John Luther Adams, Ten Thousand Birds
Alan Pierson’s production of Ten Thousand Birds is a personal and dramatic realization of John Luther Adams’s music, based on the cycle of a day. It’s intended for performances in indoor as well as outdoor venues, and has been presented in over two dozen venues across America and Europe.
ReviewsNEW YORK TIMES
"At the Armory, Alarm Will Sound arranged “Ten Thousand Birds” into a roughly 70-minute experience that follows the cycle of the day: Beginning with a gentle breeze, it traces the awakening accumulation of morning, the liveliness of afternoon and the long pauses of night before returning to that peaceful wind. Overhead the lights gradually dimmed, and on the floor, the audience was invited to move among the musicians. Just as there is no one way to present this work, there are no rules for how to hear it." - Joshua Barone ST. LOUIS MAGAZINE “…musicians spread through the space and stayed in constant motion. At one point, the violinists even wove through the crowd at a fast jog, their instruments trilling like swallows. Adams was there; he stood on the outskirts, tall and thin, in a black hat and long black coat, taking it all in. He seemed pleased. The rest of us? Stunned in a good way—and moved beyond measure.” |
Link: Alarm Will Sound plays Ten Thousand Birds
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For Booking, contact [email protected]
Notable Performances
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PREMIERE: Public Media Commons, St. Louis, MO 2014 |
Nuit Blanche Festival, Paris, France
2022
Park Avenue Armory, New York City, NY
2022
City Museum, St. Louis, MO
2024
From the Director
I’ve lived my entire life in urban spaces, mostly hectic ones: Chicago, New York, Boston. The rumble of cars and trucks has always felt like home. So when I closed my eyes for my first night of camping out in the wilds of Alaska’s Denali National Park, the thing that hit me was the depth of the quiet all around me. The world felt so strangely silent. It was only after some minutes that my ears, gradually acclimating to this unfamiliar world, began to perceive just how alive that world was with sound.
Similarly, when I first looked at John’s music for Ten Thousand Birds, my very first reaction was shock at what was absent: there was no score in a conventional sense, just page after page of songs for individual instruments, with no indication of how they were to be played in relation to each other: which songs are played simultaneously? What order should the other songs be played in? And what material would be left out entirely? (This was surely more music than we would play in a single performance!) And where should the players be in relation to each other? I’m used to scores which more specifically convey a composer’s vision for a piece, and in the absence of that, I felt confused and unmoored. The possibilities were overwhelming. I called John: “um …. what do I do here?” John said that it was up to me to structure AWS’s performance using the material he’d created. He gave me just one suggestion: “Think about structuring the piece around the cycle of a day.”
I loved that idea, which seemed the perfect way to structure music that’s so deeply connected to the natural world. John is an artist who grew up in urban spaces too; but it was when he moved to Alaska in the 1970s that he found his voice. So I carved out some quiet time at my desk, spread out all the pages of music that John had given me, and began to imagine how to put all of this together. Like that first night in Denali, it was only after adjusting to what was missing that I began to appreciate the richness of what was all around me. The day structure suggested a natural arc: beginning and ending with the delicate sounds of wind and the brightly delicate calls of morning birds, with thrilling climaxes that could be created out of aggressive afternoon calls and a cacophony of night-time frog sounds. There were harmonic shapes to be created. There were opportunities for dialogue, and for moments of surprise, drama, and humor. And because John hadn’t predetermined where players would be placed, I could uniquely create the piece for each environment we’d perform it in: immersing the audience in a naturalistic musical environment for them to explore.
Despite spending so much time and care envisioning Alarm Will Sound’s Ten Thousand Birds performance, there was one element that took me completely by surprise at our first performance: how small our own role is in the performance. John is an activist as much as a composer, and his music is always about connecting listeners to the sounds of the natural world. In Ten Thousand Birds, Alarm Will Sound’s performers are in dialogue with the sounds of the environment and because John filled the piece with sounds of birds of North America, our performances are often joined by the very birds whose songs we’re playing.
Similarly, when I first looked at John’s music for Ten Thousand Birds, my very first reaction was shock at what was absent: there was no score in a conventional sense, just page after page of songs for individual instruments, with no indication of how they were to be played in relation to each other: which songs are played simultaneously? What order should the other songs be played in? And what material would be left out entirely? (This was surely more music than we would play in a single performance!) And where should the players be in relation to each other? I’m used to scores which more specifically convey a composer’s vision for a piece, and in the absence of that, I felt confused and unmoored. The possibilities were overwhelming. I called John: “um …. what do I do here?” John said that it was up to me to structure AWS’s performance using the material he’d created. He gave me just one suggestion: “Think about structuring the piece around the cycle of a day.”
I loved that idea, which seemed the perfect way to structure music that’s so deeply connected to the natural world. John is an artist who grew up in urban spaces too; but it was when he moved to Alaska in the 1970s that he found his voice. So I carved out some quiet time at my desk, spread out all the pages of music that John had given me, and began to imagine how to put all of this together. Like that first night in Denali, it was only after adjusting to what was missing that I began to appreciate the richness of what was all around me. The day structure suggested a natural arc: beginning and ending with the delicate sounds of wind and the brightly delicate calls of morning birds, with thrilling climaxes that could be created out of aggressive afternoon calls and a cacophony of night-time frog sounds. There were harmonic shapes to be created. There were opportunities for dialogue, and for moments of surprise, drama, and humor. And because John hadn’t predetermined where players would be placed, I could uniquely create the piece for each environment we’d perform it in: immersing the audience in a naturalistic musical environment for them to explore.
Despite spending so much time and care envisioning Alarm Will Sound’s Ten Thousand Birds performance, there was one element that took me completely by surprise at our first performance: how small our own role is in the performance. John is an activist as much as a composer, and his music is always about connecting listeners to the sounds of the natural world. In Ten Thousand Birds, Alarm Will Sound’s performers are in dialogue with the sounds of the environment and because John filled the piece with sounds of birds of North America, our performances are often joined by the very birds whose songs we’re playing.