Adams: The Dharma at Big Sur; My Father Knew Charles Ives
Published:
COMPOSERS: Adams
LABELS: Nonesuch
ALBUM TITLE: Adams
WORKS: The Dharma at Big Sur; My Father Knew Charles Ives
PERFORMER: Tracy Silverman (electric violin); BBC SO/John Adams
CATALOGUE NO: 79857
In planning Dharma, Adams was
influenced by the observation
that in many traditions outside
European classical music the essence
lies between the notes, in slides,
portamenti and ‘blue notes’. He
originally wrote it entirely in ‘just’
intonation (using intervals different
from those of conventional tuning)
but this proved impractical so now
only the harps, samplers and piano
remain tuned to a ‘just’ scale in B.
Dharma begins with a violin
rhapsody suspended over a drone,
but it’s no ordinary rhapsody and no
ordinary violin. Silverman, playing
a solid-bodied six-string electric
instrument, is required to evoke a
range of music, including psychedelic
guitar and the Indian sarangi.
Like Ives, Adams listened to
classical and popular music with
equal enjoyment and grew up in a
family drawn to the New England
Transcendentalists like Thoreau.
(His father, did not, in reality, know
the great maverick composer.) My
Father, though unmistakeably
Adams, is a glorious re-imagining
of some of Ives’s greatest pieces, a
rich, exhilarating homage full of
quotations which turn out not to be
quotations after all: only a snatch of
‘Reveille’ and a hint of ‘Nearer My
God to Thee’ are genuine.
Barry Witherden