John Luther Adams: Everything That Rises

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 mesmerisingly beautiful.