Experience the profound musical landscapes of John Luther Adams with “Lines Made by Walking,” a captivating album featuring two recent string quartets performed by the acclaimed JACK Quartet. This release, available on CD and digital formats, showcases Adams’s signature style of blending intricate compositions with deep connections to nature and place.
This album offers unlimited streaming via the Bandcamp app and high-quality downloads in MP3, FLAC, and more. You can purchase the digital album for $12 USD or more, or opt for the Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album for $16 USD or more, which includes a physical CD shipped within 3 days. For dedicated fans of John Luther Adams, the Full Digital Discography offers all 11 of his Bandcamp releases at a 20% discount.
Track Listing:
- Lines Made by Walking: I. Up the Mountain 08:01
- Lines Made by Walking: II. Along the Ridges 10:10
- Lines Made by Walking: III. Down the Mountain 12:07
- untouched: I. Rising 08:15
- untouched: II. Crossing 08:03
- untouched: III. Falling 08:14
“Lines Made by Walking” (2019) is presented as an intimate and powerful three-movement piece, arguably John Luther Adams‘s most personal work in recent years. This music embodies constant motion, traversing landscapes and shifting perspectives for the listener. Adams himself describes the inspiration: “I’ve always been a walker. For much of my life I walked the mountains and tundra of Alaska. More recently it’s been the Mexican desert, the altiplano, quebradas, and mountain ridges of Chile, and the hills and canyons of Montana. Making my way across these landscapes at three miles an hour, I began to imagine music coming directly out of the contours of the land.”
He elaborates on his compositional process for “Lines Made by Walking,” explaining his use of tempo canons and tracing pathways across harmonic fields to create unique instrumental profiles and intricate textures. John Luther Adams sought “the most fluid and beautiful routes across my musical landscapes,” mirroring his physical walks through diverse terrains. This process allowed him to discover a “true multi-voice polyphony” born from the act of walking itself.
Complementing “Lines Made by Walking” is “untouched” (2016), another three-movement string quartet by John Luther Adams. In contrast, “untouched” explores delicate and entrancing soundscapes created entirely from natural harmonics and open strings – no stopped tones are used.
John Luther Adams shares the genesis of “untouched,” recounting an experience on the tundra with an Aeolian harp: “I stood on the tundra, holding a small Aeolian harp on top of my head, dancing with the wind, turning like a weathervane. Music seemed to flow out of the sky—across the strings, down through my body, and into the earth.” This ethereal experience led him to explore harmonic and melodic palettes derived from superimposing the harmonic series at different intervals. “untouched” represents a further exploration of the sound world he began with his first string quartet, “The Wind in High Places,” envisioning the quartet as a sixteen-string Aeolian harp where music arises purely from natural harmonics and open strings, untouched by fingers on the fingerboards.
This album, released on September 20, 2020, features the JACK Quartet, renowned interpreters of John Luther Adams‘s quartet music, with Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman on violins, John Pickford Richards on viola, and Jay Campbell on cello. “Lines Made by Walking” was commissioned by Tippet Rise Art Center. The album was produced by John Luther Adams and Nathaniel Reichman, with Jim Fox as executive producer. It was recorded at Tippet Rise Art Center in February 2020, engineered by Monte Nickles and Jim Ruberto, and mixed and mastered by Nathaniel Reichman. Design by Jim Fox, cover photograph by Joshua Cripps, and interior photograph by Erik Petersen. Compositions are © Taiga Music 2020, and CD p & © 2020 Cold Blue Music. Visit www.coldbluemusic.com for more information. All rights reserved.
