Dark Waves (composition)

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Dark Waves is a 2007 musical composition in one movement by the American composer John Luther Adams. It was commissioned by Musica Nova for the Anchorage Symphony Orchestra, who premiered the composition in 2007. [1] The piece is dedicated to the Alaskan conductor Gordon Wright, who died a few days before the world premiere. [2]

A movement is a self-contained part of a musical composition or musical form. While individual or selected movements from a composition are sometimes performed separately, a performance of the complete work requires all the movements to be performed in succession. A movement is a section, "a major structural unit perceived as the result of the coincidence of relatively large numbers of structural phenomena".

A unit of a larger work that may stand by itself as a complete composition. Such divisions are usually self-contained. Most often the sequence of movements is arranged fast-slow-fast or in some other order that provides contrast.

John Luther Adams American composer

John Luther Adams is an American composer whose music is inspired by nature, especially the landscapes of Alaska, where he lived from 1978 to 2014. His orchestral work Become Ocean was awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music.

The Anchorage Symphony Orchestra (ASO) is a professional symphony orchestra located in Anchorage, Alaska. Randall Craig Fleischer is the director and conductor, and Linn Weeda is the assistant director and conductor.

Contents

Composition

Style

Dark Waves was the first time Adams mixed electronics with a symphony orchestra, about which he wrote in the program note, "I began with an impossible orchestra - large choirs of virtual instruments, with no musicians, no articulation and no breathing - sculpting layer upon layer into expansive waves of sound. Then I added the human element. The musicians of the real orchestra impart depth and texture, shimmer and substance to the electronic sounds. They give the music life. Their instruments speak in different ways. They change bow directions. They breathe. They play at different speeds. They ride the waves." Adams constructed these musical "waves" on perfect fifths, using tempo relationships of 3, 5, and 7. He wrote, "At the central moment, these waves crest together in a tsunami of sound encompassing all twelve chromatic tones and the full range of the orchestra." The composer concluded, "As I composed Dark Waves I pondered the ominous events of our times: terrorism and war, intensifying storms and wildfires, the melting of the polar ice and the rising of the seas. Yet even in the presence of our deepening fears, we find ourselves immersed in the mysterious beauty of this world. Amid the turbulent waves we may still find the light, the wisdom and the courage we need to pass through this darkness of our own making." [1]

Perfect fifth musical interval

In music theory, a perfect fifth is the musical interval corresponding to a pair of pitches with a frequency ratio of 3:2, or very nearly so.

The chromatic scale is a musical scale with twelve pitches, each a semitone above or below its adjacent pitches. As a result, in 12-tone equal temperament, the chromatic scale covers all 12 of the available pitches. Thus, there is only one chromatic scale.

Music critics like Alex Ross of The New Yorker —and Adams himself—have described Dark Waves as a stylist precursor to the composer's Pulitzer Prize for Music-winning 2013 composition Become Ocean . [3] [4] In an interview with BBC Music Magazine , Adams commented on the similarities, saying, "In 2007 I wrote Dark Waves, a 12-minute piece for orchestra. I love it and was really pleased with it but several listeners told me they thought it was too short. But I knew that I had stumbled on something that needed exploring on a larger scale. A year or two later Ludovic Morlot and the Seattle Symphony asked for a piece and we settled on an idea that I described as 'Dark Waves on steroids'. To my surprise and delight they went for it." [5] However, Mike Dunham of Alaska Dispatch News remarked, "It was said that the winning composition, Become Ocean, a 40-minute cosmos of sound for three orchestras, had its genesis with Dark Waves, a short piece premiered by the Anchorage Symphony in 2007. I'm not sure I get a direct connection, but Adams' music may be generally sorted into two categories: the noisy, heavily percussive pieces and the more atmospheric, dreamy and even melodic works. Both Dark Waves and Become Ocean fall into the second group." [6]

Alex Ross (music critic) American music critic

Alex Ross is an American music critic. He has been on the staff of The New Yorker magazine since 1996, and he has written the books The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007) and Listen to This (2011).

<i>The New Yorker</i> Magazine on politics, social issues, art, humor, and culture, based in New York City

The New Yorker is an American magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It is published by Condé Nast. Started as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is now published 47 times annually, with five of these issues covering two-week spans.

Pulitzer Prize for Music prize awarded for music

The Pulitzer Prize for Music is one of seven Pulitzer Prizes awarded annually in Letters, Drama, and Music. It was first given in 1943. Joseph Pulitzer arranged for a music scholarship to be awarded each year, and this was eventually converted into a prize: "For a distinguished musical composition of significant dimension by an American that has had its first performance in the United States during the year."

Instrumentation

Adams composed two versions of Dark Waves: one for two pianos and another for orchestra. The orchestral version calls for an ensemble comprising:

Piano musical instrument

The piano is an acoustic, stringed musical instrument invented in Italy by Bartolomeo Cristofori around the year 1700, in which the strings are struck by hammers. It is played using a keyboard, which is a row of keys that the performer presses down or strikes with the fingers and thumbs of both hands to cause the hammers to strike the strings.

Orchestra large instrumental ensemble

An orchestra is a large instrumental ensemble typical of classical music, which mixes instruments from different families, including bowed string instruments such as violin, viola, cello, and double bass, as well as brass instruments such as trumpet, trombone and tuba, woodwinds such as flutes, oboe and bassoon and percussion instruments such as the triangle,snare drum and cymbals, each grouped in sections. Other instruments such as the piano and celesta may sometimes appear in a fifth keyboard section or may stand alone, as may the concert harp and, for performances of some modern compositions, electronic instruments.

and electronics. [1]

Reception

The music critic Alex Ross called Dark Waves "one of the most arresting American orchestral compositions of recent years," adding, "it suggests a huge entity, of indeterminate shape, that approaches slowly, exerts apocalyptic force, and then recedes. Every instrument is, in one way or another, playing with the simple interval of the perfect fifth—the basic building block of harmony—but at the climax lines coalesce into roaring dissonances, with all twelve notes of the chromatic scale sounding together." [2] In 2014, Andrew Clements of The Guardian described it as "effectively a dark, compact precursor of the monumental Becoming Ocean[ sic ], with which Adams won a Pulitzer prize earlier this year." He added, "It's an 11-minute span combining layers of electronic and orchestral sound that move in and out of phase to generate a gigantic climax and then subside, all done with such subtlety and sophistication..." [7] Ivan Hewett of The Daily Telegraph similarly said it "offered a model of how a vastly ambitious expressive intent can be captured exactly, in a form as succinct as a Haydn minuet. It evoked wave motions vaster than any seen on planet Earth, in sounds that seemed to reverberate below and above our hearing." [8]

<i>The Guardian</i> British national daily newspaper

The Guardian is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as The Manchester Guardian, and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers The Observer and The Guardian Weekly, the Guardian is part of the Guardian Media Group, owned by the Scott Trust. The trust was created in 1936 to "secure the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity and to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of the Guardian free from commercial or political interference". The trust was converted into a limited company in 2008, with a constitution written so as to maintain for The Guardian the same protections as were built into the structure of the Scott Trust by its creators. Profits are reinvested in journalism rather than distributed to owners or shareholders.

The Latin adverb sic inserted after a quoted word or passage indicates that the quoted matter has been transcribed or translated exactly as found in the source text, complete with any erroneous, archaic, or otherwise nonstandard spelling. It also applies to any surprising assertion, faulty reasoning, or other matter that might be likely interpreted as an error of transcription.

<i>The Daily Telegraph</i> British daily broadsheet newspaper

The Daily Telegraph, commonly referred to simply as The Telegraph, is a national British daily broadsheet newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed across the United Kingdom and internationally. It was founded by Arthur B. Sleigh in 1855 as Daily Telegraph & Courier.

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References

  1. 1 2 3 Adams, John Luther (2007). "Dark Waves". G. Schirmer Inc. Retrieved July 22, 2017.
  2. 1 2 Ross, Alex (May 12, 2008). "Song of the Earth". The New Yorker . Retrieved July 22, 2017.
  3. ↑ Ross, Alex (July 8, 2013). "Water Music: John Luther Adams's "Become Ocean," at the Seattle Symphony". The New Yorker . Retrieved July 22, 2017.
  4. ↑ Adams, John Luther (2013). "Become Ocean". G. Schirmer Inc. Retrieved July 22, 2017.
  5. ↑ Franks, Rebecca (11 November 2014). "John Luther Adams: The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer on his piece Become Ocean". BBC Music Magazine . Retrieved July 22, 2017.
  6. ↑ Dunham, Mike (December 25, 2014). "Year in music: Alaska heard 'round the world". Alaska Dispatch News . Retrieved July 22, 2017.
  7. ↑ Clements, Andrew (19 October 2014). "BBCCO/De Ridder review – John Luther Adams' Dark Waves stuns". The Guardian . Retrieved July 22, 2017.
  8. ↑ Hewett, Ivan (19 October 2014). "'Visions of the New': BBC Concert Orchestra, Royal Festival Hall, review". The Daily Telegraph . Telegraph Media Group . Retrieved July 22, 2017.
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