John Adams: Dr. Atomic Symphony; Guide to Strange Places

Copy at Case Memorial Library
From the notes by Jeremy Denk: "We could begin with a musicological question: what's a moto perpetuo? In Western Classical music from Bach to Stravinsky (and beyond), it's a kind of compositional fetish: music that depends upon a constant motoric rhythm, an unstoppable flow of notes. In Guide to Strange Places, Adams seems to address this genre and question it at the same time. He's feeling out a unique zone between what we would now call 'groove' and the traditional perpetual motion. He's using a seemingly endless—but extremely unpredictable!—rhythmic unfolding as a canvas to tell a tale of bizarre transformations. The more one listens to this work, the more pleasure one gets out of the change-ups. It seems clear that Adams loves elisions, and particularly cherishes the slightly awkward moment of overlap, when two often contradictory musical 'characters' are trying to coexist. He's not just shifting between grooves; he's derailing his own patterns on purpose, while exploiting the imbalance to find another groove, and on and on. In an enormous chain."