Spare a thought for composers, in the ricocheting tumult of musical life since early 2020. They spend months or years writing a piece for specific musicians, venue, event. Most will earn at most the kind of fee a minor celebrity takes home for a single after-dinner speech. Then the concert is cancelled. John Luther Adams, the veteran “eco” composer, has had to wait two years for the world premiere of A Brief Descent Into Deep Time, his work for Theatre of Voices, co-commissioned by Kings Place, along with the Cork international choral festival and Carnegie Hall.
Originally a drummer who then worked in environmental protection in Alaska, Adams (b.1953) writes music inspired by the planet we live on. He calls it “sonic geography”. This latest slow-moving aural meditation on geological strata, intended for Kings Place’s 2020 Nature Unwrapped series, was nimbly shoehorned into this year’s Voices Unwrapped. He is not the first to take the Grand Canyon as his subject, nor will he be the last. Four singers slowly intoned rock names, music falling ever lower, from Kaibab limestone to Vishnu schist. The organist David Bendix Nielsen and percussionist George Barton provided minimal accompaniment. Only the final words, “grey, grey, dark grey, dark grey, black”, were distinguishable, the rest sounding like familiar vowels and consonants that could not quite translate into language.
