'I began Always Very Soft in the spring of 1973 and completed it more than three decades later. Originally the piece was scored for percussion trio and de-tuned 'cello. I conducted that version in my ?nal semester at the California Institute of the Arts. In time, I came to regard it as my last student work, and withdrew it from my active catalog. Fast forward thirty-some-odd years to the spring of 2007. For quite some time, I'd had in mind to compose a perpetual acceleration canon - music that seems always to be getting faster, but somehow never really does. As I pondered this I remembered that piece from long ago. So I dug out the old score and looked it over. From my new perspective, it seemed to me that my younger self had been attempting to compose a continuum of discontinuities - weaving disparate timbres and velocities into a subtly articulated whole. This new version of Always Very Soft contains not a single note from the original version. But I hope it conveys a more coherent and essential distillation of that early musical thought.' - John Luther Adams