Year
Title
An Atlas of Deep Time
2024
"After engaging with this recording repeatedly over several days, it continues to reveal new layers and becomes more compelling with each session. An Atlas of Deep Time stands as one of Adams’ most striking recent works and could be a contender for album of the year." — Avant Music News
As Grammy-winning composer John Luther Adams puts it, his latest work An Atlas of Deep Time “...is grounded in my desire, amid the turbulence of human affairs, to hear the older, deeper resonances of the earth.” Commissioned and recorded with the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra under the baton of music director Delta David Gier, the piece taps into an ancient resonance that seems to hover imposingly, but benevolently, over our own existence — itself a blip in geological time.
“You can sit for a long time with the history of man like a stone in your hand,” said the late author Barry Lopez, a lifelong friend to Adams. These words serve as the written invocation to a work that beautifully captures the sense of majesty, mystery and vulnerability that we, and the natural world, hold within us.
Writing for the New Yorker, journalist Alex Ross described the 2022 world premiere of An Atlas of Deep Time as “a craggier, denser, more unsettling score” than Become Ocean, the Pulitzer-winning work for which Adams is most renowned. Even so, in the audacious hands of Gier and the SDSO, the “sounding immensity” of the performance itself “afforded the uncanny pleasure of being dissolved into something complete and great.”
Commissioned by and dedicated to the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra for its Centennial Anniversary World Premiere: Sioux Falls, SD (April 30, 2022)
Produced by Nathaniel Reichman and John Luther Adams
Recorded by Mark Donahue at Mary W. Sommervold Hall, Washington Pavilion Mixing and immersive mastering: Nathaniel Reichman
An Atlas of Deep Time is published by Taiga Press (BMI) and distributed by The Wise Music Group.
“You can sit for a long time with the history of man like a stone in your hand,” said the late author Barry Lopez, a lifelong friend to Adams. These words serve as the written invocation to a work that beautifully captures the sense of majesty, mystery and vulnerability that we, and the natural world, hold within us.
Writing for the New Yorker, journalist Alex Ross described the 2022 world premiere of An Atlas of Deep Time as “a craggier, denser, more unsettling score” than Become Ocean, the Pulitzer-winning work for which Adams is most renowned. Even so, in the audacious hands of Gier and the SDSO, the “sounding immensity” of the performance itself “afforded the uncanny pleasure of being dissolved into something complete and great.”
Commissioned by and dedicated to the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra for its Centennial Anniversary World Premiere: Sioux Falls, SD (April 30, 2022)
Produced by Nathaniel Reichman and John Luther Adams
Recorded by Mark Donahue at Mary W. Sommervold Hall, Washington Pavilion Mixing and immersive mastering: Nathaniel Reichman
An Atlas of Deep Time is published by Taiga Press (BMI) and distributed by The Wise Music Group.