Music
Missed Connections: Experience in John Adams' "The Dharma at Big Sur"
Description
The Dharma at Big Sur stands in stark contrast to the more bombastic and rhythmically driven works of John Adams, but is undoubtedly rooted in the same minimalistic approaches. Adams' conceived of the work as a quasi-tone poem depicting the experience of a first arrival at California's Big Sur. The piece has two primary layers, an ambient soundscape and the six-string violin solo, that, I contend, represent the atmosphere of Big Sur and the subject experiencing it respectively. By utilizing atmospheric and minimalistic techniques, Adams suspends the listener somewhere between familiarity and alienation in a way that induces the experiencing the present. In this presentation, I will analyze both strata of the soundscape before discussing how their combination can be seen as a musical embodiment of experience.
Missed Connections: Experience in John Adams' "The Dharma at Big Sur"
Indianapolis, IN
The Dharma at Big Sur stands in stark contrast to the more bombastic and rhythmically driven works of John Adams, but is undoubtedly rooted in the same minimalistic approaches. Adams' conceived of the work as a quasi-tone poem depicting the experience of a first arrival at California's Big Sur. The piece has two primary layers, an ambient soundscape and the six-string violin solo, that, I contend, represent the atmosphere of Big Sur and the subject experiencing it respectively. By utilizing atmospheric and minimalistic techniques, Adams suspends the listener somewhere between familiarity and alienation in a way that induces the experiencing the present. In this presentation, I will analyze both strata of the soundscape before discussing how their combination can be seen as a musical embodiment of experience.