But listening with eyes closed, in a home that has had to stand in for the world during the pandemic, the music’s momentum unfolds inward. “Become River” grows out of bright filaments of light rendered by violin harmonics. Metallic percussion instruments add tiny impulses that set off a downward flow of strings — in halting smooth waves at first, then gradually with growing insistence and confidence. Wind instruments join in imperceptibly, filling out the texture, and begin to impose their own undulating motion that creates crosscurrents throughout the orchestra. In 15 minutes, the river of sound darkens and broadens. I had the uncanny sense that as it moved forward, the music had pulled me under and back into the recesses of memory.

“Become Ocean” allows itself more time to do even less. The music burgeons and recedes, with different instrumental groups sometimes at odds with each other, sometimes in sync. When the crests align, a giant swell is created that registers somehow as both comforting and vertiginous. When the final notes receded, they left me with a stark craving for more, for a return into the amniotic embrace of sound.

Mr. Adams wrote “Become Desert” in the Sonoran Desert in Mexico and the Atacama Desert in Chile. As in “Become Ocean,” the duration, 40 minutes, is long enough to create an immersive experience gently animated this time by the blooming and subsiding of warm colors. The orchestra is joined by a choir — intoning the word “luz,” Spanish for “light” — that adds more voluptuous hues to the sound palette. Shiny percussion, flutes and high soprano voices evoke a desert heat that begins to shimmer in a state of sustained, quiet elation. The final notes — is that a tiny chime glancing off violin harmonics? — sound like the sun igniting a metallic vein in a rock. Light and matter seem to blend into one.

Light and matter — and time. In their featureless grandeur Mr. Adams’s works create containers for a kind of listening that dissolves expectation and constantly turns attention back to the present moment. In his memoir, he recalls a hike on the Arctic coastal plain, watching his companion ahead of him, feet steadily rising and falling, yet seemingly walking in place. With no landmarks to measure progress against, Mr. Adams observes, “we lose our sense of scale and distance — floating in undifferentiated space, suspended in time.”

With the “Become” trilogy he invites the listener along on the kind of journey that his friend, the Alaskan writer John Haines, imagined in the poem that gave Mr. Adams’s memoir its title:

Source: New York Times

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