Samuel Adams is the son of composer
John Adams, and the degree of influence from the father on the son is just right; the younger Adams does not sound like
John Adams at all, but an underlying orientation toward clarity and minimal materials remains. One learns in the notes here that
Lyra represents "a new kind of music-making that provocatively blurs the lines separating composition, sound design, field recording, and performance, and frames it within the architecture of an ancient story." None of the blurred lines may be new in concert music in itself, but putting them all together may well be, and the aspect of mythology is fresh and takes the work out of the purely abstract realm that is deadly in so much contemporary music. The ancient story is that of Orpheus, his lyre, and his beloved Eurydice. Some of the movements depict personages or scenes in the story; one might not guess the subjects with no knowledge of them beforehand, but they are vivid enough with that information in hand. Adams uses contrasts of timbre, including but not restricted to that between acoustic and electronic sound, as a structural element, and the electronic element grows more important as the 19 sections proceed, reaching a high point in the final nine-minute "Surface Up." The movement has some rock elements and roots in Adams' career as an improvising bassist, but it is dominated by neither of these.
John Adams used to say that he thought his generation of classical composers would be the last, but this apparently is not so. ~ James Manheim