Surface and depth have formed important elements in John Luther Adams’s music – whether in conveying the unforgiving landscapes of the Arctic and the Sonoran Desert in compositions such as In the White Silence and Become Desert or grappling with the seismic activities and perturbations of the earth’s magnetic fields in The Place Where You Go To Listen.

Adams’s most recent orchestral work focuses on an even more elemental form of sonic geography, namely the geological formation of the earth, and life’s evolution within it. Premiered in April 2022 by the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra (who give a highly committed account of the work under conductor Delta David Gier), An Atlas of Deep Time was inspired by Adams’s chance discovery of a piece of white coral during a hike in the desert. The fossil, which was around 300 to 500 million years old, prompted the composer to reflect on the idea that he was ‘walking in deep time’.

An Atlas of Deep Time attempts to map a similar kind of musical journey. At the beginning of the single-movement 42-minute work, a sense of life coming into being is conveyed through deep reverberations and rumbling resonances in low strings and bass drum. This is followed by a series of rising terraced lines in brass and woodwinds, underpinned by powerful pulsing chords on piano and trembling pedal notes on timpani. At around the four minute mark, these elements combine to create the first in a series of dramatic explosions.

Unlike Adams’s best-known work, Become Ocean – with which An Atlas of Deep Time shares a similar sense of scale, length and proportion – these sonic eruptions suggest shifting tectonic plates rather than crashing waves: massive harmonic slabs hewn from the rock of ages. These build-ups sometimes trigger scattergun-like polyrhythms on tom-toms and bass drum, which suggest another Adams piece, Strange and Sacred Noise. At other times, they yield a dizzying kaleidoscopic mix of harmonic colours in woodwinds, strings and vibraphone – such as during the middle part of the work, where the orchestra takes on the form of an ethereal electronic instrument, or in the final section, which features sweeping string lines that fade into silence.

Alex Ross described the experience of listening to An Atlas of Deep Time as ‘entering a physically palpable space’, but the work’s greatness lies in the way in which it combines both space and time. Perhaps in that shard of white coral, Adams not only caught sight of the many layers that constitute the earth’s archaeological past but was also afforded a terrifying glimpse into its self-destructive future.