CROSSING OPEN GROUND Set for 2025/26 Body and Sound Festival

The LA Phil, Liquid Music and the USC Thornton School of Music today confirmed program details for the final program of its 2025/26 Body and Sound festival–John Luther Adams' Crossing Open Ground. The performance will take place in and around historic Elysian Park on Saturday, April 18, and Sunday, April 19, 2026 at 6pm.

In a co-production between LA Phil Insight and Liquid Music and in partnership with the USC Thornton School of Music, conductor Christopher Roundtree and director Dimitri Chamblas will lead 40 local musicians, including 30 from the USC Thornton School of Music, in Luther Adams' outdoor work for winds, brass and percussion. This program will conclude Insight's 2025/26 Body and Sound: Music in Five Senses festival, which offers opportunities to experience music in multisensory encounters (in complete darkness, augmented by visual elements, paired with food, and more). 

Luther Adams has an oeuvre that is animated by threads of environmental contemplation and advocacy. In this staging of Crossing Open Ground, he invites Los Angeles performers and listeners to rediscover and reconsecrate their sense of place. 

Luther Adams remarks in Crossing Open Ground's program note, “From religious pilgrims to refugees seeking asylum around the world, from the freedom marchers of the civil rights movement to present-day marchers against autocracy, walking is an expression of devotion and an assertion of freedom—a transgression of the borders we construct to separate ourselves from one another and from our shared status as citizens of the earth.”

In a performance of Crossing Open Ground, each musician and each listener is free to follow their own individual path through the physical and musical landscape of the work. Out of the experience of walking and listening together, a renewed sense of community and place emerges.” Elysian, the city's oldest park and a site of civic import complicated by legacies of displacement, will be activated through this immersive, musical consideration.