JACK Quartet - John Luther Adams: Everything That Rises (2018)

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JACK Quartet - John Luther Adams: Everything That Rises (2018)

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Composer John Luther Adams is one of today’s most original voices, often finding a common ground between nature and music, as in his deftly sculpted, Pulitzer Prize-winning orchestral soundscape Become Ocean. In Everything that Rises, written for the JACK Quartet, Adams sets his four musicians on an ever-upward hour-long trajectory as they journey towards, and dissolve into, eternity. The work makes use of both complex harmonics and “just intonation,” a tuning system whose intervals are rooted in earth, corresponding with the vibrations found in everyday physical objects. The resulting sense of timelessness is both unsettling and mesmerizingly beautiful.

“'Everything That Rises,' my fourth quartet, grew out of 'Sila: The Breath of the World'—a concert-length choral/orchestral work composed on a rising series of sixteen harmonic clouds. This music traverses that same territory, but in a much more melodic way. 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.” (John Luther Adams)