The Tippet Rise Podcast: John Luther Adams and the JACK Quartet on silence and the music of our time
December 9, 2020
December’s episode of the Tippet Rise Podcast features interviews of the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Luther Adams and the members of the acclaimed JACK Quartet. Adams is a composer who, perhaps ironically, has spent much of his life seeking quiet. He found it—in the vast and silent expanses of Alaska’s most remote and wild country –and that is where he lived for nearly forty years. The result of this experience is a particular kind of music, one that he hopes will allow his listeners to access a similar “state of mind” that silence can offer. The episode also discusses the release of the JACK Quartet’s latest recording, Lines Made By Walking. Recorded last winter in the Olivier Music Barn at Tippet Rise, the album features music composed by Adams, including the piece the album is named for, a Tippet Rise commission. Adams wrote Lines Made By Walking while in residency here at Tippet Rise. During his residency, he spent nearly every day walking the art center’s wide open landscape. Lines Made By Walking, he says, “evolved slowly at three miles an hour over this beautiful terrain.”
As another winter approaches, with much of the world still on pause, this episode of the Tippet Rise Podcast is a timely listen: an invitation to embrace the silence many of us face and to ask, what can we learn about ourselves and the world?
To listen, please click on “More info” below.