"For a generation of listeners born in the last two decades of the 20th century, the music of John Adams sounded as if it had always been there, a fixed point in a vast musical landscape," Jake Wilder-Smith writes in his note in the new 40-disc box set John Adams Collected Works. "Having already arrived in concert halls and on compact discs before our musical sensibilities began to take shape, this music colored our first impressions of a musical world. But as we grew older, Adams’s music continued to shift and expand. Listening as his work stretched in new directions, we found we had encountered the work of a significant composer in medias res: the narrative firmly established, but still in motion." You can read his complete note from the box set here.