The great sonic landscapes that have made John Luther Adams’ depictions of the oceans and deserts wildly popular emerge anew with great transparency in this meditation on our curation of the planet, written for The Crossing and our next-door neighbors, The Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Lying at the center of Vespers of the Blessed Earth are the “Litanies of the Sixth Extinction,” a sung list of several hundred endangered and vanished living things—a response to the previous movement, a “Brief Descent into Deep Time,” which reminds us that our species occupies a nearly unnoticeable blip in the awesome, wondrous time/space expansion of which we are a part.

Vespers of the Blessed Earth is commissioned by The Philadelphia Orchestra for The Crossing and The Philadelphia Orchestra.