This example of what might be called "slow" or "unpulsed" minimalism creates a beautiful, seemingly static landscape of sustained string sonority, although there are, on closer listening, constant shifts and movement "beneath the surface" of the music.

John Luther Adams needs to be kept separately in the mind from John Adams, his near-contemporary. The latter was born in Boston and centered his career in San Francisco, and has become one of the world's most famous composers, and most of his music is active, rhythmically propulsive, exuberant, and, often urban in feeling.

John Luther Adams was born in 1953 (four years later than his namesake) in Meridian, MS. Although he has worked various places, he is most associated with Alaska, where he worked for some years at public radio station KUAC-FM as the timpanist of the Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra and the executive director of the Northern Alaska Environmental Center, among other things.

Much of his music is involved with the native cultures or natural life of Alaska and with the vast landscape of the country, so much of which is broad, open, and treeless.

Such a landscape—specifically, the windblown plain of West Alaska—is in mind in Dream in White on White. The scoring of the work reflects its title: It is for a solo string quartet set against a string orchestra which can be as small as a nine-piece group, plus harp or piano.

The first major musical influence on John Luther Adams was Frank Zappa. Adams became a rock drummer, drawn to rhythmically complex, rather esoteric musical ideas. Study of Zappa inevitably led to interest in Zappa's top culture hero, Edgard Varèse, and to Morton Feldman.

The texture of this work, in its static, "open" quality, is most akin to that of Feldman, though there are rhythmic matters—particularly a passage of difficult cross-rhythms in the harp lines—that reflect Zappa, and a constant attention to the sheer sonority of the piece that relates to Varèse. This writer notes that the main melodic motive of the piece seems to pick out the notes of a phrase in Zappa's song "The Idiot Bastard Son."

Predominantly, the work is built over a sustained chord, which shifts in its voicing. The most important changing element of the chord seems to be changes in its spacing, particularly which notes are sustained in string harmonics. The work is built only on the white notes, though these are not the equal-tempered notes of the piano: Adams specifies pure non-tempered Pythagorean tuning. This specification makes for a richer, more sonorous chord, a "gentling" of any dissonant intervals used, and a tendency for harmonic notes to be in tune.

The musical effect is slow and a bit "spacey." It is music that can be listened to actively, or as a basis for meditation. Many will be charmed, if not entranced, by the slowly shifting sounds; others will get edgy waiting for more musical contrast.

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