John Adams

Always Very Soft

John Luther Adams' Always Very Soft for Percussion Trio. Player score.

'I began Always Very Soft in the spring of 1973 and completed it more than three decades later.

Originally the piece was scored for percussion trio and de-tuned 'cello. I conducted that version in my ?nal semester at the California Institute of the Arts. In time, I came to regard it as my last student work, and withdrew it from my active catalog.

Fast forward thirty-some-odd years to the spring of 2007.

For quite some time, I'd had in mind to compose a perpetual acceleration canon - music that seems always to be getting faster, but somehow never really does. As I pondered this
I remembered that piece from long ago. So I dug out the old score and looked it over.

From my new perspective, it seemed to me that my younger self had been attempting to compose a continuum of discontinuities - weaving disparate timbres and velocities into a subtly articulated whole.

This new version of Always Very Soft contains not a single note from the original version. But I hope it conveys a more coherent and essential distillation of that early musical thought. ' - John Luther Adams