Critically acclaimed composer John Luther Adams, who won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Music, offers the first recordings of three of his recent string works: two string quartets, featuring the much-lauded JACK Quartet, and a four-movement work for a choir of 48 cellos. This is stunning, beautiful, sometimes monolithic, sometimes intimate music that is in a state of constant, subtle motion.

This CD contains four of Adam's beautifully shimmering, texturally rich compositions for various combinations of one or two pianos and various percussion instruments. Features performances by noted pianist/conductor/new music champion Stephen Drury, who is on the faculty of the New England Conservatory and has recorded for Tzadik, New Albion, Mode and more.

A 2021 GRAMMY Nominee for Best Small Ensemble/Chamber Music Performance!

“Lines Made by Walking” is a uniquely beautiful and magical recording of two string quartets—"Lines Made by Walking” and “untouched”—by influential, critically celebrated composer John Luther Adams, performed by the renowned JACK Quartet. Both works reflect Adams’ passion for nature’s elemental forces. The release of this recording coincides with Farrar, Straus & Giroux’s publication of Adams’ autobiography, “Silences So Deep.” John Luther Adams’ music has won both a Pulitzer Prize and a Grammy Award and has been performed by such prominent ensembles as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Seattle Symphony, and the International Contemporary Ensemble. Cold Blue Music has released seven recordings devoted to his work, including “Everything That Rises” and “The Wind in High Places.” Deemed “superheroes of the new music world” by the Boston Globe and chosen as Musical America’s 2018 Ensemble of the Year, JACK Quartet is “the go-to quartet for contemporary music, tying impeccable musicianship to intellectual ferocity.” (Washington Post) The award-winning JACK tours and performs to critical acclaim throughout the world.

Two exuberant, beautiful solo piano pieces: the three-movement Three Dawns, based on poems by Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo, and the nine-movement Bush Radio Calling, written for the music-theater work Just Them Walking, by New Zealand's avant-garde theater company Red Mole. Both works are elegantly and spiritedly performed by Ron Squibbs. Peter Garland is a composer, world traveler, musicologist, and writer whose musicoften cited as an example of radical consonanceis always informed by his well-traveled ear and strong sense of personal vision. He studied music composition with Harold Budd and James Tenney and maintained long friendships with Lou Harrison, Conlon Nancarrow, Paul Bowles, and Dane Rudhyar. Cold Blue Music has released seven recordings of his work, including Moon Viewing Music, String Quartets, and After the Wars. Pianist Ron Squibbs is a music theory professor (UConn) and a specialist in the music of Iannis Xenakis. His previous recordings include albums of solo piano music by Dane Rudhyar and Joji Yuasa.

“Moon Viewing Music” is a quiet, mesmerizing work for large Thai-style gongs and tam-tam, performed by the celebrated Grammy-nominated percussionist William Winant. The composer writes: “For me, moon viewing is a year-round activity…. This cycle was composed in the winter. There is a unique light and intensity in a winter moon…. There is also a special silence...an inscrutable stillness.” “Garland’s music seems to be about the sheer expressive power of sound itself.” (Fanfare magazine) “[Garland is] an artist who knows what he’s doing, and then does it—repeatedly, each time out. He’s a marvelous artist; I admire his work a lot.” (Harold Budd) “Percussionist William Winant has been the avant-elite’s go-to percussionist for more than 35 years.” (SPIN magazine) Peter Garland’s music is informed by his well-traveled ear and intense personal vision. Since the 1970s, his pieces have been marked by a “radical consonance” and simplification of structure and performed around the world by such noted performers as Aki Takahashi, Herbert Henck, and Kronos Quartet. Also a musicologist and writer, he championed the work of such composers as Revueltas, Partch, and Nancarrow long before their music became fashionable. Grammy-nominated percussionist William Winant has performed with some of the most innovative and creative musicians of our time, including John Cage, Anthony Braxton, and Kronos Quartet.

“Everything That Rises” is a uniquely beautiful and magical hour of music for string quartet, performed by the celebrated, award-winning JACK Quartet. The composer writes about the piece: “Each musician is a soloist, playing throughout. Time floats and the lines spin out, always rising, in acoustically perfect intervals that grow progressively smaller as they spiral upward…until the music dissolves into the soft noise of the bows, sighing.” “‘Everything That Rises’ is art without artifice, and its beauty transports the listener.” (New York Classical Review) “‘Everything That Rises” finds Mr. Adams exploring dissonance and just-intonation tuning, in the gentlest of ways.” (The New York Times) "JACK Quartet, superheroes of the new music world.” (Boston Globe) John Luther Adams, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Music and the 2015 Grammy for Best Contemporary Classical Composition, has been described by The New Yorker’s Alex Ross as “one of the most original musical thinkers of the new century.” Adams, whose music is deeply rooted in the natural world, has worked with many prominent performers and venues.

“Celesta” is a suite of a dozen quietly transcendent, gem-like celesta solos by noted Los Angeles composer Michael Jon Fink, who also performs them. As each piece unfolds, revealing itself through elegantly fashioned variation, the listener is drawn into a highly nuanced, lyrical sound world. Taken as a whole, the collection creates its own graceful musical arc, and is certainly among the largest statements ever composed for the celesta alone. The album was recorded on one of Los Angeles’s finest five-octave Schiedmayer celestas. Fink’s usually quiet, lyrical music has been described by the “Los Angeles Times” as “lustrous,” “metaphysically tinged” and “unapologetically tranquil.” LA Weekly has written that his music is “of ethereal simplicity . . . he has shaped and refined his spare style greatly—it is distinctly his own.”

“Sunrise” is expansive, incandescent, haunting electro-acoustic music composed and performed by Jacob Cooper and Steven Bradshaw. Created during the 2020–21 pandemic, this kaleidoscopic work grows into a tsunami of sound as it casts an eye (ear) back 100 years to derive its text from a popular song composed during the 1918 pandemic: “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise.” Jacob Cooper has been lauded as “richly talented” (The New York Times) and a “maverick electronic song composer” (The New Yorker). His music has been performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group, Eighth Blackbird, and the Calder Quartet and released by Nonesuch, New Amsterdam, and other labels. The recording of his string orchestra work Stabat Mater Dolorosa, which The New York Times described as “exhaustingly poignant,” was an NPR Top Ten album in 2020. “Jacob Cooper finds grace in diaphanous slow motion.” (WQXR) “Conceptually intrepid…vital…Cooper has long been a fan of teasing his audience’s perception of time.” (Pitchfork) A founding member of the Grammy-winning The Crossing vocal ensemble, Steven Bradshaw, whose voice has been described as “Luminous” (Broadway World) and “Extraordinary” (South Florida Classical Review) has appeared as a soloist with Bang on a Can, the Philadelphia Chamber Orchestra, Roomful of Teeth, and many others groups.

Bhajan is a free-wheeling yet meditative four-section work for electric violin and live electronics, which one critic described as “a pas de deux between violin and electronics,” was written for and features noted new-music violinist Robin Lorentz. Nicholas Chase has headlined festivals in Europe and the US as a composer, performer, and improviser, His interactive, site-specific composition NOVA: Transmission was exhibited as part of the Whitney Biennial in New York and his Ngoma Lungundu opened the New Music+ Festival at the Jana ek Academy, Czech Republic. He was an inaugural Composer Fellow at the 2011 international Other Minds Festival in San Francisco and in 2015 was honored by the International Center for Japanese Culture, Tokyo, Japan.

Arctic Dreams is critically celebrated composer John Luther Adams's uniquely beautiful and magical seven-movement work for a quartet of voices and a quartet of strings, with layers of digital delay that create 32-part canonic textures. It is dedicated to the composers friend the late writer Barry Lopez, and titled after one of Lopez's greatest books. The work, like most of Adamss works, reflects the composers passion for natures elemental forces. Adams writes about the piece: As in several of my later string quartets, all the string sounds are produced by natural harmonics and open strings. The sung text is composed of the names of Arctic places, plants, birds, weather, and the seasons, in the languages of the Iñupiat and Gwichin peoples of Alaska. John Luther Adams's music has won both a Pulitzer Prize and a Grammy Award and has been performed by such prominent ensembles as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Seattle Symphony, JACK Quartet, and the International Contemporary Ensemble. Cold Blue Music has released eight recordings devoted to his work, including Lines Made by Walking, Everything That Rises, and The Wind in High Places. The performers: Synergy Vocals is a critically acclaimed vocal ensemble that has recorded music by Steve Reich, Louis Andriessen, David Lang, Luciano Berio, John Adams, Arvo Pärt, and many others and performed with the Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco Symphonies and the Los Angeles and New York Philharmonics. Their performances and recordings have been deemed amazing (New York Times); beautiful, haunting (Gramophone); and dazzling (The Observer). With Synergy is a quartet of notable string players: violinist Robin Lorentz, violist Ron Lawrence, cellist Michael Finckel, and bassist Robert Black.