Uploaded May 2020 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Recorded Live on 1st October 2015 at St Michael's, Manchester, UK.
Nicholas Kok - Conductor
PSAPPHA ENSEMBLE
Benedict Holland, Catherine Yates & Caroline Pether - Violins
Heather Wallington - Viola
Jennifer Langridge & Paul Grennan - Celli
Daniel Whibley - Double Bass
Learn more at psappha.com
Support Psappha: psappha.com/support-us
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Shaker Loops began as a string quartet with the title Wavemaker…but my technique lagged behind my inspiration, and this rippling pond very quickly went dry. Wavemaker crashed and burned at its first performance. The need for a larger, thicker ensemble and for a more flexible, less theory-bound means of composing became very apparent.
Fortunately I had in my students at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music a working laboratory to try out new ideas, and with the original Wavemaker scrapped I worked over the next four months to pick up the pieces and start over. I held on to the idea of the oscillating patterns and made an overall structure that could embrace much more variety and emotional range. Most importantly the quartet became a septet, thereby adding a sonic mass and the potential for more acoustical power. The “loops” idea was a technique from the era of tape music where small lengths of pre-recorded tape attached end to end could repeat melodic or rhythmic figures ad infinitum. (Steve Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain is the paradigm of this technique.) The Shakers got into the act partly as a pun on the musical term “to shake”, meaning either to make a tremolo with the bow across the string or else to trill rapidly from one note to another.
The flip side of the pun was suggested by my own childhood memories of growing up not far from a defunct Shaker colony near Canterbury, New Hampshire. Although, as has since been pointed out to me, the term “Shaker” itself is derogatory, it nevertheless summons up the vision of these otherwise pious and industrious souls caught up in the ecstatic frenzy of a dance that culminated in an epiphany of physical and spiritual transcendence. This dynamic, almost electrically charged element, so out of place in the orderly mechanistic universe of Minimalism, gave the music its raison d’être and ultimately led to the full realisation of the piece.
The official John Adams website is earbox.com
Recorded Live on 1st October 2015 at St Michael's, Manchester, UK.
Nicholas Kok - Conductor
PSAPPHA ENSEMBLE
Benedict Holland, Catherine Yates & Caroline Pether - Violins
Heather Wallington - Viola
Jennifer Langridge & Paul Grennan - Celli
Daniel Whibley - Double Bass
Learn more at psappha.com
Support Psappha: psappha.com/support-us
-------
Shaker Loops began as a string quartet with the title Wavemaker…but my technique lagged behind my inspiration, and this rippling pond very quickly went dry. Wavemaker crashed and burned at its first performance. The need for a larger, thicker ensemble and for a more flexible, less theory-bound means of composing became very apparent.
Fortunately I had in my students at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music a working laboratory to try out new ideas, and with the original Wavemaker scrapped I worked over the next four months to pick up the pieces and start over. I held on to the idea of the oscillating patterns and made an overall structure that could embrace much more variety and emotional range. Most importantly the quartet became a septet, thereby adding a sonic mass and the potential for more acoustical power. The “loops” idea was a technique from the era of tape music where small lengths of pre-recorded tape attached end to end could repeat melodic or rhythmic figures ad infinitum. (Steve Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain is the paradigm of this technique.) The Shakers got into the act partly as a pun on the musical term “to shake”, meaning either to make a tremolo with the bow across the string or else to trill rapidly from one note to another.
The flip side of the pun was suggested by my own childhood memories of growing up not far from a defunct Shaker colony near Canterbury, New Hampshire. Although, as has since been pointed out to me, the term “Shaker” itself is derogatory, it nevertheless summons up the vision of these otherwise pious and industrious souls caught up in the ecstatic frenzy of a dance that culminated in an epiphany of physical and spiritual transcendence. This dynamic, almost electrically charged element, so out of place in the orderly mechanistic universe of Minimalism, gave the music its raison d’être and ultimately led to the full realisation of the piece.
The official John Adams website is earbox.com
