Shaker Loops

Program notes

About the Work

Shaker Loops is the earliest music on tonight’s programme, and the piece in which Adams first found a voice of his own inside minimalism. It began in failure. While teaching at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music he wrote a string quartet called Wavemaker, built from long chains of oscillating figures that were meant to ripple like the surface of a pond. By his own account it ‘crashed and burned at its first performance’. He kept the idea of the oscillating patterns, enlarged the group to seven players for the sake of more sonic mass, and over the following four months worked the material out again with his students. The result, completed in 1978, was a string septet with a new title. In 1983 he made the arrangement for string orchestra that is played tonight.

Both words of the title have two meanings. ‘Loops’ comes from tape music, in which a short length of recorded tape joined end to end repeats a figure indefinitely; Adams names Steve Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain as the model. Here the loops are short melodic figures that the players repeat and overlap. ‘Shaker’ is partly a pun on the string player’s ‘shake’, a tremolo with the bow or a rapid trill between two notes. It is also a memory. Adams grew up in New Hampshire not far from a former Shaker colony near Canterbury, and he had in mind the picture of those ‘otherwise pious and industrious souls caught up in the ecstatic frenzy of a dance’.

That image is what separates the piece from the cooler minimalism around it. Adams wrote that this ‘dynamic, almost electrically charged element’, so out of place in what he called the ‘orderly mechanistic universe of Minimalism’, gave the music its reason for being. Shaker Loops repeats, but it also speeds up, swells, breaks off and changes mood. It has remained one of his most performed works, has been choreographed several times, and was heard in the 1987 film Barfly.

Adams notes that some listeners prefer the clarity of seven solo players and others the density and power of a full string section. The second of those is what the LSO’s strings offer here.

What to Listen For

There are four parts, played without a break.

‘Shaking and Trembling’ grows out of near silence, with a single interval pulsing in fast repeated notes. Other voices are added one at a time, the pattern thickens into a dense, slowly changing cluster, and the intensity keeps rising. You may notice that the music seems to move fast and slowly at once: the bows are busy while the harmony shifts very gradually.

‘Hymning Slews’ is the still centre. The pulse drops away, and the players exchange slow slides from one pitch to another (the ‘slews’ of the title) in a sound world that seems suspended in time.

‘Loops and Verses’ starts with a lamenting melody for solo cello. Under it a rhythmic motor gradually starts up again and gains force until it reaches the climax of the whole work, the passage that comes closest to the ecstatic dance Adams had in mind.

‘A Final Shaking’ serves as a coda and carries the last of the waves out.