What Is This Man Talking About?
On his blog, The Rest Is Noise, Alex Ross links his latest New Yorker piece, Song of the Earth, and as we always do, we clicked over to give it a read even though it was a piece on John Adams (ho-hum; yet another piece on Adams), a composer in whose music we've but a lukewarm interest.
On a recent trip to the Alaskan interior, I didn’t get to see the aurora borealis, but I did, in a way, hear it. At the Museum of the North, on the grounds of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, the composer John Luther Adams has created a sound-and-light installation called The Place Where You Go to Listen — a kind of infinite musical work that is controlled by natural events occurring in real time. The title refers to Naalagiagvik, a place on the coast of the Arctic Ocean where, according to legend, a spiritually attuned Inupiaq woman went to hear the voices of birds, whales, and unseen things around her. In keeping with that magical idea, the mechanism of The Place translates raw data into music: information from seismological, meteorological, and geomagnetic stations in various parts of Alaska is fed into a computer and transformed into an intricate, vibrantly colored field of electronic sound.
Huh? Is that the kind of thing ol' John's been up to lately? Gone a bit loopy, has he?
Then, a little further down:
The Place, which opened on the spring equinox in 2006, confirms Adams’s status as one of the most original musical thinkers of the new century. At the age of fifty-five, he is perhaps the chief standard-bearer of American experimental music, of the tradition of solitary sonic tinkering that began on the West Coast almost a century ago and gained new strength after the Second World War, when John Cage and Morton Feldman created supreme abstractions in musical form.
Say what? And what's John Adams doing way up there in frigid Alaska anyway? He's a New-England-transplant-sun-'n-surf-Left-Coast boy, right? What is Ross talking about here?
The music of John Luther Adams, that's what.
Talking about his work, Adams admits that it can sound strange, that it lacks familiar reference points, that it’s not exactly popular — by a twist of fate, he is sometimes confused with John Coolidge Adams, the creator of the opera Nixon in China and the most widely performed of living American composers — and yet he’ll also say that it’s got something, or, at least, "It’s not nothing."
Indeed it's not. A listen or ten to the MP3 of Adams's Dark Waves embedded at the end of Ross's first-rate article makes that plain as plain can be.
What's that?
Oh. That. Glad you asked.
Dark Waves most decidedly has "a perceptible and coherent musical narrative from work's beginning to end...saying comprehensibly something beyond and exclusive of commentary on its own processes and methods." In other words, genuine music, not gibberish.
