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"Landscape is the culture that contains all
human cultures."
The natural soundscape and a strong sense of place are enduring creative sources for me. As a composer in the far North, my life and work are firmly grounded in the sounds of this place. My dream is to discover a music which belongs here, somewhat like the plants and the birds -- music informed by traditions of the whole world, but music which can best, perhaps only be made here...music that somehow resonates with all this space and silence, cold and stone, wind, fire and ice.
The keynote of the northern Interior is silence. The rivers are frozen much of the year. Snow mutes the land. Even the wind is calm, more often than not. With animal and human life spread sparsely over sprawling distances, sound is the exception. This enveloping stillness can attune the ear in extraordinary ways. Listening carefully, we hear that silence doesn't literally exist. Still, the idea of silence is powerful and mysterious. In a world going deaf with man-made noise, silence is a profound metaphor of the spirit. Much of the North is still filled with silence. And the ultimate importance of the original landscape in Alaska may well lie in its intangible value as a great reservoir of silence. In the words of poet John Haines:
"...birds become ideas... Birds are not like ideas -- ...so writes human ecologist, Paul Shepard.
In the extended cycle songbirdsongs (1974-79), I tried to bring into my own music something of the magic of the music of birds. My concern in these pieces was not with literal transcription of the melodies and rhythms of bird songs. Instead, I wanted to discover my own free translations of those mysterious languages which we humans may never understand.
Gradually, my settings of bird songs began to grow. The songs of the hermit thrush, varied thrush and Swainson's thrush -- along with the drumming of a ruffed grouse--found their way into A Northern Suite (1979-80), a set of tone-paintings composed for my friend, conductor Gordon Wright, and the Arctic Chamber Orchestra. In this music, bird songs were set broad, slowly-changing textures of sustained tones and open harmonies, which I hoped would echo the expansive landscapes of Alaska. In time, landscape became the primary methaphor for my music. Night Peace (1977) -- for wordless, antiphonal choirs, solo soprano, harp and percussion -- was an evocation of a moonless winter night. In The Far Country of Sleep (1988) -- for orchestra -- I tried to evoke the unbroken spaces and silences of the Arctic coastal plain, as well as that ultimate wilderness, Death, through which we all must pass. My work with musical landscapes continued in Dream In White On White (1991) -- for harp, string quartet and string orchestra -- inspired by the treeless, windswept expanses of Western Alaska. Somewhere deep within ourselves, near the core of human intelligence and imagination, we sense that the natural world is the original source of all our creative thoughts, forms and energy. For most of us, the ultimate manifestation of Nature is landscape.
The idealized landscape is no substitute for the authentic personal experience of being fully present in a place. Like any deep intimacy, this takes time. We can view a landscape in a matter of seconds. But it can take a lifetime to truly know a place. In my more recent work, I've tried to move beyond painting musical landscapes...simply making music about place. Instead, I dream of music which somehow is place...music with a coherence equivalent to the wholeness of a natural ecosystem...music which creates its own inherently musical presence and sense of place. I call this ideal "sonic geography"...and I think of it as a region that exists somewhere between place and culture, between human imagination and the world around us. My first exploration of this territory was Earth and the Great Weather (1990-93), subtitled A Sonic Geography of the Arctic. The keynote of the Arctic plains is the wind. In the Arctic, I listened to the ethereal voices of an aeolian harp -- an ancient instrument played by the wind. The music of the wind became the keynote -- the sonic ground of Earth and the Great Weather. The earth speaks to us, and we speak to it, through names...the names we give to places, plants, birds and other animals, the weather and the elements...The text of Earth and the Great Weather is a series of Arctic Litanies, incantations comprised entirely of names. The Iñupiat and Gwich'in people have lived in the Arctic for centuries. And the names with which they speak to the world around them constitute an authentic poetry of place. We human beings have a fundamental need to perceive and re-create order between ourselves and the world in which we live. But most of us rarely take time to listen to the slower, deeper rhythms around and within us. Still, the vitality of human culture, perhaps even our survival as a species, may depend on listening. The primal music of birds and animals, the voices of wind
and water, the music and oral traditions of indigenous
peoples, remind us of our profound and mysterious
connections to the larger, older world. Through careful
listening to the unique resonances of place, we can
rediscover and reaffirm for ourselves, in the deepest sense,
who and where we are. More writings of John Luther Adams
John Luther Adams's email: jla@alaska.net Bio
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he
places in which we live resonate within us. The sounds
around us -- the songs of birds, the cries of animals, the
rhythms of the seasons and the reverberations of the
elements -- all resonate in the music of a place.
n
his remarkable book, The Tuning of the World, Canadian
composer R. Murray Schafer uses the term "keynote" to mean
the sonic ground of a particular place and time, the sound
against which all other sounds are heard. We rarely listen
to these keynotes. But we notice when they're not there. On
southern coasts, the keynote is the roar of surf. On city
streets and highways, the roar of the internal combustion
engine. And the keynote of most modern houses and buildings
is the 60-cycle electrical hum.
or
me, it began with birds. The great French composer Olivier
Messiaen called them "the first musicians". As a young
composer searching for my own voice, I was captivated by the
songs of birds. I spent many days in the field, listening to
the music of the birds -- as Annie Dillard says -- "learning
the strange syllables, one by one."
part
from the bird itself -- Paul Shepard asks -- what of the
habitat through which it moves, and to which it returns
unseen? If all creatures are possible ideas...the habitat is
for us the outward form of the whole space of the mind."
