Although this is quite an early work by this composer, Night Peace shows John Luther Adams' main characteristics of slow musical motion, textures that are open and suggestive of wide, unoccupied vistas, and sonorous though unusual harmonies and textures.

John Luther Adams was born in Meridian, MS, in 1953, and made his reputation in Alaska. He initially published under the name John Adams, but added his middle name, obviously to avoid confusion with a namesake, John Adams, who was born in Boston in 1949 and became very famous and popular worldwide from a base in San Francisco.

John Luther Adams had his first musical interest in rock, and was a drummer in a rock band. Interest in Frank Zappa—his earliest all-consuming musical hero—quickly drew him to more complex musical ideas, including introduction to the music and ideas of Edgard Varèse and Morton Feldman.

Feldman's frequent use of slow, subtly changing textures began to predominate in John Luther Adams' music, particularly when the composer moved to Alaska at the age of 22—in 1975—to become a timpanist and principal percussionist in the Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra and later the Arctic Chamber Orchestra. He became deeply interested in the natural environment of Alaska (serving as executive director of the Northern Alaska Environmental Center) and in the native peoples of the region. All these influences have found their ways into his music.

This choral composition concerns itself with the slow winding out of a single melodic idea—or rather, the slow accretion of the motivic elements of that idea, which is not heard in its complete, original form until the very end of the music.

The scoring is for double chorus, often divided and usually producing slow, sustained, arching chords that seem to have a kind of vocal luminosity. Their chordal entries are often touched and altered by the presence of a single percussion sound; one is reminded that Olivier Messiaen in his Little Liturgies of the Divine Presence frequently directed the percussionists to make their tones emerge con le sonorité (with the sonority).

The work begins with darker, unpitched percussion sounds, especially timpani. The chorus joins after this percussion and harp introduction. There is also a harp and percussion interlude where the chorus sits out for a few minutes. In this region of the work Adams isolates a four-note motive that bears a strong resemblance to the main idea of the first movement of Mahler's Ninth Symphony. But here the motive is not dark or ominous—the mood is peaceful, more like the two-note oscillation at the end of the same composer's Das Lied von der Erde. The percussion interlude begins to join the elements of the theme as the harp merges with chiming percussion instruments, especially vibraphone, to make a crystalline effect.

At the end a solo soprano, spaced by soft choral chords, sings the whole long theme. Adams said he conceived this theme "in the luminous stillness of a moonless winter night."

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