Thousand Holes.” The two works that comprise this album—constructions that blend process and intuition—maintain a tight focus on music’s inherent sensuality. The title piece, a bold, wonderfully quirky, technically demanding work, performed by the extraordinary pianist Stephen Drury and percussionist Scott Deal, amasses and mixes multiple-tempo streams of simple triads with electro-acoustic “auras” to create a sense of beautifully suspended time. The more introspective second piece, the percussion quintet “…and bells remembered…,” performed by the Callithumpian Consort, spins forth a quiet, gently clangorous world of ringing tones. The composer writes about Four Thousand Holes: “I came of age playing rock and roll. And although I left that musical world long ago, the truth is I’ve never really felt completely at home in the classical music world. I’m especially uncomfortable with much of the so-called ‘crossover’ music of recent years, in which classical musicians attempt to expand that tradition (and demonstrate their street ‘cred’) through appropriation of elements from pop music. “In spite of this skepticism, Four Thousand Holes is my own effort to re-appropriate and reclaim for myself something of my own musical past. For the first time since my days as a rocker, I’ve chosen to restrict myself to major and minor triads—those most basic elements of Western music (both pop and classical). But I’ve tried to assimilate them fully into my own musical world. Approaching these simple chords as found objects, I’ve superimposed them in multiple streams of tempo, to create darker harmonies and lush fields of sound. “In recent years I’ve been fortunate to form a close musical partnership with Stephen Drury. Steve’s extraordinary gifts inspired me to explore expansive forms and textures (similar to those of my orchestral music) with only one or two performers. “In essence, Four Thousand Holes is a concerto. To begin I composed the score for the electronic tracks. Steve recorded all of the individual chords that occur in the score. I took those recordings, time-stretched them, reversed their envelopes, and knit the reversed sounds together with their original decays. The resulting waves of sound I layered into ten independent tracks to create the virtual ‘orchestra.’ “Next I composed the piano part, articulating the peaks of all the electronic tracks simultaneously—a feat of coordination that demands considerable virtuosity from the pianist. Finally I composed another multi-layered part for metallic percussion sounds that I think of as sparks emanating from the piano. “In Four Thousand Holes, strong musical currents fall and rise, again and again, as points and lines are juxtaposed with heavy, hammered chords. The mix of the ‘live’ and electronic sounds blurs the distinction between musical figure and ground. As in much of my recent music, I conceive of the entire piece as a single complex sonority that evolves slowly. As we settle into the sound, we begin to hear long lines, counterpoint, and maybe even the occasional trace of a tune.” The composer writes about …and bells remembered…: “In the midnight dusk of this spring evening I sit at the piano. The studio windows are open. The hermit thrush is singing. The quiet chords I’m playing meld with the song of the bird. The cycles of life and music return me again to the place where I began. “I’m finishing a new piece…a piece I began in the spring of 1973. I was 20 years old, a student at Cal Arts. I hadn’t begun studying bird songs. I hadn’t yet traveled to Alaska. Still there’s something in this music that all these years later I recognize as my own—as if I’d begun it yesterday. “The instrumentation has changed. The notation has changed. The specific details of texture, the sequence of events has changed. But the overall sound, the harmonic colors, the feeling is the same. “What a strange sense of familiarity and detachment. I’m comforted by this continuity across the years. And I understand that the music now has a life of its own, independent of me.” PERFORMERS: Stephen Drury is a pianist, conductor, and new music champion who has performed throughout the world—taking the sounds of contemporary music from Arkansas to Seoul—including appearances at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, Alice Tully Hall (as part of the Great Day in New York Festival), Bargemusic, London’s Barbican Centre and Queen Elizabeth Hall, Paris’s Cité de la Musique, the Leipzig Gewandhaus, MusikTriennale Koln, the North American New Music Festival in Buffalo, Bard College’s Summerscape Festival, the International Festival of Contemporary Art in León, Mexico, and Moscow’s International Music Festival, as well as at Roulette, the Knitting Factory, Tonic, and The Stone in New York City. (He gave the first piano recitals ever in Julianehaab, Greenland, and Quetta, Pakistan.) Scott Deal is an active new-music percussionist who has performed at theaters, galleries, universities, and festivals throughout North America and Europe. An artist who presents a “riveting performance” (Sequenza 21), and “displays phenomenal virtuosity” (Arts Fuse), Deal has premiered numerous solo, chamber, and mixed media works. His previous recording of music by John Luther Adams (Red Arc/Blue Veil, Cold Blue CB0026) has been described as “a soaring, shimmering exploration of texture and tone…an album of resplendent mood and incredible scale” (Musicworks). The Callithumpian Consort, founded by pianist and conductor Stephen Drury, is an ensemble that produces high-level concerts of contemporary music. Flexible in size and makeup, the Consort consists of a long-standing band, the Thump soloists, in the company of a large pool of instrumentalists. Its repertoire encompasses a broad stylistic spectrum, from the classics of the last 50 years to today’s ink-still-wet avant-garde and experimental works. Actively commissioning and recording new works, the ensemble has worked with composers John Cage, Lee Hyla, John Zorn, Michael Finnissy, Franco Donatoni, Lukas Foss, Steve Reich, Helmut Lachenmann, John Luther Adams, Frederic Rzewski, Christian Wolff, and many others. REVIEWS: “I can’t stop listening to John Luther Adams’s ‘Four Thousand Holes.’” —Alex Ross “Four Thousand Holes may simply be Adams’s best work to-date.… So far, 2011 has had its lion’s share of exquisite recordings, but this disc stands out as required listening.… Album of the Week.” —WQXR/Q2 (NYC) “One piece is large, one is small, and both celebrate the spatial dimensions of nature, their meditative rhythms laced with the gratuitous flowering sensuality of 21st-century minimalism and impelled by a fascination with found chordal objects.… This is also, to an unusual extent, music not only without bar-lines but perhaps without bars themselves. In Four Thousand Holes, it’s all about major and minor triads. In …and bells remembered…, it’s about bells…. Extensive web-based documentation details an extraordinary attention to detail on the part of Adams, who describes the intuition-inspired process and art of his compositional activity with the gleeful wizardry of an entomologist bringing a precarious subject back to life. It is impressive to imagine anyone actually following such conceptual virtuosity, much less creating the seamless, seemingly organic layers of sound Adams lays out over his structurally precise and infinitely flexible power grids.” —Gramophone magazine “The reputation of John Luther Adams has been building in recent years, as the lush, meditative music of this Alaska-based composer has begun traveling far from the western wilderness landscapes from which it draws its prime inspiration.… His recent piece, Four Thousand Holes, was in fact commissioned by the Boston-based pianist Stephen Drury, who will give its first performance on June 23. . . . In advance of that premiere the work has found its way onto a compelling new disc on the Cold Blue label, with Drury and percussionist Scott Deal. Despite a rather majestic climax, Four Thousand Holes unfolds at a measured pace, like a kind of contemplative walk in the woods in which the landscape changes slowly but dramatically over time. There is a spontaneous feel that belies the careful craftsmanship. Drury’s piano part is made up exclusively of chords based on major and minor triads, with Deal’s vibraphone and orchestra bells adding an extra sonic glitter. On top of it all, Adams generates a processed electronic ‘aura,’ derived from the piano lines, and it spreads out like a canopy of sound: dense, rich, and enveloping.” —Josh Shea, Boston Globe