Garage and the SOUND UP contemporary music festival present the Russian premiere of Canticles of the Holy Wind (2013) by John Luther Adams, a monumental composition for a choir of 60 singers and percussion.
John Luther Adams (b. 1953) is an American experimental composer known for his structurally minimalist music enriched with allusions to natural phenomena. During his studies at the California Institute of the Arts in the early 1970s he became interested in environmentalism, a passion that led him to Alaska, where he lived from 1978 to 2014. In the late 2000s, he began spending time on the Mexican coast, where he wrote Become Ocean, which won a Pulitzer Prize for Music (2014) and a Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition (2015).
Canticles of the Holy Wind is performed by four mixed choirs, with separate voices imitating birdsong or coming together in complex, multi-part chords: the sound mass heating up at climactic moments and then dispersing like fog. Adams liberates the listener from the necessity of following a linear development and offers an alternative mode of perception through presence and the contemplation of a changing acoustic landscape.