As Grammy-winning composer John Luther Adams puts it, his latest work An Atlas of Deep Time “...is grounded in my desire, amid the turbulence of human affairs, to hear the older, deeper resonances of the earth.” Commissioned and recorded with the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Delta David Gier, the piece taps into an ancient resonance that seems to hover imposingly, but benevolently, over our own existence – itself a blip in geological time.

“You can sit for a long time with the history of man like a stone in your hand,” said the late author and naturalist poet Barry Lopez, a lifelong friend to Adams. The poet’s words serve as the written invocation to a work that beautifully captures the sense of majesty, mystery and vulnerability that we, and the natural world, hold within us.

Writing for the New Yorker, journalist Alex Ross described the 2022 world premiere of An Atlas of Deep Time as “a craggier, denser, more unsettling score” than Become Ocean, the Pulitzer-winning work for which Adams is most renowned. Even so, in the audacious hands of Gier and the SDSO, the “sounding immensity” of the performance itself “afforded the same uncanny pleasure as dissolving into something complete and great.”