Christopher Adler
Christopher Adler · Commission and recording · 2009
Christopher Adler builds pieces out of mathematics and then lets them behave like weather. Two of his works have run through my playing for more than fifteen years — one written for me, one I have kept programming.
Plenum Vortices
Adler wrote Plenum Vortices in 2009 on a commission from Morris Palter and me, and dedicated it to us both. It is seven and a half minutes for a reduced kit — snare, floor tom, kick, and two resonant metals of clearly different pitch — played with four sticks.
The piece opens on a polyrhythmic foundation and then branches: variations pile onto the original cycle until the thing you were counting disappears underneath them. The title comes from Descartes and his vortex theory of planetary motion, which is exactly what the entangled cycles end up sounding like.
Pines Long Slept in Sunshine
The companion piece from the same year is for five players and runs about thirteen minutes. Every element in it comes out of permutations of a twenty-four-note scale; the second half is built on logarithmic spirals and Fibonacci sequences — the shapes inside conch shells and pine cones — so the large architecture grows the way the title suggests rather than imitating any sound in nature.
Adler dedicated it to a long list of percussionists, Robin Engelman among them. The University of Kentucky Percussion Ensemble gave the premiere in April 2009. I have programmed it with the Nief-Norf ensemble since.
The room
