Pulitzer Prize–winning composer John Luther Adams was born in Mississippi but spent much of his adult life in Alaska, where the pristine grandeur of the natural environment exerted a deep influence on his music. After completing composition studies with James Tenney in 1973 at the California Institute of the Arts, Adams became involved in the conservation movement in Alaska, eventually serving for a term as executive director of the Northern Alaska Environmental Center, while continuing to compose and teach. “My music has always been profoundly influenced by the natural world and a strong sense of place,” he notes. “I hope to explore the territory of sonic geography—that region between place and culture, between environment and imagination.”
It was Adams’s haunting orchestral poem Become Ocean (2013) that won him the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music, as well as a Grammy Award in 2015 for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. That same year, he was named Musical America’s Composer of the Year. As he adds to an expansive oeuvre of landscape-informed compositions, Adams hopes his music will alert audiences to critical issues of climate change and environmental preservation, leading Alex Ross of The New Yorker to proclaim him “one of the most original musical thinkers of the new century.”
Adams’s compositions frequently allude to root environmental elements of earth, water, and air in their titles and performance conceptions. As the composer himself observes, “My work calls me to live as close as I can to the Earth, which is the ultimate source for everything I do.” The Earth is, indeed, the foundational and ultimate inspiration for Adams’s latest composition, Vespers of the Blessed Earth, which he considers one of the most ambitious works of his creative life. He includes potent words from 20th-century Spanish poet Pedro Salinas on the frontispiece of the printed score: “Earth, nothing more. Earth, nothing less. And let that be enough for you.”
In this work, the distant echoes of Claudio Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 offer a kind of inspirational model, but mostly in the sense that Monteverdi’s piece is also a collection of prayers—night prayers offered for the Blessed Virgin Mary. Adams’s Vespers are prayers for the Earth itself, not necessarily verbal or vocal, but alluding to sacred words, symbols, and practices, sometimes framed in the form of purely instrumental pleas from the heart. As the composer has declared of these Vespers, “I wanted to give full voice to the grief that so many of us feel today, to see a measure of consolation and solace, and some hope of renewal in the enduring beauty of the Earth.”
In five movements, Vespers of the Blessed Earth presents a geological-scale view of the Earth’s history, interspersed with sections that focus on specific examples of endangered environments, fauna, and flora. In the first movement, “A Brief Descent into Deep Time,” the sacred text is the Earth itself. Adams describes the movement as a journey across “two-billion years of deep time through singing the names, colors, and ages of the geologic layers of the Grand Canyon.”
“A Weeping of Doves,” for a cappella chorus, is derived from the call of the beautiful fruit dove (Ptilinopus pulchellus), a brightly colored bird found throughout the rainforests of Papua New Guinea. The weeping of the beautiful fruit dove functions here not only as a symbol of the divine spirit within Abrahamic religions and a representation of lost peace, but also as the direct inspiration for the ritual mourning and weeping practices of the Kaluli people of the New Guinean rainforests. The weeping of doves is a holy lament—across cultures and religions—for the Earth.
The third movement, “Night-Shining Clouds,” illustrates a paradoxical tension between humanity’s disregard for the environment and the Earth’s own response. Adams writes, “Sometimes on summer evenings, bright clouds appear on the northern horizon, pulsing with color as if illuminated from within. As we pollute the atmosphere more and more, these noctilucent clouds have become more widespread, as the earth just grows more beautiful.” In this movement, as in the entire work, the descending lines evoke an austerity and sadness. Here the orchestral strings explore the sub-harmonic series, “spiraling downward in a nocturnal chaconne.”
The allusion to a liturgical Vespers service is most overt in the fourth movement—Adams calls it “the heart of my vespers”—with its title of “Litanies” and the use of Latin text throughout. “Litanies” implies both an act of divine supplication and a list of related items. In the “Litanies of the Sixth Extinction,” the chorus recounts the scientific names of 193 threatened and endangered species of plants and animals, ending (ominously) with Homo sapiens. (“Sixth extinction” is a term conservation biologists have given to the current Anthropocene mass extinction event in which the disappearance of thousands of lifeforms coincides with climate change and humankind’s accelerated destruction of natural environments.)
The concluding “Aria of the Ghost Bird” revisits the sacred implications of birdsong and spiritual presence, but with a poignant, cautionary tone. In this movement, Adams sets musically the call of the now-extinct Kaua’i ʻŌʻō bird (Moho braccatus) of Hawai’i. The composer transcribed the bird’s distinctive call from a 1987 recording of the last of the species—a male—singing for a female who would never come, but singing to the end nevertheless.
The warning entreaty of John Luther Adams’s Vespers for the Blessed Earth is both timely and urgent. But he adds a caveat:
No matter what we humans may vaingloriously believe, ours is not to “save the earth.” With or without us, the earth will endure. The urgent challenge now facing humanity is to save ourselves, to become more fully and deeply human.
—Luke Howard
Music connected with dance has long held a special place in French culture, at least as far back as the age of Louis XIV, and there was an explosion of major full-length scores during the 19th century in Paris. Some of the perennial favorites were written by now generally forgotten figures, such as Adolphe Adam (Giselle from 1841) and his pupil Léo Delibes (Coppélia in 1870 and Sylvia in 1876). These composers inspired the supreme ballet music of the late century, that written by Tchaikovsky, the great Russian. With his scores to Swan Lake (1875–1876), The Sleeping Beauty (1889), and The Nutcracker (1892), ballet found its musical master.
In the first decade of the 20th century, however, magnificent dance returned to Paris when the impresario Sergei Diaghilev started exporting Russian culture. He began in 1906 with the visual arts, presented symphonic music the next year, then opera, and finally, in 1909, added ballet. The offerings of his legendary Ballets Russes proved to be especially popular despite grumbling that the productions did not seem Russian enough for some Parisians. Music historian Richard Taruskin has remarked on the paradox:
The Russian ballet, originally a French import and proud of its stylistic heritage, now had to become stylistically “Russian” so as to justify its exportation back to France. Diaghilev’s solution was to commission, expressly for presentation in France in 1910, something without precedent in Russia: a ballet on a Russian folk subject, and with music cast in a conspicuously exotic “Russian” style. He cast about for a composer willing to come up with so weird a thing.
Diaghilev had some difficulty finding that composer. After being refused by several others, he engaged the 27-year-old Igor Stravinsky, who achieved great success with The Firebird in 1910. His second ballet, Petrushka, followed the next season. And then came the real shocker that made music history: The Rite of Spring.
The Russian artist and archaeologist Nicholas Roerich, a specialist in Slavic history and folklore, devised the scenario for the Rite together with Stravinsky and eventually created the sets and costumes. Subtitled “Pictures of Pagan Russia,” the ballet offers ritual dances culminating in the sacrifice of the “chosen one” in order “to propitiate the god of spring.” Stravinsky composed the music between September 1911 and March 1913, after which the work went into an unusually protracted period of rehearsals. There were many for the orchestra, many for the dancers, and then a handful with all the forces together. The final dress rehearsal on May 28, 1913, the day before the premiere, was presented before a large audience and attended by various critics. All seemed to go smoothly.
An announcement in the newspaper Le Figaro on the day of the premiere promised
the strongly stylized characteristic attitudes of the Slavic race with an awareness of the beauty of the prehistoric period. The prodigious Russian dancers were the only ones capable of expressing these stammerings of a semi-savage humanity, of composing these frenetic human clusters wrenched incessantly by the most astonishing polyrhythm ever to come to the mind of a musician. There is truly a new thrill which will surely raise passionate discussions, but which will leave all true artists with an unforgettable impression.
Diaghilev undoubtedly devised the premiere to be a big event. Ticket prices at the newly built Théâtre des Champs-Élysées were doubled, and the cultural elite of Paris showed up. The program opened with a beloved classic: Les sylphides, orchestrations of piano pieces by Chopin. What exactly happened next that evening, however, is not entirely clear. Conflicting accounts quickly emerged, sometimes put forth by people who were not even in attendance. From the very beginning of The Rite of Spring there was laughter and an uproar among the audience, but whether this was principally in response to the music or to the dancing is still debated. It seems more likely that it was the latter. One critic observed that “past the Prelude the crowd simply stopped listening to the music so that they might better amuse themselves with the choreography.” That choreography was by the 23-year-old dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, who had presented a provocative staging of Claude Debussy’s Jeux with the company just two weeks earlier. Although Stravinsky’s music was evidently inaudible at times through the din, conductor Pierre Monteux pressed on and saw the 30-minute ballet through to the end. The evening was not yet over. After intermission came two more audience favorites: Carl Maria von Weber’s The Specter of the Rose and Alexander Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances from his opera Prince Igor.
Five more performances of The Rite of Spring were given over the next two weeks, and then the company took the ballet on tour. Within the year the work was triumphantly presented as a concert piece, again with Monteux conducting, and ever since the concert hall has been its principal home. Yet it is well worth remembering that this extraordinary composition, which some commentators herald as the advent of modern music, was originally a theatrical piece, a collaborative effort that forged the talents of Stravinsky, Roerich, Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Monteux, and a large ensemble of musicians and dancers. Leopold Stokowski conducted the American premiere of both the concert and staged versions of The Rite of Spring with The Philadelphia Orchestra.
The Rite of Spring calls for an enormous orchestra deployed to spectacular effect. The ballet is in two tableaux—“The Adoration of the Earth” and “The Sacrifice”—each of which has an introductory section, a series of dances, and a concluding ritual. The opening minutes of the piece give an idea of Stravinsky’s innovative style. A solo bassoon, playing at an unusually high register, intones a melancholy melody. This is the first of at least nine folk melodies that the composer adapted for the piece, although he later denied doing so (except for this opening tune).
Some order eventually emerges out of chaos as the “The Auguries of Spring” roar out massive string chords punctuated by eight French horns. In the following dances, unexpected and complicated metrical innovations emerge. At various points in the piece Stravinsky changes the meter every measure, a daunting challenge for the orchestra in 1913 that now seems second nature to many professional musicians. If Arnold Schoenberg had famously “liberated the dissonance” a few years earlier, Stravinsky now seems to liberate rhythm and meter.
Although the scenario changed over the course of composition, a basic “Argument” was printed in the program at the premiere, which read as follows:
FIRST ACT: “The Adoration of the Earth.” Spring. The Earth is covered with flowers. The Earth is covered with grass. A great joy reigns on the Earth. Mankind delivers itself up to the dance and seeks to know the future by following the rites. The eldest of the Sages himself takes part in the Glorification of Spring. He is led forward to unite himself with the abundant and superb Earth. Everyone stamps the Earth ecstatically.
SECOND ACT: “The Sacrifice.” After the day: After midnight. On the hills are the consecrated stones. The adolescents play the mystic games and see the Great Way. They glorify, they proclaim Her who has been designated to be delivered to the God. The ancestors are invoked, venerated witnesses. And the wise Ancestors of Mankind contemplate the sacrifice. This is the way to sacrifice Iarilo the magnificent, the flamboyant.
—Christopher H. Gibbs
Program notes © 2023. All rights reserved. Program notes may not be reprinted without written permission from The Philadelphia Orchestra Association and/or Luke Howard.