Negotiating Sound, Place, Ritual and Community: The Extended-Length Concert Percussion Music of John Luther Adams

by

James Michael Peter Drake

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Musical Arts Faculty of Music University of Toronto

© Copyright by James Michael Peter Drake 2019

Negotiating Sound, Place, Ritual and Community: The Extended- Length Concert Percussion Music of John Luther Adams

James Michael Peter Drake

Doctor of Musical Arts

Faculty of Music University of Toronto

2019 Abstract

American composer John Luther Adams has been recognized as one of the most important and innovative composers of contemporary classical music. Adams is well-known for his musical connections to the natural environment, and for espousing the idea of “music as place”. These overarching themes, combined with composition techniques that take inspiration from natural phenomena and organic processes, have led to works that often have a formal structure at their core, but a combination of rhythms, harmonies and textures that is unlike any other mainstream composer working today.

Through his associations with many notable contemporary percussionists, Adams has written compositions that have made a particularly strong impact in contemporary percussion music, especially through his affinity for writing for “non-pitched” instruments. He has also shown an affinity for compositions that are expansive in duration. Three compositions that share these characteristics are the main focus of this study: Strange and Sacred Noise, The Mathematics of

Resonant Bodies and Ilimaq.

I suggest that along with environment and place, ritual is a key component in Adams’ compositions, and that highlighting aspects of ritual may help lead to a greater feeling of

ii community and/or Victor and Edith Turner’s concept of communitas between performers and audience. I frame these ideas inside of Small’s concept of “musicking” (that is, music as an activity), and also acknowledge ideas of ritual and performance from Schechner, Baranowski,

Small and others.

I discuss the origins, logistics and evolution of performance practice of all three pieces. I interview leading performers of Adams’ percussion music to gain insight into their performance practices and reactions to the music. Finally, I suggest a conceptual framework for approaching the performance of these works, to strive for a goal of communitas, and offer both some general and specific performance practice suggestions based on performer feedback and my own experience.

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Acknowledgments

The dissertation would not have been possible without the assistance of a number of people, and I am grateful for all the support I have received.

Dr. Russell Hartenberger not only served as my first percussion teacher, but also as my supervisor when I first enrolled in the DMA Program at the University of Toronto. His teachings have shaped the way I play and think about music and sound, and I am constantly grateful for his patience and quiet wisdom, and for the continued opportunities to talk about and make music with him. I am also grateful to Jack Van Geem, my percussion teacher at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, who was inspiring not only as a percussion teacher but also as an example of how to live a fulfilling (musical) life. He helped me to understand the importance of intention in performance and his influences – both musical and extra-musical – continue to shape me to this day.

Dr. Aiyun Huang has been an invaluable support as my current supervisor for this dissertation. She is a passionate advocate for contemporary music who was extremely generous with her time, consistently encouraging and also constructively critical. Her honest feedback and thoughtful questions have made this dissertation far more insightful than it would have been otherwise, and her good humour and positive energy through this project always left me feeling excited about the work. Thanks also go to Dr. T. Nikki Cesare Schotzko and Dr. James Parker, who served on my committee, for their helpful feedback, astute questions and suggestions which opened up new paths in my thinking, and to Dr. Nicholas Papador and Dr. Robin Elliott who, through their insightful questions, encouraged enlightening discussion during my defense. I could not have had a more exceptional group of academics to help guide me through this undertaking.

There would be no dissertation about this music if the composer hadn’t written it! John Luther Adams has been an inspiration musically, and showed himself to be a warm and generous interviewee. I am grateful for getting the chance to connect with him and to ask him questions about his music. His honest and thoughtful answers made these conversations an absolute pleasure, and only served to cement my deep and abiding interest in his compositions.

Much of this dissertation would also not have been possible without the contributions of various performers. To Richard Burrows, Adam Campbell, Glenn Kotche, Allen Otte, Ben Reimer and

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Steven Schick, thank you for sharing your insights about these works and your thoughts on percussion performance. One of the best results of writing this dissertation was having the opportunity to discuss percussion music with each of you.

Throughout the writing process, I have been lucky to have the support of a number of friends and colleagues. Their kindness and patience when I was at my busiest was quietly and appreciatively noted. Thanks in particular to my colleagues in TorQ (Richard Burrows, Adam Campbell and Daniel Morphy), Lily Ling, Reza Jacobs, Esther Lexchin, Jane Walsh and Zimfira Poloz (and all the staff of the Hamilton Children’s Choir) for their words of encouragement, and providing the occasional hot meal or needed break.

Finally, this dissertation and degree would not have been possible without an enormous amount of support and love from my family. To my parents, Judith and Peter Drake, thank you for always supporting my path in music and in life. Special thanks to my brother, Dr. Andrew Drake, for his conversations of commiseration, inspiration and advice – I could not have gotten here without your help. Though you won the race, I am ever grateful that you were there to cheer me to the finish line.

This dissertation is dedicated to Dagmar Rydlo, who, though an exploration of solo piano literature, first showed me how beautiful making music could be, and to the memory of Robin Engelman, who not only introduced me to John Luther Adams’ works but instilled in me the importance and beauty of sound.

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Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS IV

TABLE OF CONTENTS VI

LIST OF TABLES VIII

LIST OF PLATES IX

LIST OF FIGURES X

LIST OF APPENDICES XI

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION AND OUTLINE 1

1 INTRODUCTION 1

1.1 PERSONAL BACKGROUND 3 1.2 METHODOLOGY 5 1.2.1 Outline 6

CHAPTER 2 JOHN LUTHER ADAMS’ MUSICAL AND EXTRA-MUSICAL INFLUENCES 8

2 INTRODUCTION 8

2.1 FORMATIVE INFLUENCES 9 2.1.1 From Zappa to Varèse to Feldman 9 2.1.2 John Cage 10 2.1.3 Henry Cowell 11 2.1.4 James Tenney 12 2.2 ASSOCIATED MUSICAL MOVEMENTS: INFLUENCES AND PARALLELS 13 2.2.1 Minimalism/Post-minimalism 13 2.2.2 Totalism 15 2.2.3 Noise 16 2.2.4 Ambient Music 18 2.2.5 Eco-minimalism 19 2.3 EXTRA MUSICAL INFLUENCES 19 2.3.1 Environment 20 2.3.2 Place 28 2.3.3 Ritual 32 2.3.4 Parts of the whole 39 2.3.5 Communitas 42

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CHAPTER 3 ORIGINS, FORMS AND THE EVOLUTION OF PERFORMANCE PRACTICE IN ADAMS’ PERCUSSION MUSIC 44

3 INTRODUCTION 44

3.1 STRANGE AND SACRED NOISE 46 3.2 THE MATHEMATICS OF RESONANT BODIES 55 3.3 ILIMAQ 67

CHAPTER 4 PERFORMER REFLECTIONS 77

4 INTRODUCTION 77

4.1 INTERVIEW SUBJECTS 77 4.2 INITIAL REACTIONS TO THE COMPOSITIONS 79 4.3 CHALLENGES IN PREPARATION 81 4.4 CIRCUMSTANCES OF PERFORMANCES 84 4.5 INITIAL PERFORMER IMPRESSIONS 98 4.6 INITIAL AUDIENCE REACTIONS 104 4.7 PERCEPTION OF RITUAL ELEMENTS 109

CHAPTER 5 CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK AND PERFORMANCE PRACTICE SUGGESTIONS 113

5 INTRODUCTION 113

5.1 CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR PERFORMANCE 118 5.2 PERFORMANCE PRACTICE SUGGESTIONS 121 5.2.1 Sound 122 5.2.2 Gesture 129 5.2.3 Place 132 5.2.4 Environment 137 5.3 CONCLUSION 138

BIBLIOGRAPHY 139

APPENDIX A: TERMINOLOGY 148

APPENDIX B: JOHN LUTHER ADAMS PROSPECTIVE INTERVIEW QUESTIONS 158

APPENDIX C: PERFORMER PERSPECTIVE INTERVIEW QUESTIONS 159

APPENDIX D: MHRP INFORMATION LETTER AND CONSENT FORM 161

COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 166

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List of Tables

Table 4-1: Summary of audience reactions…………………………………………………….105

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List of Plates

Plate 2-1: Looking towards Kachemek Bay State Park, Homer, AK …………………………..22

Plate 2-2: Looking towards Knik Arm, Anchorage, AK ……………………………………….23

Plate 4-1: Dress rehearsal of “clusters…” from TorQ’s production of Strange and Sacred Noise …………………………………………..……………………………87

Plate 4-2: Dress rehearsal of “…dust into dust…” from TorQ’s production of Strange and Sacred Noise …………………………………………...……………………………88

Plate 4-3: Detail of Glenn Kotche’s Ilimaq set up at UT Austin, Texas..……………………….93

Plate 4-4: Aerial view of Glenn Kotche’s Ilimaq set up at the Pulitzer Foundation ……………95

Plate 4-5: Kotche’s Ilimaq setup at the Pulitzer Foundation, St. Louis, MO.…………………...96

Plate 4-6: Ben Reimer performing Ilimaq at the Apollo Cinema, Kitchener, Ontario …………98

Plate A-1: Composers’s note at John Luther Adams installation The Place Where You Go to Listen, Museum of the North, University of Alaska Fairbanks ..……………….…155

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List of Figures

Figure 3-1: A 2D representation of the 1D Cantor set……………………………..……………48

Figure 3-2: Measures 100-108 of “…dust into dust…” from Strange and Sacred Noise………50

Figure 3-3: Sierpinski gasket, iterations 0-3…………………………………………………….51

Figure 3-4: Menger sponge, iterations 0-2……………………………………………………....52

Figure 3-5: Measures 100-108 of “burst” from The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies…………59

Figure 3-6: Measures 1-54 of “rumble” from The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies…………...60

Figure 3-7: Measures 173-187 of “thunder” from The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies……....62

Figure 3-8: Measures 6-22 of “shimmer” from The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies………....65

Figure 3-9: Measures 241-288 of “Under the Ice” from Ilimaq …………………………….….72

Figure 3-10: Measures 113-160 of “To the Sky” from Ilimaq (Player 1) ……..………………..74

Figure 4-1: Approximate stage plot of TorQ’s presentation of Strange and Sacred Noise….….86

Figure 4-2: Approximate stage plot of Drake’s presentation of The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies ……………………………………………………………………………….90

Figure 4-3: Glenn Kotche’s backline list for Ilimaq ……………………………………………92

Figure 4-4: Glenn Kotche’s stage plot for Ilimaq ………………………………………………94

Figure 4-5: Measures 1-40 of “velocities crossing in phase-space” from Strange and Sacred Noise (Player 3) ……………………………………………………………………..99

Figure 5-1: Conceptual Framework for Perfomance of Adams’ percussion works …………..119

Figure 5-2: Possible Ilimaq audio layout configurations ……………………………………...128

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List of Appendices

Appendix A: Terminology ……………………………………………………………………148

Appendix B: John Luther Adams prospective interview questions …………………………..158

Appendix C: Performer prospective interview questions ……………………………………..159

Appendix D: MHRP Information Letter and Consent Form…………………………………..161

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Chapter 1 Introduction and Outline 1 Introduction

When John Luther Adams won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music, one could forgive a casual classical music fan for the possible confusion. Both Adams and his contemporary (and at the time arguably better-known) namesake, John Adams, were up for the award. John Luther Adams had long been mixed up with John Adams – indeed, the confusion was what prompted him to use his middle name professionally when the other Adams started receiving international acclaim following the success of his opera Nixon in China. (Feisst 2012, 44n) John Luther Adams’ Pulitzer win, for his deep, sonorous and enveloping orchestral composition Become Ocean, brought him new recognition from the Western classical music mainstream, a recognition that had been largely absent for many years before, when he had worked in relative isolation in his studio outside of Fairbanks, Alaska; a typical reaction from music critics was that the win would “extricate [Adams] from the shadow of his near-namesake”. (Siôn 2014) In some ways, that seems to have happened – Adams’ visibility in the world of Western classical seems to have increased (at least anecdotally), and there appears to be a surge of interest in his work, both past and current.

John Luther Adams (born 1953) has since been widely recognized as one of the most important and innovative composers of contemporary classical music of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He has been a productive and iconoclastic composer since the mid 1970s, though the increasing awareness of his music within the classical music community (and beyond) has led to ever more interest in his compositions, and likely an increase in performances. (Certainly, it has led to an increase in writing about Adams’ music: there were three dissertations published about his compositions in 2015, and an edited volume with contributors writing about performance, theoretical and musicological aspects of his compositions published in 2012.) Adams is especially recognized for his musical connections to the natural environment, and to an idea of music as “place”, in both concrete (geographical) and abstract (sonic environment) senses. These overarching themes, combined with composition techniques that take inspiration from natural phenomena and organic processes, have led to works that often have a formal structure at their core. His musical language, however, is unlike

2 any other contemporary mainstream composer. Adams use of multiple polyrhythmic lines (giving the illusion of multiple tempos), his avoidance of typical harmonic functions of tension and release in favour of a type of stasis, and his general preference for large-scale forms emphasize sound and experience over any narrative element.

Through his associations with many notable contemporary percussionists – and as a former drummer, percussionist and timpanist himself – Adams has written compositions that have made a particularly strong impact in contemporary percussion music. Of his more than 75 published compositions, just over one fifth are either for solo percussion, percussion ensemble or percussion and one or two other instruments. Within the percussion-only works, Adams has shown a strong affinity for composing for so-called “non-pitched” percussion instruments,1 and for compositions that are expansive in duration, many lasting for between 45 and 80 minutes. Three compositions that share these characteristics will be the main focus of this study: Strange and Sacred Noise (for percussion quartet, composed in 1997), The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies (percussion solo and audio playback, 2003) and Ilimaq (percussion solo/quartet and audio playback, 2012). Each of these compositions is an extended-length concert work, uses (exclusively or almost-exclusively) non-pitched instruments, and was written to be performed indoors or in a “typical” concert-like setting (unlike Inuksuit, which was specifically envisioned as a work to be performed outside and is therefore site-dependent).

Previous scholars of Adams’ music have focused on his links to environment and the natural world (Shimoni 2015, Hanslowe 2015), his ideas of place (Cless 2015, Feisst 2012, Carl 2012), technical analysis of styles and musical materials (Tarantino 2012, DeLuca 2014), and other facets of his musical output. My areas of interest, however, relate to ideas of both ritual and community in Adams’ compositions, with particular focus on SASN, Mathematics and Ilimaq. As a performer of this music, I’ve often thought these compositions are especially “ritualistic” in nature: they require significant amounts of concentration and stamina from both performer and listener, they feature a great deal of repetitive motion and sound over an extended period of

1 “Non-pitched” percussion instruments are those whose sounds because of a complex series of harmonic overtones, don’t translate easily into a recognizable/sing-able pitch. This designation typically includes most drums (except for timpani), wood blocks, triangles, cymbals, tam-tams, shakers, and most other instruments whose construction isn’t organized around an established pitch class.

3 time, the (mostly) unpitched instruments used and timbres created invite the question of “is this even music or is it just noise?” (see Attali 2006, Hegarty 2007) and, unlike much of the Western European musical canon, there is no (obvious) narrative arc. Though Adams himself has never been regarded as a composer of traditionally “sacred” music (especially as compared to minimalist contemporaries such as Arvo Pärt or John Tavener), ideas of sacred-ness, ritual, ceremony and religion, though not belonging specifically to any common organized religion and often centered around the environment, have crept more into his writing and thinking2, and, I would argue, also into his music.

Ideas of ritual, combined with the challenging nature of this music, also made me wonder about community: what is the relationship of the performer to the audience in these works? Are there ways to think about and perform this music to bring the community of participants closer together, to have a unified and connected experience? Christopher Small (1998) and Wayne Bowman (1994) have argued that music isn’t just a “thing” (whether that be a written score or an audio artifact) but is instead an activity: not a noun, but a verb. In Musicking, Small pushes this argument to its logical end by suggesting that everyone tangentially involved in the act of “musicking” – be it performer, listener, technical production staff, etc. – is in fact a necessary part of the community of music. Both Small and Baranowski (1998) also explore the idea of ritual and elaborate on the idea of ritual as action. Through reading of Small’s idea of musicking and ritual, and through interviews with both John Luther Adams and individuals who have performed the three works in question, I examine how we might present these works in the future to make the experience more communal and deeply felt for both performers and audiences.

1.1 Personal Background

My own exposure to the music of John Luther Adams came from two sources. My first exposure to Adams’ compositions was as participant in a summer workshop run by the

2 See Adams’ “Music as a Form of Prayer”, 2018, “Credo” in Winter Music (2004, 144-145), and “Making Music in the Anthropocene” (2015) for elements of existential spiritualism and ideas of “sacred” in his writings about his compositions. Additionally, on December 31, 2016, Adams published “Prayer for the New Year” on his personal Facebook page.

4 percussion ensemble Nexus. Robin Engelman, who had been my percussion ensemble instructor while I was an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto, programmed and coached Adams’ …and bells remembered… for one of the ensemble concerts. Though I wasn’t playing in that particular piece, the harmonies, timbres and – most of all – the spaciousness of that piece stuck in my memory (as did the poetic title). …and bells remembered… was unlike anything else on the concert, and also unlike much of the percussion music to which I had thus far been exposed. Many pieces in the solo or chamber percussion repertory seem to be “about” complexity – complexity of timbres, of rhythms, of sounds and techniques. A great deal of percussion music also seems to focus on virtuosity: how fast can one play? How many instruments can be played at a time? What sets of unusual techniques can be exploited? …and bells remembered…, however, had none of these attributes. The focus instead was on listening, and on the beauty of specific sounds that seemed to exist floating in space. It seemed to me to shift the focus of percussion music: in so many pieces, the focus is constantly on the performer, but here the spaciousness and quiet lushness of bells meant that the focus was squarely on the sounds of the instruments.

My second exposure to John Luther Adams came indirectly from percussionist and leading contemporary percussion advocate Steven Schick. His book The Percussionist’s Art (2006) was revelatory for me: in it, Schick writes about the music (often complex and idiosyncratic) that he loves and performs, in a way that was both engaging and rigorous, with very little academic jargon. Schick’s book also exposed me to a number of composers and works with which I was previously unfamiliar. One of these composers was John Luther Adams, by way of Schick’s discussion of The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies. The concepts behind this piece – an extended-length concert work for unpitched percussion, the mediation between noise and music and silence, the tie-ins with ideas of place and the (natural) environment – resonated strongly within me. I subsequently read Adams’ book Winter Music and was even more intrigued by his worldview and ethos as a composer. As I began listening to more of Adams’ musical output, it struck me that much of this music contained the two characteristics that have almost always been an important part of music that I connect with as both performer and listener. First, for performers, Adams’ music is challenging and engaging without being needlessly hard or technical: there is no “difficult for the sake of difficult”, and, having now played a number of his pieces, I can state that the sense of accomplishment and satisfaction following a successful

5 performance is commensurate to the amount of work needed to put such a performance together. Second, as a listener, this is music that is thought-provoking and stimulating without being alienating. Though knowing the processes behind the music and being able to see the score is certainly instructive and revealing, one doesn’t necessarily need those resources (or even need to have any sort of background in music theory, composition or history) to be able to engage with and enjoy these works.

Since discovering Adams’ music, I have been fortunate to perform The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies and Strange and Sacred Noise, and have performed in and/or coached multiple performances of “…dust into dust…” (from Strange and Sacred Noise) and Inuksuit. It is therefore mainly from a performance perspective (rather than a strictly musicological one) that my interest in Adams’ music has been piqued.

1.2 Methodology

In seeking to fully understand the practical and philosophical facets of Strange and Sacred Noise, The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies and Ilimaq, I will be approaching the performance of these works from both theoretical and experiential perspectives. As a performer, my primary interest in these pieces is in their performance, rather than their existence as a series of notated symbols. I also strongly believe that the experience of making music is best experienced as part of a community. Thus, I wish to frame this dissertation by suggesting that music is action, and that that action of music should engender community. Music is not a noun, but a verb, and can broadly include many types of related actions and behaviours.

This idea of music as an activity rather than an abstract “thing” that people compose is best expressed by Christopher Small and his concept of “musicking’. For Small (and, indeed, for many cultures outside of the Western classical tradition), the main focus of music is action. Small emphasizes that “performance does not exist in order to present musical works, but rather, musical works exist in order to give performers something to perform.” (1998, 8, original emphasis) To Small, “musicking” involves all those who participate in the musical activity. In essence, “To music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing.” (1998, 9) Throughout his book, Small emphasizes that each of those parties have a relationship with one another, and that each of

6 those relationships are important and reciprocal. Similarly, on the subject of relationships, Richard Schechner suggests that performances “exist only as interactions, actions and relationships” (Schechner and Brady 2013, 30). For purposes of this investigation, I will focus on what is typically termed “live” performance; that is, one happening in real time and space, and defined by having an audience, a person(s) who is in attendance (i.e. physical proximity) to witness the performance but does not actively take part in the creation of the sounds or processes, and instead is a more passive participant in the event. 3

It is this definition of music – music as action, as inclusion, as a process involving many people with different roles, and as a sort of “broadening of the circle” – that I believe that performers should strive for, and that I will allude to when discussing aspects of performance of the compositions of John Luther Adams.

1.2.1 Outline

Chapter 2 details some of Adams’ stylistic forebearers, including Henry Cowell, John Cage, Morton Feldman and James Tenney, as well as movements and genres from which he draws influence, though his work doesn’t fit squarely into any one category. I also introduce three factors which I believe are critical to fully comprehending Adams’ compositions: environment, place, and most importantly, ritual. I explore the influence of these factors on Adams’ musical output, with a special focus on percussion compositions, and suggest how they influence each other. I also introduce the concept of communitas, as defined by Victor Turner and Edith Turner, as a goal for performance, and suggest how environment, place and ritual may combine to help encourage this phenomenon.

In Chapter 3, I take a more detailed look at aspects of Adams’ three extended-length concert percussion pieces: Strange and Sacred Noise, The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies and Ilimaq. I examine the origins of each piece, and discuss aspects of the forms of each of the movements.

3 Athough I am aware of the debate surrounding issues of “liveness” and “mediation” in performance, it is beyond the purview of this dissertation to delve deeply into these issues. I have, however, offered a general definition of aspects of performance, along with other relevant definitions, in Appendix A, “Glossary of Terms”.

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There is also an examination of the instrumental forces required, as well as some elements of current performance practice.

Chapter 4 is a summary of performer reflections regarding the three above-mentioned compositions. I summarize and note particularly insightful or interesting anecdotal responses of musicians who commissioned and premiered these compositions (Allen Otte with Percussion Group Cincinnati for Strange and Sacred Noise, Steven Schick for The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies, and Glenn Kotche for Ilimaq) as well musicians who have given subsequent performances of the works (Richard Burrows and Adam Campbell of TorQ Percussion Quartet, Ben Reimer, and myself). Performers reflect on their initial reactions to hearing and/or playing these pieces, the circumstances of their performances, the audience reactions, and to how they perceive elements of ritual in the compositions and/or performances.

In Chapter 5 I build upon the previous information to propose a conceptual framework for performance of these compositions. The goal of this framework is to achieve a state of community and/or communitas amongst performers and audience. The framework is based on Small’s idea of musicking as a communal, participatory activity. It begins with the four elements of environment, place, sound and gesture, and also incorporates elements of theatre and ritual. Aspects of liminality and transportation, especially as espoused by Richard Schechner, are also discussed. Finally, I offer some general suggestions regarding intention in future performance practice, especially in regard to highlighting aspects of ritual in the compositions and the goal of communitas, as well as some specific ways in which those intentions could be realized.

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Chapter 2 John Luther Adams’ Musical and Extra-Musical Influences

2 Introduction

John Luther Adams has, in over 40 years of composing, developed a distinct compositional voice, recognized both by public appreciation and by critical acclaim: Alex Ross of the New Yorker has described him as “one of the most original thinkers of the new century” (Ross 2008), and Adams’ work came to wider public consciousness with the awarding of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for music for his composition Become Ocean, which was described by the Pulitzer committee as a “haunting orchestral work that suggests a relentless tidal surge”. He is a composer whose somewhat varied styles are nevertheless almost instantly recognizable as “his” music: whether it is accelerating and decelerating rhythmic passages or a sense of stasis that is nonetheless supporting a surface textural movement, Adam’s music does not quite sound like any of his contemporaries, and though there may be some stylistic and structural similarities to established subgenres of Western contemporary music such as minimalism or post-minimalism, his work doesn’t neatly fit into them. Nonetheless, he is, in his own way, part of a tradition of “American mavericks”, a term coined by conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and composer and music writer Kyle Gann to describe composers who have broken with (or at least headed away from) European compositional traditions.4 It is therefore no surprise that one of his greatest musical and philosophical influences was John Cage, arguably one of the founders of the modern conception of non-pitched percussion music.

Adams’ influences are many: they include well-known figures of twentieth century contemporary music, genres arising out of “experimental music” traditions such as minimalism and noise, Indigenous and shamanistic musics, and rock and roll and popular music, as well as concepts of environment, place, and ritual.

4 Robert Carl also proposes using the term to describe Adams in his essay “Place and Space: the Vision of John Luther Adams in the Ultramodernist Tradition” (2012, 206).

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2.1 Formative Influences

2.1.1 From Zappa to Varèse to Feldman

One of Adams’ formative musical experience was playing drums in a garage rock band during high school in New Jersey. Initially playing as a cover band (and focusing mainly on “the ‘three B’s’: the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and the Byrds” [Sirota 2014]), his band soon turned to original works. Adams began to listen to Frank Zappa5 and on the liner notes of the Zappa album “Freak Out!” noticed a quotation that caught his attention: “’The present-day composer refuses to die!’ – Edgar Varèse.” (Ross 2008) This quotation led him to search out Varèse’s compositions. When his friend Dick Einhorn found the LP The Music of Edgar Varèse, Volume II, they listened to it and “wore out the grooves” (Sirota 2014). Listening to Varèse was the start of Adams’ interest in contemporary classical music, and steered him towards major figures of the avant-garde, including Cage, Harrison, Xenakis and Stockhausen. Although he became “bored” by typical “three-chord” rock songs (Sirota 2014), his musical beginnings as a rock and roll drummer would continue to influence his musical life and composition style.

Another composer Adams met through recordings who would remain a very powerful influence on both Adams’ compositions and his way of thinking about what music composition could be was Morton Feldman. When Adams heard Piece for Four Pianos, “I thought I’d died and gone to heaven”. (Adams 2004, 119) He credits that experience with Feldman’s music for wanting to become a composer:

When the music ended I picked up the needle and played it again. Who knows how many times I repeated this. I couldn’t figure out what it was about this music that made me feel this way – an almost painful longing for something that hadn’t yet happened, for a place that didn’t yet exist. And I wanted to be in that place for as long as I could. It was right about then that I knew what I wanted to do with my life. (Adams, as quoted in Shimoni 2015, 4)

Feldman’s compositions eventually showed Adams that music could be both formally rigorous and sensual, a goal that Adams often references when he talks about his own works (Shimoni

5 Adams described Zappa as “a major influence in my musical education, not so much for his own music as for the music he directed us kids to.” (Gann 1997, 369)

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2015, 9, Fisher 2016, Adams 2004, 121). Feldman’s influence also becomes evident in more concrete ways: one of Adams’ earliest pieces, for percussion trio, was entitled Always Very Soft, perhaps a nod to Feldman’s penchant for extremely quiet dynamics. Gann describes Feldman’s influence on Adams as “a delight in delicately balanced sonorities used as recurring images”. (Gann 1997, 370) Adams’ use of silence and/or a sense of vast space in many of his compositions is certainly Feldman-esque, even if his structures and musical language are somewhat different.

2.1.2 John Cage

John Cage is an “American maverick” composer who is often cited as a major influence on Adams6 - indeed, Ross speaks of him as the most important influence (2008). He is stylistically somewhat less of a clear predecessor than some other composers mentioned here, at least in terms of continuing lineage of specific musical ideas, structures or techniques. Though Cless cites Cage’s percussion works as a particular influence (2015, 3), I believe that Cage’s main influence is rather one of an overriding ethos, and specifically a legacy of thinking about sound, noise, music, and the sonic environment. Also important was Cage’s outlook on what, exactly, composition was, what it entailed, and how one might go about it. In his essay “Love the Questions”, Adams writes:

John Cage said that in the course of his life and work he gradually came to understand composition “not as the making of choices, but as the asking of questions. […] In my own work I try to follow a similar path. I try to ask as clearly and directly as possible a few essential questions about the music at hand. Once I articulate these questions, my discipline is simply to keep faith with the musical materials, to listen carefully to the sounds and follow wherever they might lead me. (Adams 2004: 40)

This emphasis on the importance of sound in and of itself is perhaps the most important legacy of Cage’s work. In his seminal essay “Experimental Music”, Cage writes “And what is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds.” (Cage 2011, 12) He also suggested that music, rather than having some grander

6 See Adams 2004, Shimoni 2015, Cless 2015, Fraley 2015, 2, Hanslowe 2015 et al.

11 purpose, was merely the “organization of sounds” (3) and that composers should therefore be considered “organizers” (5). Cage’s use and consideration of silence – especially as it related to the incorporation of sounds from the surrounding environment, as espoused by works such as 4’33” – was also an important influence, and contributed, along with R. Murray Schafer’s concept of environmental soundscapes, to how Adams thought about what music might be and what listening might be.7 The simple organization of sounds was, to both Adams and Cage, harmony: Adams writes that

Cage’s definition of harmony was “sounds heard together.” Listening to the multiplicity of sounds all around us, we learn to hear the marvelous harmony they create. Hearing this harmony we come to understand our place within it, how our voices fit into the larger, endless music of the world. (Adams, In Search of an Ecology of Music)

Similarly, Cage’s use of chance principles for composition was an inspiration, though perhaps a somewhat indirect one. Despite the quote above about “following the musical materials where they might lead”, Adams did not (and does not) introduce indeterminacy to the outcome of his music in the same way that Cage does. While Adams certainly trusts in the processes that he establishes for himself, he does give himself more agency as a composer than Cage did in his chance pieces such as Music of Changes, and more than performers and critics often give Adams credit for (see Tarantino 2012, 157-158).

2.1.3 Henry Cowell

Cowell’s music and writings – particularly his New Musical Resources – were a significant influence on Adams’ musical output. In particular, his “unified field theory”, which suggests that elements of pitch/harmony, rhythm and colour might be connected and unified via their relation to the overtone series, was pivotal in Adams’ work. He was especially taken with the idea of rhythmic counterpoint, and the notion that a whole note could (and should) be easily and evenly divided not solely into groups of two (and sometimes groups of three) but also groups of 5, 7, 9, 10, etc.8 The use of what most Western-educated musicians think of as “polyrhythms”

7 For more on Cage, Schafer, silence and the listening environment, see Hanslowe 2015, 38-42.

8 For a more detailed explanation of Cowell’s ideas on rhythm, see Cowell 1996:45-108.

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(e.g. five equally spaced notes over a set duration against four equally spaced notes over the same duration) is a hallmark of much of Adams’ writing, especially his writing for melodic instruments: these relationships are used “as an analogue for harmonic relationships”. (Tarantino 2012, 160)

2.1.4 James Tenney

Despite being a “classic problem kid” (Ross 2008) and failing to graduate high school, in 1971 Adams began to study music at Cal Arts. It was a brand-new school at the time, and for Adams it was a successful fit: “The facilities were fantastic and the faculty was even more exciting. James Tenney, Leonard Stein, Mel Powell, Harold Budd, Charlemagne Palestine, Ingram Marshall, and Morton Subotnick were all there.” (Adams 2004, 121) Tenney served as Adams’ principal composition instructor and his style of teaching – by asking questions of students and allowing them to make mistakes, rather than dictating and enforcing compositional methods and musical rules – was one that suited Adams and his somewhat rebellious nature. Tenney also impressed upon Adams – or maybe simply encouraged – the importance of sound in and of itself, and ideas about the potential unity of sound and form. Tenney’s Postal Pieces – compositions for a single instrument, each written on a postcard-sized piece of paper, and each focusing on a single instrumental gesture or note (or simple variations thereof) were hugely influential: “Not since Lucier’s I am Sitting in a Room had I heard music that so powerfully conveyed the physical magic of sound.” (Shimoni 2015, 5) “Before Cal Arts I’d unconsciously subscribed to the notion that to be truly new and interesting, music had to be complicated. Now here I was surrounded by music that was formally simple yet sonically rich and bracingly new.” (Adams, as quoted in Shimoni 2015, 6) Referencing both his and Tenney’s affinity for ergodic (i.e. self-similar) form, Adams spoke of “an integration of pitch and rhythm (the theoretical legacy of Cowell)” as an important aspect of his own compositions. (Adams, 2007, 7) Tenney also connected the metaphorical dots between many of the composers of the “experimentalist” tradition. Adams himself cites these composers as his musical forbearers: “I’ve always felt […] directly connected with the American experimentalist tradition from Ives and Cowell to Partch, Nancarrow, Cage, Feldman, Harrison, Oliveros, and Tenney. These are my deepest musical roots.” (Adams 2004, 123)

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2.2 Associated Musical Movements: Influences and Parallels

2.2.1 Minimalism/Post-minimalism

If one were forced to choose a single existing subculture of contemporary music with which to categorize Adams as a composer, minimalism may be the one that comes closest to encapsulating some of the feel and materials of his compositions. Many of the hallmarks of the minimalist style are present in Adams’ pieces: elements such as small rhythmic phrases that repeat in larger cycles, a general lack of a traditionally-prominent melody line and subservient harmonic content, compositional processes unfolding gradually over time, and a focus on a relatively static texture would all seem to “check the boxes” of minimalism. These last two characteristics are perhaps the strongest indicators of the style. Much of Adams’ music doesn’t have a traditional narrative arc: there is no obvious progression of exposition/development/recapitulation, no clearly demarcated moments of push/pull or tension/release to drive the music forward. Rather many of his compositions are based on a more static texture, and the feeling that the bulk of the music (i.e. instrumentation, harmonies, colours, structure) is staying the same, while the changes are happening at a surface/micro- textural level. Feisst (2012, 35) expands on this idea by suggesting that to listen to some of Adams’ works – in this case, In the White Silence (for strings, celeste, harp, glockenspiel and two vibraphones) – is to be dropped in the middle of a sonic event or place that is already occurring: “…listeners should not perceive the piece as a sound object or a musical narrative proceeding from A to B. Rather, they should inhabit time and sound like a place devoid of beginning and end”.

There are certainly aspects of minimalism – or “music as a gradual process”, as described by Steve Reich – that seem to align with Adams’ output and thinking about music, at least to a point. Reich, like Adams, is interested in the process as the driving force and structure of a composition: in other words, the means is, in fact, the end (or at least a good part of it.) Reich says that “The distinct thing about musical processes is that they determine all the note-to-note (sound-to-sound) details and the overall form simultaneously” (2002, 34) and “What I’m interested in is a compositional process and a sounding music that are one and the same thing.” (35) (This certainly could apply to Strange and Sacred Noise and The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies, as well as more broadly to Adams’ use of ergodic and geometric forms.) In an intriguing

14 parallel to the chance procedures of John Cage, Reich writes that “Although I may have the pleasure of discovering musical processes and composing the musical material to run through them, once the process is setup and loaded it runs by itself.” Processes are clearly very important to Adams, in part because of how they help the composer get away from self- expression as the end goal of composing: “The challenge for artists today is to move beyond self-expression and beyond anthropocentric views of history.” (Adams 2004, 128) Shimoni (2015, v, 116), Tarantino and others point out that (algorithmic) processes are crucial to the structure of many of Adams’ compositions. Where Reich differs from Cage (and Adams) is the nature of those processes: “John Cage has used processes and has certainly accepted their results, but the processes he used were compositional ones that could not be heard when the piece was performed.” (Reich 2002, 35) Adams’ processes, though different in form, are closer in practice to Cage’s: they may set in motion gradual change over time, but in many cases they are not always audible processes in the minimalist tradition. Rather, he sometimes, especially in works involving pitched instruments, uses developmental methods which are not immediately recognizable to the listener, but which nevertheless allow the music to have a feeling of stasis and movement at the same time, such as shifting instrumentation, tremolos, and distinct tempos layered upon each other.

Reich also suggests that both he (and Cage) never do anything to change the outcomes of the processes he sets in motion; while process is certainly important to Adams, it is not the only thing that drives his music, and he doesn’t refrain from adjusting or altering the results if he feels it is necessary. (Tarantino 2012, 177, Adams 2004, 132)

Nevertheless, Adams’ music somehow doesn’t seem to fit in with other music under the “minimalist” label. His music often has a much different texture than the stereotypical pulsing of minimalist works; subtle nuances in colour are very important to Adams, and there is often a textural transparency in his pitched pieces that is not usually present in compositions by Reich or Glass. It may in fact be more appropriate to group Adams under the “post-minimalist” banner. The use of processes not immediately audible to the listener (but generally obvious when examining a score) is one of the important distinctions separating post-minimalism from its antecedent. Other characteristics of post-minimalism include a mostly diatonic tonality, a cohesive central ideal of emotional expression (rather than a Romantic-style dramatic variety of

15 feeling), relatively strict rhythmic and/or contrapuntal procedures, and a steady or “motoric” pulse (Gann 1997, 325).

Adams himself has not been entirely comfortable with having his music described as either minimalism or post-minimalism. Despite his admiration for minimalist composers, particularly LaMonte Young and his “rich melodic worlds within unchanging harmonic clouds” (Adams 2004, 150), Adams doesn’t believe that his music fits into the commonly accepted definition of “minimalist”. He writes that

My music has sometimes been called “minimalist” or “post-minimalist.” To most people the term minimalism calls to mind short rhythmic cells, slow-moving, consonant harmonies, and audible compositional processes. However, I rarely use literal repetition in my music. Something is always changing, even when the surface sounds more or less the same. Much of my music does embrace consonance and modal harmony. But a work like Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing [for orchestra] is relentlessly chromatic and dissonant […] and the tuning world of Earth and the Great Weather [an opera for narrators, vocal quartet, percussion quartet, string quartet and pre-recorded environmental audio and digital delay] is derived directly from the harmonic series.” (Adams 2004, 122)

Nevertheless, the comparisons remain: reviews of performances of Across the Distance (Graham 2016, 89) and Become Ocean (Tsioulcas, 2014) as well as an article by Service (2015) make reference to minimalism as a major facet of his style.

2.2.2 Totalism

Coined primarily by Kyle Gann, “totalism” is another musical genre heading with which Adams has been associated. Totalism developed as a generation of composers grew up being influenced not only by various Western art music traditions, but also by exposure to world music, jazz, rock, and even Renaissance music. The increased use of computers in both notation and the actual act of composition also began to have a large effect on composers’ outputs (Gann 1997, 355). Totalism, described by Gann as “having your cake and eating it too”, was the result: music which appeals to audiences on both sensual and visceral levels, but which doesn’t compromise artistic rigour, complexity and interest for those performing the music. Gann clearly considers Adams a totalist composer, as he devotes some pages to Adams’s life and work in the

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“Totalist” chapter of American Music in the Twentieth Century. He also suggests that Adams’ credo of “formal rigor and visceral impact” is “the totalist credo, the credo of an entire generation of American composers weary of the sterile abstractions of the avant-garde music they studied in college.” (Adams 2004, xv) Much like his reaction to being labeled a minimalist, Adams is not entirely convinced that his work belongs in this category, though he finds the label “easier to take” when considering a deeper definition of totalism: that is, the idea of integrating harmony and rhythm into a “unified field grounded into harmonic series – a ‘totality’ of pitch and time” (Adams 2004, 123). It is this aspect of totalism, perhaps (with its implied reference to Cowell), that gets closest to describing his unique output.

2.2.3 Noise

It should come as no surprise that someone who counts Cage and Varèse among his primary influences is fascinated by noise. Yet for Adams, the aspects of noise that are appealing are not those that are traditionally associated with the futurists such as Russolo. Composers such as Russolo, Antheil, and Varèse (and, to a lesser extent, Cage), seem to mostly consider noise as something artificial or man-made. In his manifesto “The Art of Noises” Russolo first states that “Ancient life was all silence. In the 19th century, with the invention of machines, Noise was born” (1986:23), though he later acknowledges that noise can be both natural and “pleasant”:

It cannot be objected that noise is only loud and disagreeable to the ear. […] To be convinced of the surprising variety of noises, one need only think of the rumbling of thunder, the whistling of the wind, the roaring of a waterfall, the gurgling of a brook, the rustling of leaves, the trotting of a horse into the distance, the rattling jolt of a cart on the road, and of the full, solemn, and white breath of a city at night. (1986, 25-26)

In Noise/Music, Paul Hegarty argues that noise as a concept is largely cultural. Noise is traditionally associated with negatives: something “unwanted, other, not something ordered”, and exists primarily in relations to what it is not, or what it negates. However, ultimately “noise is something like a process, and whether it creates a result (positive in the form of avant-garde transformation, negative in the form of social restrictions) or remains process is one of the major issues in how music and noise relate." (2007, 5) Hegarty also asks a question about the work of musician Aube (Akifumi Nakajima), but one that could apply equally well to Adams’

17 fascination with and incorporation of noise elements in his compositions: “Does [he] bring noise into music, make noise music, or noise? This question applies across the spectrum of ‘noise music’. In other words, the question is, how do music and noise relate?” (9)

Adams’ interest in and interaction with noise comes from his fascination with the natural world (discussed in more detail below) and some of its more violent processes – they were especially influential in the inspiration for and materials of his percussion quartet Strange and Sacred Noise, discussed in detail in the next chapter. These processes and their seemingly irregular yet somehow-ordered occurrences suggested to him fractals and mathematical processes as a way of composing; thinking about the possible timbres of noise suggested the use of “unpitched” percussion instruments such as snare drums, cymbals and tam-tams, all of which have complex harmonics that often make a definite fundamental pitch hard to define. Additionally, Adams created and tuned pink noise electronically for his installation The Place Where You Go to Listen in Fairbanks, Alaska.

There are also philosophical connections to the idea of noise and/as music that I believe are fundamentally appealing to Adams, especially as they relate to his non-musical influences of environment, place and ritual. Like Cage – Adams describes himself as a “Cage fundamentalist” when it comes to his views on noise – he suggests that when we invite noise into our listening, it is possible that all sounds in the world could become music. (Adams 2019a) Schick notes that Adams’ “consonant pieces” (e.g. In the White Silence) and “noise” pieces (e.g. Strange and Sacred Noise or The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies) may instead be two sides of the same coin: each is a “pure” version of sound that may be transformed into the other. (Schick 2019) Noise has been associated with defiance and challenge: Morton Feldman said that “It is only noise which we secretly want, because the greatest truth usually lies behind the greatest resistance” (Cassidy and Einbond 2013, xiv) and George Lewis speaks of how noise represents change and freedom (Cassidy and Einbond 2013, 122), ideas that can be aligned with views of the natural world to which Adams is so connected. Noise can also be something that is associated with ritual and sacrifice (see, in particular, Attali 2006). This view of noise as something that is/represents the “unbridled” and the “uncontained” certainly has parallels in some of Adams’ outlooks, especially his idea that compositions that he writes are just “there”, waiting to be expressed, and he is simply a conduit for “the music” (Adams 2019b) – the idea of

18 sonic forces that are bigger than human experience is one that seems to hold a certain appeal to him.

2.2.4 Ambient Music

Though Adams has not publicly acknowledged a kinship with any of the artists making what is generally termed as “ambient music” (Brian Eno being a sort of figurehead in that world), some of the stylistic parallels are undeniable. Like Adams (and minimalist music), ambient compositions are typically not based on an obvious narrative form, but rather are about creating atmosphere and an experience of sound. In the introduction to The Ambient Century, Eno describes this development, including music’s relationship with the space in which it is performed and its “sonic space”, something that would become very important to Adams’ thinking:

Until recently music was inseparable from the space in which it was performed - including the social space. One very strong movement in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries was towards music as an immersive, environmental experience. You see this in Mahler, Debussy, Satie, Varèse and then in Cage, La Monte Young and the Modernists. It's a drift away from narrative and towards landscape, from performed event to sonic space. (Prendergast 2003, xi)

Prendergast later details Eno’s pivotal role in developing an (electronic) ambient sound for the masses. Note the similar emphasis on relationships to environment and sound as a representation of the natural world (discussed in more detail below), as well as “automatic” music:

It was all down to Brian Eno to synthesize the work of the primary minimalism composers and bring it into the mainstream. […] He fused all this with the philosophy of John Cage and in 1975 invented Ambient music – music that would take on hues of environment “just as the colour of the light and the sound of the rain”. He was intrigued with the idea of “automatic music” and took Reich’s aforementioned “music as a gradual process” to heart. (93-94)

Though the timbres and specific musical materials may not be the same (Adams’ use of pitch clusters and just intonation tuning sets his works apart from Eno’s compositions), upon listening to many of Adams’ works (particular those that Tarantino calls “colour field” pieces such as In

19 the White Silence) it seems evident that he and ambient musicians like Brian Eno have in many ways been taking parallel journeys on their respective paths to shaping sound.

2.2.5 Eco-minimalism

Adams’ compositions show connections to all of the above genres, yet don’t quite fit neatly into any of them. He is very much inclined towards the importance of sounds of themselves, and deep listening, something that he shares with the late composer and accordionist Pauline Oliveros.9 He is also (as detailed below) influenced by the natural world, and much of his recent work is a musical examination of our place within various ecosystems. To that end, and given that his work most closely aligns with a (very broad) definition of minimalism, I propose that much of Adams’ output could be described as “eco-minimalism”: compositions that use the broad materials of minimalism, but that focus on the primacy of sound, and have an environmental bent to them.

2.3 Extra musical influences

In order to gain a more complete understanding of Strange and Sacred Noise, The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies and Ilimaq (and indeed much of John Luther Adams’ catalogue), it is helpful to examine some of the broader influences on his compositional output and musical thinking. In addition to the musical influences discussed above, Adams’ creative output has been guided by a deep love of and sense of connection with the natural world. This sense of connection has manifested itself in almost all of his compositions, and particularly in the three examined here. I propose that there are three aspects to this connection, all of which are features (in differing degrees) of SASN, MRB and Ilimaq: the environment (that is, a representation or acknowledgement of our mostly “natural” physical surroundings), an idea of place (a broader, more abstract concept than specifically focusing on “the environment”) and a sense of ritual (often as a means to achieve a spiritual connection). These three tenets of Adams’ motivating philosophies are very closely connected, though as each one has a slightly different focus and genesis, I suggest that it is worth considering them individually first. I believe that each of these

9 Adams contributed the foreward to Oliveros’ book Sounding the Margins, in which he expressed admiration for her work as an academic and composer, and connected the two of them to “a long line of independent composers” in the United States. (2010, v)

20 concepts is in fact a facet of expression of Adams’ deep-rooted connection to the natural world. Being aware of these concepts can help inform decisions about performance practice, both in how the music is played and the circumstances in which it is played.

2.3.1 Environment

“Environment” is a word that is used frequently both by Adams himself and those who discuss his music. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “The physical surroundings or conditions in which a person or other organism lives, develops, etc., or in which a thing exists; the external conditions in general affecting the life, existence, or properties of an organism or object”. For the purpose of this thesis, we shall use a slightly more focused definition keeping consistent with how Adams uses the word. When Adam references the “environment”, he is often referring to elements of “natural world” or referencing an ecological community, particularly one that is as yet untouched by explicit development, though is likely still affected by the actions of human beings. (OED, 2d.: “Frequently with the. The natural world or physical surroundings in general, either as a whole or within a particular geographical area, especially as affected by human activity.”) The reference to human activity is important: Adams is concerned not just with nature as an abstract, pastoral concept but with how human beings can and/or should relate to the natural world.10

Adams has, throughout his career, been recognized as an “environmental” composer. This categorization is partially self-induced. Though he professes to be somewhat apolitical (in that he doesn’t actively or publicly advocate for the policies or fortunes of one particular political party [Adams 2019a, Hanslowe 2015, 91]), he is not reticent about his connection with and his concern for the natural environment. Indeed, it was this concern that originally brought him to Alaska, the place and environment with which he is still most often associated, as an explorer, canoe guide, and eventually an environmental campaigner who worked with many others to help establish the Arctic National Wildilfe Refuge in the northeast corner of the state. In addition to his music, he has disseminated his views on the importance of preserving the natural world, his connection to the earth, the importance of environmental wisdom of various indigenous peoples,

10 Although a strict reading of OED definition 2b would include urban centres as a part of “the environment”, Adams’ usage of the term does not typically make reference to them in that way.

21 and warnings about climate change and the loss of a “reservoir of silence” (2004, 9) through his many writings, including various articles and journal entries that would become Winter Music, The Place Where You Go to Listen (both the book about his installation, and his retelling of an indigenous tale as posted on his website), articles in Slate (2015c) and the New Yorker (2015b, 2018a), and personal Facebook posts. When asked about future composing plans and the possibility of another extended work for percussion, Adams answered that as he enters his “late period”, he is thinking about future projects not in terms of genres of music or forces of instruments to be used, but rather trying to ask bigger questions: “What really matters? What is my best gift to the world?” (2019b) Climate change has long been a concern for Adams – indeed, it was part of the motivation for writing Become Ocean. After doing some more recent reading about climate change (he mentions a report that starts with the sentence “It is far worse than you think”), he is now thinking about even future projects in an environmental sense: he wants “to leave something for the people who are here to deal with all of this”. (2019b) That sense of responsibility to our present environment and future generations also motivated his work with the Alaska Soundscape Project (which later became part of the genesis for his composition Earth and the Great Weather), which was in turn inspired by R. Murray Schafer’s World Soundscape Project. (Feisst 2012, 31) Schafer also served as the inspiration for another metaphorical concept: that of the “tuning of the world”, that is, an attempt to combine natural and human made sounds in a harmonious and compatible whole (Schafer 1994, 6). 11

11 Adams feels so strongly about this metaphor that he suggests that Schafer should have retained “Tuning of the World” as the current title for his book, rather than retitling it The Soundscape with “Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World” as a subtitle. (Adams 2019b)

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Plate 2-1 Looking towards Kachemak Bay State Park, Homer, Alaska, February 2015. Photo by the author.

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Plate 2-2 Looking towards the Knik Arm in Anchorage, Alaska, February 2015. Photo by the author.

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Adams’ deep-rooted connection to the natural world isn’t solely demonstrated through his writings and his advocacy, however – it is present in many of his compositions. I suggest that, while it has always been an important factor, the direct influence of environmental subjects and, in turn, material that is most “representative” of an outdoor soundworld (that is, sounds that are representations or quasi-imitations of natural sounds or processes) are most prevalent in both earlier works (up to circa 1997) and then again in the last few years. Examples of such works include songbirdsongs (1974-1980, revised 2006, for piccolos/ocarinas and percussion) and Earth and the Great Weather (1993, a theatre piece for four speakers, string quartet, percussion quartet, and audio playback), Inuksuit (2009, for up to 99 percussionists, performed outdoors) and Ilimaq (2012). songbirdsongs is certainly one of his more representative environmental pieces: the piccolo melodies are “translations” of various species of birdsong that he first heard working as a farmhand in Georgia, including wood thrushes, red-winged blackbirds, song sparrows, American robins and many others (Adams also subsequently included birds that he heard in more northern parts of the country). Shimoni (2015, 72-73) summarizes the necessity of translation rather than literal transcription:

Although Adams did try to faithfully record the songs in the field, he knew that exact replication of birdsong is impossible on a human instrument. Birds use notes located between those that are used in common Western scales. Although they often sing quite rhythmically, they do not necessarily follow a consistent beat. They can sing higher than piccolos and, using their multiple voiceboxes, can produce more simultaneous timbres than any human instrument can play. Moreover, what would be the point of a piece of music that only aimed to reproduce a few selected sounds exactly as they were once heard in the wild? Wild utterances are spontaneous events; abstraction and replication can strip them of their meanings. Even Messiaen, the great ornithologist who had incorporated so many birdsongs into his music, wrote, “It is ridiculously servile to copy nature.... Melodies of the “bird” genre will be transcription, transformation, and interpretation of the volleys and trills of our little servants of immaterial joy.”12 Adams, though, needed to find his own process of “translation.”

12 Olivier Messiaen, Technique de mon language musical (Paris: Leduc, 1944), reprinted as The Technique of My Musical Language, trans. John Satterfield (Paris: Leduc, 1956), 34.

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From the beginning, Adams chose to score most of the birdsongs for piccolo, since, among Western instruments, its timbre and register most closely resembles birds’ voices. The technique of flutter-tonguing also allowed Adams to approximate the sound of certain bird trills, such as that which the wood thrush uses to end its songs. To the piccolos Adams added percussion instruments, which create the sound of the place in which the birds are the “accents.” songbirdsongs stands as one of the pieces in which Adams most directly represents nature as one might experience it for oneself. Though these are “translations”, both the timbral and shape similarities to actual birdcalls and the indeterminate form13 result in a composition which represents an actual natural soundscape with enough veracity that many listeners would, at the very least, likely draw a connection to bird sounds without previous access to program notes or even knowing the title of the work. The percussion parts – particularly in the revised 2012 version – are not as literal a representation of nature as the piccolo parts representing the various bird species, but still serve to add entrancing doses of timbral colour and create a sonic atmosphere against which the piccolo motifs can stand out.

Earth and the Great Weather has a different sort of environmental bent to it. It is a recognition of both the natural and human aspects of “the environment” – an acknowledgement that humans can (and do) co-exist alongside the natural world, in relative harmony, as often demonstrated by Indigenous cultures. This work was considered an “environmentalist statement” because of its reflections “upon the preciousness and equality of human and non-human life and the priceless values of the Arctic’s eco-regions”. (Feisst 2012, 31) The composition – at least those parts of it which are meant to be performed live – is somewhat more abstract than songbirdsongs, in that the musical material is not as obviously representative of sounds that are recognizable as “coming from nature”. Nevertheless, the environmental connections are arguably even more explicit, arising as they do through the texts associated with the work and some of the pre- recorded sounds. The libretto of the work contains what Adams describes as eight “Arctic Litanies”. Rather than a traditional libretto expressing action or emotion, the Arctic Litanies are essentially catalogues of names of animals, plants, places and seasons that occur in four

13 The available recording of songbirdsongs with Stephen Drury and the Calthumpian Consort is only one of many possible versions that may be realized through the arranging of phrases and motives within movements.

26 languages, sometimes overlapping: Gwich’in, Iñupiaq, English and Latin.14 The titles of the movements are likewise evocative of the natural world (some are in fact English translations of Indigenous place names): “The Place Where You Go to Listen”, “Drums of Winter”, “Pointed Mountains Scattered All Around”, “The Circle of Suns and Moons”, “The Circle of Winds”, “Deep and Distant Thunder”, “River With No Willows”, “One That Stays All Winter”, “Drums of Fire, Drums of Stone” and “Where the Waves Splash, Hitting Again and Again”.15 Earth also makes extensive use of field recordings that Adams made around Alaska. Sounds of flowing water, thunder, bird calls, rock slides and ice falls place the listener firmly in a natural sonic environment and evoke images of an environment that is largely unaffected by human development.

In Inuksuit, written for up to 99 percussionists and the first Adams composition explicitly conceived to be performed outdoors, a new dimension of environmental interaction is realized. Inuksuit is a composition with a partially indeterminate structure; though there is written music and a basic order of events (both within each part and as a macro-structure for all the parts as a whole), any given performance will depend on many factors, including how many performers are participating (any number from nine to 99 is acceptable, as long as it is divisible by 3), exactly what parts those performers choose to play, and the layout of the performers in the performance area. The performance area is in some ways the most important factor in determining the overall sonic result of the piece, and it marks the first time that Adams has directly incorporated “the environment” as a real-time, unmediated part of one of his compositions. Though it would seem that selecting a site that is “natural” (i.e. in nature, away from human development) is the obvious choice, the piece may be performed in a variety of environments – past performances have included a forested area with a creek outside the Banff

14 Adams acknowledges in the liner notes to the recording the contributions of his indigenous collaborators (James Nageak, Lincoln Tritt, Adeline Raboff and Doreen Simmonds) both in the translation of these names and their general instruction to him “in the rich nuances of their Native languages and cultures”. (Adams, 1994:7)

15 This work is one of many that shows the profound cultural influence that Adams’ contact with northern Indigenous cultures has had. He suggested that his compositions are influenced by the feeling of various Indigenous ceremonies, rather than the actual musical content, though he does acknowledge that the rhythm groupings of twos and threes in the Drum Quartets is influenced by drumming ceremonies he has witnessed (2004, 25). He acknowledged the difficulty of wanting to pay tribute to these influences while also being conscious of cultural appropriation (2019b).

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Centre in Alberta, a farmer’s field near Cambridge, Ontario, Clocktower Park in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Morningside Park in New York City (Kozinn 2011) and both sides of the U.S./Mexico border at San Diego/Tijuana (Hertzog 2018).

The performers start together in an imagined “centre” and gradually spread out to form three concentric circles. Listeners are invited to position themselves anywhere throughout the performance, and to move around (or not) during the piece; this results in a unique experience for each audience member, as their aural perspective will differ depending on their relative position to the many scattered performers. Though some of the written music is, like songbirdsongs, representative of “natural” sounds (Inuksuit includes performers blowing through cardboard “megaphones” which can sound like gusting wind, and ends with bird calls on glockenspiel and piccolo), it is the environment in which it is performed that often ends up as the most imposing sonic contributor. Even with exactly the same percussive forces choosing the same motives to play at the same time, numerous acoustic factors of the outdoors (including wind speed and direction, the presence or absence of factors such as reflective surfaces, bodies of water or foliage and any other occurring environmental sounds, be they “natural” or “man- made”) have the potential to offer up a very different overall result.

Despite a lack of obviously representative “environmental” material in both SASN and MRB, the influence of the natural world is still present in these pieces, even if less explicit. Adams speaks of the influence of the sounds of large-scale natural processes such as rock falls and melting and shifting ice as an initial inspiration for the composition of SASN. (Adams 2004, 130-131) More broadly, even Adams’ more abstract movements, whether written for melodic instruments or “noisy” percussive forces, exhibits a connection to the environment through its form and texture: this music “imitates the impersonal, complex surface texture and long-term cyclical predictability of our shared soundscape. […] listening to a piece by Adams is in many ways much like listening musically to the uncontrolled sounds that surround us.” (Hanslowe 2015:2)

The more explicit presence of “environment” in llimaq marks a sort of return to its more direct incorporation in Adams’ large-scale indoor concert percussion works. One might argue that the “live” musical material is informed by somewhat oblique environmental references: many of the drumming patterns are based on Adams’ interpretation of the feeling and experience (though not the actual musical material) of Indigenous drum ceremonies, or in his words, of an Inuit

28 shaman riding “the sound of the drum to and from the spirit world” (Adams 2012a). The strict canonical nature of most of the material – a performance can use either a single player with digital delay or four percussionists – and the “surround sound” nature of those sound sources could be viewed as representing the echoes that sometimes occur in natural spaces. Nevertheless, the strongest environmental association occurs in hearing the pre-recorded parts of the piece. Though the sounds are somewhat more processed and filtered than those included on Earth and the Great Weather, one can still make out what seem to be sonic artifacts of rain, rushing water, a sparking fire, thunder, and a rock slide. Glenn Kotche, who commissioned the piece, also mentioned that the tape part includes recordings of “animals under the ice” (Kotche 2019b).

2.3.2 Place

“Place” is a somewhat more abstract and multi-layered (and occasionally therefore more problematic) term than “environment”. Environment, though it can have many contexts, at least tends to represent something that we can sense in the real world in real time: a forest, a body of water, a city, a desert. These are all physical areas, and using those various descriptions can conjure a relatively concrete idea of what those areas will look, feel and sound like. “Place”, on the other hand, is far less specific, and yet it is a concept that is clearly important to Adams. He has written and spoken extensively of ideas of place as they relate to his music.

In the Oxford English Dictionary, one broad definition of place (refined in two different ways) comes closest to articulating the somewhat intangible way that Adams (and those who write about his music) understand the term. “II: Senses relating to space or location. 3.a.: Room, available space. Also: a space that can be occupied. 3.b.: Space (especially as contrasted with time); continuous or unbounded extension in every direction; extension in space.” Though the latter is noted by the OED as being “obsolete”, I feel that it is an appropriate description of some senses of the word, especially in relation to Adams’ idea of “sonic geography”.

One potentially confusing aspect is the difference between the meanings and ideas of “place” and “space”. Though these two terms are often used interchangeably (as they are in Robert Carl’s essay “Place and Space” in The Farthest Place or in Grimes’ writing on “ritual places”), they are sometimes used in relation to each other, with one a subset of the other. Esler, writing about how place informs the phenomenology of music performance, suggests that space is

29 something that is created and determinate, something with a purpose, while place may just exist without any human designation or action. He suggests that spaces are areas, locations or buildings which are purpose-built or at least designated for a specific function, for example an opera house (2007, 77) or a shopping mall. Esler considers space a “system of place”, and suggests that “Place is an adjunct to space, as place informs space” (78); that is, spaces are often, though not always, built in some sort of relation to the place in which they exist. Most importantly, “Space has a function, whereas place needs no function or purpose. Spaces are designed and places are found.” (80, emphasis added) He goes on to suggest that, when we perform outside in “nature”, we are refashioning the outside as a space, and therefore also incorporating into a “theatrical system” (81) (i.e. including it as an integral part of the performance). This distinction is interesting in a broad sense: it should be clear to anyone who has attended a live musical performance, especially one that takes place in a less common setting (i.e. not a concert hall or club) that the setting is transformed in feeling by the musical activity that it’s hosting – the place now has another purpose, perhaps one which it was not originally designed for.

I would suggest, however, that the assigning of symbols of “place” to an area that simply exists and “space” to one which we somehow create is slightly arbitrary and confusing: the similarity of the words makes it too easy to get the two terms mixed-up. I propose instead that “place” can also be a physical, locatable area in which music may happen, and that we need not distinguish between the two words if the origin and intention of the setting is clear.16

Where the definition of “place” begins to get somewhat more unclear is when we speak of place as an abstract concept created by music. “Music as place” is a theme that Adams comes back to

16 “Space” can have another meaning, one which I believe might be more useful in the context of this writing. For those who write about and listen to Adams’ compositions, I believe that the idea of space (or the related “spaciousness”) refers instead to a sense of scale, to durations of the notes, and the durations of the silences between notes. It implies breadth and depth in scale and materials. Music with space could be viewed as the opposite of music that is intimate; space infers that there is breathing room, a chance to relax somewhat and to (metaphorically) stretch out. At the same time, it does conjure up images of a physical vastness, and of the listener being a figure in the middle. Certainly, this is an image that can apply to many of Adams’ expansive pieces, including SASN, MRB, Ilimaq, Dream of White on White, Become Ocean and many others.

30 time and again in his writings and compositions. When writing Dream of White on White (1992, for string quartet, harp or piano and string orchestra), he

[…] wanted to move away from music about place, towards music that is place. I wanted not only to portray a natural landscape in music, but to create a musical landscape with an essential coherence in some way equivalent to the wholeness of a real place; music that conveys its own inherently musical sense of place. (2004, 15)

Writing later of Strange and Sacred Noise, he wrote that

My music is haunted by place, and by an ideal of sonic geography – place as music, and music as place. More recently I’ve begun to explore new aspects of the relationships between music and place and a convergence of sonic geography with sonic geography. (2004, 130)

Though the term “sonic geography” doesn’t appear to have been coined by Adams, and is sometimes used by others in slightly different contexts (the Canadian new-music publication Musicworks has, for example, a column every issue which describes the sound-world associated with a specific geographic location), it is another term that has become associated most strongly with him and his work, again partially due to his repeated use of it in his own writings. In his close study of Adams’ Four Thousand Holes, Cless (2015, 17) suggests that are four types of sonic geography: the sounds of location (i.e. including sounds which are taken directly from a certain place, such as the sound of traffic when depicting a busy a street); as musical metaphor for a place (e.g. Smetana’s The Moldau or Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain); as “compositional ideal” (e.g. much of Adams’ music, presumably including many of his colour- field pieces, and Ilimaq, with a focus on an aesthetic of “wholeness” and “wonder”); and as phenomenological theory (that is, a composition that exists as a place in its own “acoustic space- time”). These categories are not, of course, fully fixed or separated: one can imagine compositions which incorporate both actual soundscapes and representations of sounds. Indeed, I would suggest that some other Adams’ other works such as Inuksuit (containing as it does a mixture of abstract and more representative musical motifs) would fall into a space between the second and third types of sonic geography.

Based on the writings quoted above, I would argue that Adams’ concept (or at least his desired goal) of works like Strange and Sacred Noise would correspond not to the third but to the fourth type of sonic geography: music as place, that exists on its own. The “acoustic space-time”

31 element of the definition is important, perhaps more so than the overall (and thus far vaguely- defined) concept of sonic geography. “Acoustic space-time” was first coined by Steven Feld, and Cless defines it as the “when and where of sonic place (and thereby, musical place), a medium that can be accessed through listening and living inside of a place that the sound inhabits.” (2015, 25) Cless further breaks down the “dimensions” into four components: “the physical space of sounding, the acoustic properties of sounds, the temporal positioning, [and] the temporal depth (i.e. the space-time of cultural meaning and memory).”

The first three “dimensions” of acoustic space-time are – at least when speaking of a live performance – easily described, or at least identified. Firstly: where does the performance happen? What are the physical properties of this place? What is the (physical) relationship between the place and the listener? How does that affect the overall sound? Secondly: what are the sounds? What are the textures, the colours, the melodic elements, the harmonic elements? Thirdly: how and when do these sounds happen in time? What is the rhythm? How is this rhythm perceived by the listener? How is the passage of time during the musical event perceived by the listener? Is the listener aware of the passage of time, or does it seem to pass quickly, slowly, or not at all?

The fourth aspect, that of temporal depth, is considerably less objective than the other three. What is the cultural meaning for the listener? How does the general context of the listener’s position in society – be it social, economic, cultural, political or geographical – influence how they hear the performance? Likewise, does the performance provoke some aspect of memory that relates to a lived experience, real or imagined? It is clear from these sorts of questions that the acoustic space-time will necessarily be different for each listener (and, for that matter, each performer), as personal context plays such a large role in these questions.

This most subjective aspect of acoustic space-time and the larger concept of sonic geography also hints at an another important aspect of place, especially as related to Adams’ goal of “emotional impact” in his compositions: even in its most abstract form, it also implies a type of emotional connection, particularly when used in conjunction with the word “sense”. A “sense of place” can describe a feeling of belonging or some other connection: it is a feeling of knowing (or creating) one’s relationship with a location (real or imagined), whatever that relationship may be. This concept is certainly not a new one, and likewise not exclusive to the work of John

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Luther Adams. Author E. W. Howe hinted at the power of musical compositions to invoke an emotional connection to imagined places: “When people hear good music, it makes them homesick for something they never had, and never will have” (Country Town Sayings, 56) and many people will, at least anecdotally, know the feeling of nostalgia for a past place or time that can be evoked simply by hearing a familiar composition. What is striking about ideas of place in Adams’ music is the degree to which it is a focus of his outlook, method and resulting work. Creating this sense of place strictly through the sound world of his compositions – rather than through any obvious musical references or program note indications – was one of Adams’ primary goals with Strange and Sacred Noise, and it has continued in his subsequent works.

2.3.3 Ritual

When, as a performer, I first encountered Strange and Sacred Noise and The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies, I immediately thought that “this is ritualistic music”. I will confess that if I had been asked at that time exactly what I meant by “ritualistic”, I would not have been able to offer a clear and concise answer; rather, my reaction was simply an instinctual feeling. The challenges involved in performing these pieces (their extended length, the amount of mental concentration, the repetitiveness of much of the musical material) as well as the challenges of listening to them made them feel a little like some type of (ultimately worthwhile) musical sacrifice, a sort of rite that both performer and audience were experiencing together. For me, this immediately marked these pieces as a different sort of musical experience than those in which I had partaken to that point. It seemed to be a significant undertaking in a way that other music was not, and engender a sort of suspended state of being that other music did not.

Ritual in its noun form is most broadly defined as “the prescribed form or order of religious or ceremonial rites” but is also “a ritual act or ceremonial observance” and “an action or series of actions regularly or habitually repeated” (Oxford English Dictionary). The most important elements in this definition of ritual are the connection with religion and/or ceremony, and the element of repetition.

Repetition can occur on both micro and macro scales: rituals may include actions that repeat multiple times within a single instance of the ritual (e.g. the repetition of certain phrases as part of the Catholic celebration of Mass), and the ritual itself may be repeated in different instances (e.g. Catholics gathering for Mass every week on Sunday morning). Repetition may be exact, or

33 there may be slight variation. In either case, the idea that events repeat in some form – and that we might be able to identify and understand this form – is a key factor. Indeed, Baranowski proposes that rituals (or perhaps more precisely ritual actions) are not necessarily about hidden or engendered meaning but are instead defined by being actions that are “patterned in time” (1998, 5). She proceeds to draw connections between the challenge of searching for the “meaning” of ritual and “meaning” of music, and references Peter Kivy in asking “why do people engage in these activities, sometimes for extended length of time, that are essentially meaningless?” (6) Baranowski suggests that people are in fact more interested in surface properties of ritual than its “deeper” or symbolic meaning, and that the “formalization” of the ritual itself is the important part. She makes the claim that “at a generic level of temporal pattern cognition, [ritual and music] are identical,” for three reasons: 1) both are highly patterned; 2) both occur in time and have a distinct start, middle and ending; and 3) rituals and music each have “particular constraints” (1998, 16-18). She proposes that both musical compositions or performances (without texts) and ritual cannot “mean” anything in the logical, comprehensive and collectively agreed-upon way that language does, and suggests instead that we perceive these things through recognizing patterns that are “[the] same, [a] derivation, [or] different” (20-21).

If repetition or “patterning in time” was the only criteria needed to define certain actions as rituals, then one could theoretically assign any repeatable action as a ritual. This, however, is generally not the case (although it can be admitted that the colloquial usage of “ritual” as a term meaning repeated every-day tasks has become more widespread in recent decades). I believe that relation to a form of religion or ceremony is also a necessary component. This ceremony could be a traditional one, long established (see again the example of the Roman Catholic Mass), or one that is recent and very personal, and may overlap with an idea of “tradition” (for example, getting dressed up to attend of a performance of The Nutcracker every holiday season, even/especially if one doesn’t necessarily regularly attend either classical music concerts or ballet performances). Christopher Small goes further to suggest that rituals are, at their base, context dependent and very personal: “Ritual is a form of organized behaviour in which humans use the language of gesture […] to affirm, to explore and to celebrate their ideas of how relationships of the cosmos (or of a part of it) operate, and thus of how they themselves should relate to it and to one another.” (1998, 95) It therefore follows that exactly what the ritual is

34 signifying could be almost limitless, as these relationships are necessarily socially constructed and therefore entirely context dependent; the important thing is that a ritual is an action (107) through which they are idealized. In this broad sense, Small argues, ritual is “the mother of all arts.” (105) Perhaps because of a common association of “ritual” and “rites” with ideas of “religion” and “ceremony”, a ritual may often convey a sense of increased weight of importance as compared to everyday tasks, though the nature and amount of that importance may vary from participant to participant.

Although Adams insists he is skeptical of the idea of ritual (or perhaps ritual for the sake of ritual), at the same time he recognizes that human beings have an inherent need for it in some form. He further proposes that the lack of an “elder” function in much of current Western culture has led us to a generally ritually-bereft state, and that for him (and many of his generation), their coming-of-age ritual was “sex, drugs and rock and roll”. (Adams 2019a) For Adams, one of the guiding ideas of his life and his creative spirit is to “imagine the culture I wish I lived in”. Perhaps in part because of the cultural influence of Indigenous communities on Adams’ outlook, his culture very evidently involves elements of ritual, especially as related to nature and especially as a replacement and/or addition for main-stream organized religion.

Though investigation about ideas of religion and ritual in John Luther Adams’ compositions has been largely absent in recent scholarship (especially as compared to concepts of environment, place, and related ideas), I believe that it is an important factor in Adams’ worldview and greatly influences the pieces that he composes. Adams doesn’t profess to follow any major established religion; he is, instead, someone whose religion is the beauty, power and fragility of the natural world (though in his essay “Credo” he has admitted closeness to aspects of both Buddhist and contemplative Christian traditions [2004, 144]). He often invokes ideas of things that might be “greater than humankind” and has a reverence for the mystery and wonder of creation. Adams imbues his compositions (and many of his writings) with a deep sense of the sacred. From his essay “Music as a form of prayer”, written in 2018 to coincide with the premiere of his work In the Name of the Earth presented by the Lincoln Centre in New York City:

For me, the earth itself is sacred. The natural world is an inexhaustible source of inspiration and music. Whether in the Arctic or the desert, most of my works have begun with some small epiphany, some moment of grace that I've experienced outdoors, in what I call "the real world."

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Music for me is a form of prayer. It is a call to attention, an invitation to enter into sacred space, to be more deeply aware, to feel the presence of mysteries larger and older and deeper than I can fathom. In my work I aspire to discover new musical spaces that invite us to lose ourselves, to step out of time as we usually experience it.

One instance of a sort of religious influence is obvious: it’s there in the title of Strange and Sacred Noise. The concept of noise (and the broader idea of sound) is something that Adams considers a sacred resource – he describes himself as a “Cage fundamentalist” when it comes to noise, and suggests that when we invite noise into music, we listen differently and that it is a “way of being in in the world” (not unlike what adherents might say about their respective religions). Adams’ usage of noise as a musical building block reflects this devotion. In describing noise as a “primal roar” and something that “music came out of” (2019a), he also hints at another aspect of ritual that corresponds to his music: the notion that ritual is often conceived of as something primal, “arcane, mysterious ceremony” (Schartz/Godfrey 1993, 297), birthed in ancient traditions. This connection is further expanded upon by Jacques Attali in his work of musical and political philosophy Noise: The Political Economy of Music (2006). Attali suggests that noise serves a “simulacrum” for “ritual murder” and a general channeler (and representative) of ritual violence, beginning many centuries ago, and that the early role of a musician was to be a “shaman, doctor”, “one of the first catalyzers of violence and myth” and an “integral part of the sacrifice process” with a “primal identity” revolving around “magic-music- sacrifice-rite”. (12) While Adams doesn’t necessarily set out to compose music that specifically requires the musician to act out a sacrifice, the element of noise and sacrifice is clear in all three extended-length percussion pieces. When performing any of these works, the extreme dynamics, repeated gestures and resultant walls of sound require that a performer undergo a training regimen to be properly prepared, and both rehearsal and performance can often feel like a sort of physical sacrifice. A performance can often leave a performer feeling exhausted, or even injured (if not properly prepared).

The “musician as shaman/doctor/magician” aspect of Attali’s reading of ritual is present in Adams’ compositions, most notably in Ilimaq. As the most programmatic of the three works discussed here, Adams himself suggests that the composition revolves around a spirit journey to the underworld, and acknowledges the debt paid to that idea (if not the actual musical material)

36 from various Inuit and other indigenous musical ceremonies. Following is the inscription and program note included with the score:

The dead shall live, the living die, And music shall untune the sky.

- John Dryden

In Inuit tradition the shaman rides the sound of the drum to and from the spirit world. In Ilimaq, the drummers lead us on a journey through soundscapes drawn from the natural world, and from the inner resonances of the instruments themselves.17

What is it, however, about these compositions, about their performance and their hearing, that makes them into (or at least feel like) a ritual? What imbues them with a “ritualistic” feeling more than a Beethoven sonata (in many ways a more complex and difficult undertaking for a performer) or an extended jazz solo? I suggest it is the combination of the following musical materials, all of which somehow invoke a sort of musical primal-ness, as imagined through myth and collective memory:

• Instruments: the usage of unpitched percussion instruments plays into the trope of drums as a “primal” sound: it suggests reference to a (mythical) time when music was played not primarily for pleasure but for purpose, be it a celebration, a prayer, a communication or a remembrance. The other percussion instruments (e.g. tam-tams, cymbals, triangles, sirens and mallet instruments), while perhaps not having the same primal timbral associations, nevertheless make a similar association through their complex timbres, and bring to mind the primacy of noise in music. Atalli suggests that “music is inscribed between noise and silence, in the space of the social codification that it reveals” and that it might help to “lead us through the immense forest of noise with which history presents

17 Adams (2012a, ii).

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us”.(2006, 19) The use of these instruments and their association with concepts of “noise” (especially as Adams’ works obviously are aimed at shaping this “noise” into a form, a sort of modern remaking of the very beginning of what we now call music composition) can therefore be associated with a sense of the primal, and thus with collectively imagined images of primal rituals.

• The use of repeated motives and materials – in the case of the three works in question, primarily accelerating and decelerating rhythmic lines – fulfills the requirement of repetition in ritual. Moreover, the physical action of constantly producing rapidly repeated notes on percussion instruments introduces an element of physical exertion on the part of the performer, something which must be overcome for successful completion of the ritual.

• The presence of extremes in the dynamic range – particularly in the case of instruments such as tam-tams, which can become almost dangerously loud for both performer and audience – increases the sense of effort, and adds a certain amount of “weight” to the experience. At the high end of this broad amplitude spectrum, one may not only hear but actually begin to feel the music in one’s body because of the amplitude and frequency of the sound waves given off by the instruments.

• The relatively long duration of individual movements and complete pieces emphasizes and multiplies the elements of repetition. In addition to increasing the physical demands of the performer, it also requires increased mental concentration. For the listener, it requires a certain willingness to be open to music that is primarily focused on sound and does not have an obvious narrative path to it. This in turn necessitates both an increase in concentration and at the same time a willingness to “let go” and be immersed by the sound world that the performers are constructing. In other words, even listening to these pieces takes a certain amount of purposeful effort.

All of these musical factors contribute to a sense of “ritual” in John Luther Adam’s extended percussion pieces by provoking a sense of liminality. First used extensively by anthropologist Victor Turner, liminality is a state of being “in-between” or in “the margins” – that is, not fully in one state or another, but somewhere in a transition. (Anthropologists often cite the liminality

38 of rites which might transition someone from child to adult: during the ritual they are in a transitive state, not still children but not yet considered adults.) Richard Schechner (1985, 6) suggests that while performing, a performer is “not [themselves]” but also “not not [themselves]”; in other words, a performer may engage with other modes of being/doing/playing than they would in a normal non-performative setting, yet at the same time they are not giving up their own identity. They are both playing a role, and being themselves. Though this could be argued to happen to a certain extent in any performance, I believe the musical and structural nature of the works being performed (and particularly the amount of physical and mental exertion for performers and, to a lesser extent, listeners) encourages this liminality to a greater degree.

The feeling of being in this liminal state can play itself out as a sort of suspension of consciousness/being/time, either for performer or listener. Performers might describe having a sort of out-of-body experience.18 There are many musical traditions around in the world in which the goal of a musical experience is to induce those present (either performers or spectators) into a trance or some sort of possession.19 While I am not suggesting that it was Adams’ explicit goal to provide the musical conditions for a full trance or possession to occur in either performers or audience, their performance nevertheless seem to promote a state of altered consciousness to some extent.

This altered state can also greatly affect our ability to accurately perceive the passage of time or the duration of a particular event (in this case, the composition being performed and/or listened to). Having talked to many performers and audience members who have attended works that share some characteristics of the Adams worked discussed here (for example James Tenney’s Having Never Written A Note for Percussion or Steve Reich’s Drumming, or even those who have played a continuous snare drum roll for 30 or 60 minutes), a common response seems to be

18 As a performer, I have certainly had performances – including both MRB and SASN – where I felt as though I were outside of myself, watching my body perform the music. Please see Chapter 4 for a more detailed discussion of performers’ experiences while performing.

19 See Schechner 1985, 246-248 for an example of trance; other examples of musical “possession” include santerìa, where a dancer may be possessed by an orisha (spirit) or flamenco where a singer channels a duende (demon or spirit) while improvising.

39 that while the first few minutes of the experience appear to pass very slowly, subsequently time seems to pass quicker than expected, with the result that participants are often surprised to learn the actual duration of a concert or performance, and would have under-estimated it if asked for a guess of the duration.

2.3.4 Parts of the whole

It this this combination of these three “extra-musical” factors of environment, place and ritual, that makes much of Adams’ music and especially SASN, MRB and Ilimaq so interesting on both philosophical and musical levels. These three factors relate to each other in a cyclical fashion: almost always, there is a connection from one to the other two. Environment occupies a central subjective place in much of Adams’ works; out of the three works discussed in detail in this dissertation, it is most present in llimaq, and arguably least present in MRB. Thinking of environment necessitates thinking of a broader concept of place: after all, environment (the natural world) necessarily exists in a place (or multiple places at the same time). Sonic suggestions of environment bring that idea of place into the foreground. Yet place does not always have to coincide with environment; as noted above, place can be a feeling created by a combination of sound and time, and doesn’t necessarily correspond to a real physical, geographically-identifiable location. (In other words: environment must include place, but place need not include environment.)

Though environment (the natural world) and ritual do not require each other to exist, they are often linked nonetheless, particularly in Adams’ works. A work like Inuksuit is a ritual which celebrates in the environment; the deliberate movement of musicians across an outdoor performance setting, the representations of natural sounds in the musical parts, and the use of both musical space (silence) and physical place (audience integration amongst the musicians) call attention to the natural world by contrasting it with the ritual of performance. One could go further and suggest (as Esler indirectly does in his discussion of the phenomenology of performance as related to place) that any performance of Adams’ work outdoors becomes a ritual way of connecting to the environment. While I do not agree that an outdoor performance setting is always the most advantageous for the fullest and deepest experience of pieces like SASN, it must be admitted that a performance of these pieces in various outdoor settings does

40 connect ideas of ritual and the environment. Steven Schick proposes that Adams’ use of noise is related to both ritual and the environment a more indirect way, a kind of non-narrative “documentary of [his] relationship to the natural world”. Schick found the “noise” element of a piece like MRB and the harmonic consonance of a work such as In the White Silence to be

[…] two different versions of the same thing: that they were pure states, because noise is pure in its own way, and that by manipulating the material of noise, he moved it in the direction of consonance; by manipulating the material of consonance (in In the White Silence or Become Ocean) by overlaying it and putting it on top of one another… he was moving in the direction of noise, the saturation. […] It feels to me that Inuksuit and Sila and songbirdsongs (although that’s an early work) are slightly different in how they treat the natural world: it doesn’t seem to be quotations for providing a meaningful narrative, but there is an acknowledgement [in some of Adams’ compositions] that noise is the sonic lifeblood of the world, and that when it fades out, when human noise fades out, that we will hear the noise of the place we’re in. (Schick 2019)

The environment itself may inspire people to ritual action on a number of levels. On a macro level, it is the inspiration for much of Adams’ compositional output, especially that of recent years (e.g. Become Ocean, Become Desert, In the Name of the Earth, Sila: The Breath of the World, etc). On a smaller more moment-based level, the experience of being in an environment that is found to be powerful or affecting in some way may move someone to create a ritual in the moment: perhaps a mediation consisting of deep breathing, or a spontaneous musical performance to celebrate a feeling of joy in a certain landscape.

Concepts of ritual and place have been intertwined for centuries in many contexts. Elements of ritual may embue new meaning and significance to an otherwise “ordinary” place. Much like the other interrelations discussed here, this can occur on numerous different (and sometimes overlapping) scales. A house of worship may, through a consecration ritual, be designated (for a continuous amount of time) as a “holy” location. An otherwise secular place – a park, a banquet hall, a restaurant – may be granted temporary meaning through the ritual of a marriage ceremony. This second example exemplifies the possibilities of the liminality of place: in this instance the place is still itself, yet is also something else, something over and above its usual meaning and context.

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Perhaps the most significant instance of the interaction of ritual and place is in theatre. In its widest sense, theatre encompasses all performance art forms: it is a representation of some sort of event, either real or imagined, presented live by performers, generally in a specific (designated) place. Ballet, opera, chamber music, dance, drama and readings are all types of theatre. In addition to the element of live performance, theatre is often (but not always) enhanced by visual elements (including lighting, costumes, scenic design and other elements of stagecraft) and may also be enhanced through elements of sound design and very occasionally even smell or touch. These disparate elements may serve to contribute a sense of realism to the setting of the performance, or may simply work to enhance an overall mood, feeling or aesthetic. In any case, both the performers and the other aspects of theatre serve to take a designated space (often, but not always, a building, hall or room created or chosen for the express purpose of performing a theatrical work) and help transform the room into something else, at least for the period of time of the performance. Again, it is important to note the liminality of the situation: the place of the performance is still the place that it was before the performance started: it has not fundamentally changed or somehow shifted its location or its overall purpose. But it is at the same time something different and additional, as long as the place takes on a different function in the minds of those performing and those engaged with the performance.

It is also important to restate here that the performance itself is the important part of the ritual place-making: it is not simply a matter of dressing up a set and expecting that a stage will therefore be transformed. Even in a traditional Western classical music concert, the ritual of performance changes the nature and character of the space where that performance takes place. Before the ritual, it is simply a hall, or room; during the performance, it becomes a place where people gather with a common goal of somehow participating in the process of musicking (see Small 1998 for an excellent close description of the ritual of a typical professional symphony orchestra concert experience). The convergence of people and of music gives the space a new energy and meaning that it did not have previously. After the performance is over, the nature of the place changes again, and returns to a more dormant role.

As ritual creates place, so place can also encourage or create ritual. Much like the relationship between the environment and ritual, the power of a place may encourage or enhance certain rituals or experiences. Even those who do not consider themselves adherents of a certain religion may feel the powerful of a ritual or even the desire for ritual action when visiting a

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“holy” place that is associated with that religion. Likewise, when one visits one of the world’s major cities, for example, one may be more likely to listen closely to a performance that is scheduled in that city’s designated music performance space (be it a concert hall, theatre or popular music club) than a busker that one encounters somewhere on the street.20 Designated spaces suggest behavours and create expectations; place can help to create context for a ritual.

2.3.5 Communitas

An act of ritual, when shared with others, can lead to a feeling of “communitas”. This is another term coined by Victor Turner, who wanted to distinguish a “modality of social relationship” as opposed to a more general commonality sometimes implied in “community”. (Turner 2008, 96) Communitas is a sort of reshuffling of relationships: Turner suggests that the default set of human relationships involves structures of hierarchy and rank, but when communitas occurs during the ritual process, it is “a recognition…of a generalized social bond that has ceased to be and has simultaneously yet to be, fragmented into a multiplicity of structural ties.” (96) In other words, it is a sort of (temporary) resetting of structural relationships that therefore implies a greater sense of equality/equity and connection amongst a group. Edith Turner defines it as “the anthropology of collective joy”, though it is also “almost beyond strict definition, with almost endless variations.” (2012:1) It can also be described as “spiritual unity” (3), “togetherness itself” (4) or “a group’s pleasure in sharing common experiences with one’s fellows”. (2) It is important to understand that communitas is not the same as solidarity: the pleasure that is experienced cannot be in opposition to another group, but is instead a deeper connection to all others (by way of the immediate group), to the concept of humanity as a whole. She notes that these moments generally occur spontaneously and somewhat unpredictably, but also notes the frequent association with rituals (3). Edith Turner devotes a chapter of her work to the phenomenon of communitas in nature, and suggests that the proper way of regarding communitas includes “…the removal of previous theoretical distinctions between culture and

20 In 2007 the Washington Post set up an experiment that entailed having Joshua Bell, one of the world’s greatest solo violinists, busk incognito in a Washington subway station to see if people would recognize great artistry. The result: most people walking by ignored him, and there was no crowd that gathered, despite the predictions of conductor Leonard Slatkin. Though the initial “experiment” was interested in discovering whether people would recognize beauty out of context, to me it is an example of the important aspect that ritual and place play in our enjoyment of a performance, and how the absence of one can lead to the absence of the other. (Weingarten 2007)

43 nature, for a start” (143) and that it occurs “in the very environment. It is in the universe.” (144) I would further suggest that this association also applies to the broader concept of place. Communitas through ritual can make places special (and could even create or contribute to an abstract sense of place, much as Adams’ music does), while the gathering of people in special places can help to institute communitas.

As a performer, I believe that communitas is an important component of the act of making music. The pleasure of a group experience, the energy of feeling something together, the sense that something is communicated, understood and affecting in a way which is deeper than the surface aspect of that communication, be it words, music or images – is what many performers (and, for that matter audience members) hope for in a performance. I believe that it is a heightened version of Small’s concept of musicking: the idea that the participation and energy of everyone involved in the act of participating in music helps to make it the experience that it is. It is a breaking down of barriers: even though we may have different roles in a music event, we are all nonetheless experiencing that event as a collective, where everyone contributes to make the event and the experience what it is. It is something that is difficult to describe in an objective, quantifiable manner – as Edith Turner suggests, it is best communicated through stories. Grimes (2012) recommends that as scholars reporting on ritual, it is impossible to accurately convey a proper description of a ritual without also taking part to some extent, and that one should share first person observations, rather than simply an “objective” account. To that end, Chapter 4 will summarize experiences (including my own) of performers who have commissioned and/or performed Strange and Sacred Noise, The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies and Ilimaq in an attempt to provide some historical context surrounding the circumstances of premiere or other notable performances, and also to seek to discover what factors may help to constitute a performance of these works that was meaningful and engaging for all present.

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Chapter 3 Origins, forms and the evolution of performance practice in Adams’ percussion music 3 Introduction

Many composers have championed percussion as a new and mostly-untapped area of musical potential, particularly throughout the twentieth century – one thinks of John Cage’s statements “Percussion music is revolution” (Cage 2011, 87) and Charles Ives’ “The possibilities of percussion sounds, I believe, have never been fully realized” (1972, 124-125). Certainly, percussion instruments – particularly those that are typically classified as “non-pitched” or “unpitched” – have been integrated into Western classical and contemporary music over the last 150 years more numerously and with a far greater variety then at any time previous. Yet there have been certain composers who have tried to extend this influence even further by contributing works specifically for either solo percussion or percussion ensemble. Varèse, Harrison and especially Cage have all made significant contributions to this area of solo and chamber music. I believe that no one of his generation has made more of a contribution – both in number of works composed and in terms of musical and artistic development – to percussion music than John Luther Adams.21 Out of the 73 compositions listed on his website22, ten of them are for solo percussion or percussion ensemble (including two percussion ensemble works now often played separately but originally part of larger works) , another six are for percussion and one other instrument (harp, piano or piccolo), and many more feature percussion prominently as part of chamber ensembles or orchestral textures.

Although all of Adams’ percussion music is worthy of consideration (and certainly of listening!), I will focus here on three works: Strange and Sacred Noise (1991-1997), The

21 I am speaking of Adams here in the context of composers who are, at least to some extent, widely known and recognized by the concert-going public, and whose reputations rest at least partly with writing compositions for a variety of musical forces. There are many composer/percussionists, especially in the last two decades, who have produced a wealth of material for percussionists to perform; however, most of these composers tend to specialize in this genre, and their work is generally not widely known outside of an audience of percussionists and/or the North American “college music department” environment.

22 http://johnlutheradams.net/category/works/, accessed March 13, 2019.

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Mathematics of Resonant Bodies (2003), and Ilimaq (2012). Although one of these works (SASN) is written for percussion quartet and the other two are for solo percussionist, they have many elements in common, especially as they relate to the challenge posed to performers and listeners:

• Imagined to be performed in a more traditional (indoor) concert setting23

• Extended length by chamber music standards

o SASN contains six discrete movements, total duration approximately75 minutes

o MRB contains eight discrete movements, total duration approximately 70 minutes

o Ilimaq contains 3 contiguous movements, total duration approximately 48 minutes

• Dynamic extremes (as structural devices)

• Frequent usage of dense textures (in part to approximate duration; i.e. “written out” rolls particularly on instruments with shorter sustain such as snare drums, tom-toms and marimbas) 24,

• Significant physical (endurance) demands required of performer

• Significant mental demands required of both performer (concentration) and listener (reception)

23 Adams piece Inuksuit, now one of his most-performed works, is also an extended length percussion piece but is designed to be performed outdoors, and offers a very different listening and playing experience than SASN, MRB or Ilimaq.

24 Percussionists have traditionally compensated for lack of duration control on many instruments by developing the “roll”. A roll on a percussion instrument typically consists of very fast repeated strokes; the theory and practice behind it is that the strokes will be close enough together that the ear will be tricked into thinking that it is, in fact, one note being held. Sometimes these rolls are accomplished through alternating “single strokes” (e.g. R L R L etc., often used on mallet instruments, timpani or bass drums), and sometimes the percussionist is able to use the playing surface to “bounce” a stick or mallet, thereby getting multiple (quicker) strokes per larger arm movement (e.g. RRRLLLRRRLLL, used most regularly on a snare drum). It should be noted that single stroke rolls take more physical energy and therefore are more tiring and also harder to sustain consistently, especially at softer dynamics.

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Though much of the musical material in these works is not considered “difficult” either technically or musically as compared to other contemporary percussion repertoire, the combination of proliferation of extreme dynamics (and the shifts between the extremes), the length of these works and the constant physical motion required put them in a special category of challenging percussion music.

3.1 Strange and Sacred Noise

Adams has stated repeatedly, both in his own writings and in numerous interviews, that his intention when composing is to create music that has “both formal rigour and visceral impact” (see, for example, Adams 2004, 134). He also claims that he is most affected by music in which self-expression is not evident (Adams 2019a). He expresses these ideas in the phrase “music as communion vs. music as communication”, and it is quite clear that he generally prefers the former (Adams 2004:134). These guiding artistic principles, combined with his interest in the outdoors and processes of nature, were important factors in the composition of his concert- length percussion quartet, Strange and Sacred Noise.

Adams’ motivation for the piece was twofold. His work Earth and the Great Weather had had multiple complete performances, but these performances had also led to the “extraction” of the three drum quartets as stand-alone works. These works, Drums of Winter, Deep and Distant Thunder and Drums of Fire, Drums of Stone, were physically demanding, mentally challenging pieces for percussion quartet, scored for a total of eight tom-toms and two concert bass drums. The Percussion Group Cincinnati (Allen Otte, James Culley and Russell Burge) were the first ensemble that Adams heard who performed the three movements together, back to back. PGC had first met Adams when they travelled to Fairbanks around 1993 to perform Russell Peck’s The Glory and the Grandeur with the Fairbanks Symphony, as well as a PGC concert at the University of Alaska. Adams came to the concert and afterwards invited Otte to his “composition shed”. At that time Adams played excerpts from Earth and the Great Weather and gave Otte the music to the three drum quartets to peruse. Otte subsequently communicated that after looking at the score for the three quartets that he believed that PGC could perform the work as a trio, as the two principal parts would each be performed by one percussionist, and the two secondary parts could be combined and played by a single percussionist. Otte also

47 requested that Adams “refashion the soundscape” by picking excerpts from Earth in a way that would (with a sort of prologue and epilogue) connect the three movements together. PGC subsequently invited Adams to Cincinnati to hear a performance of the drum quartets. This listening experience was ear-opening for him: Adams loved the “immersion” aspect of this performance, the feeling of being totally sonically encased by these drum quartets with very little aural respite. This was an important development point for him: not only did it make him begin to consider the idea of extended percussion music, particularly music that might sound closer to what many might define as “noise”,25 but it also set the stage for a future collaboration with PGC. (Adams 2005)

His other major influence was the environment. In 1989, before he had started work on SASN, a “personal crisis” led him to take a solo camping trip on the shores of the Yukon river, where he listened to the multitude of sounds that emerge from the process of river ice breaking apart in the spring. Both the sounds themselves and the huge scale and natural “violence” of the process served as both a personal realignment of perspective between man and nature, and a sonic inspiration: "Standing on the bank of a great river at breakup or near a tidewater glacier as a massive wall of ice explodes into the sea, we are confronted with the overwhelming violence of nature - a violence at once terrifying and comforting, transpersonal and purifying." (Adams 2004, 131)

Adams was also beginning to explore music as place (and place as music) rather than music simply representing place. In this he was inspired by visual art, specifically abstract expressionists; he found that Mark Rothko’s ideal of his own art as “the simple expression of the complex thought” resonated with him as a guiding principle. As Esler notes, “Nature provokes simplifications. We see water, we hear wind, but these simplifications are comprised of intricate stochastic detail.” (2007, 84) Furthermore, Adams was continuing to realize that simple, symmetrical forms would provide a way to focus on sound, without being concerned about any

25 As Adams remarks to Allen Otte in their interview, his compositions at that time were essentially divided into two extremes, as influenced by his home in Alaska: those works that were influenced by the light of the North and had lighter, sparser, brighter textures and timbres (e.g. Dream of White on White and In the White Silence), and those that were influenced by the winter’s encompassing darkness, and were more explosive (mostly his drum- based percussive pieces, especially the Three Drum Quartets from Earth and the Great Weather. (Adams & Otte, 2004)

48 sort of narrative development or issues of tension and release. Esler, speaking to this same idea, references James Tenney’s Never Having Written A Note for Percussion:26 the form is “simple to understand” and “monolithic in its construction”. “Because of the simple structure, the sonorous complexity of the instrument breaches the horizon. We hear the intricate granularity of noise and apprehend its musical qualities.” (2007, 84) Form and a sense of place become inexorably intertwined for Adams: “Form is idealized space. Sound is audible time. Form defines a context. Sound embodies the presence of the moment.” (Adams 2004, 132)

As part of this quest to sonically create a presence of place and inspired by violent natural processes such as ice break-ups, waterfalls, and the sound of thunder, Adams began a study of rudimentary chaos theory and subsequent research about the nature of basic fractal patterns as a representation of certain natural processes. Fractals – mathematical equations that definite shapes and patterns – are often regarded as a defining aspect of the appearance and shape of the natural world, as their visual representations suggest formations such as cliff edges, tree branches, snowflakes and spirals. For Adams, they also serve as the perfect structural inspiration: fractal patterns are symmetrical, scalable forms that override any questions of narrative development or tension and release. The result is that the focus of each movement of SASN is on the sounds themselves and the interaction of various instruments, rather than any formal narrative. The nature of the patterns – for example, the “Cantor set”, in which the middle third of a straight line is removed, in multiple iterations – can serve as a macro (structural form) and micro (musical motive development) guiding principle.27

Figure 3-1: A 2D representation of the 1D Cantor Set fractical. Illustration by the author.

26 Tenney’s piece, composed in 1971 for John Bergamo, is one of a series of “Postal Pieces”, written on postcard- size cardstock. The piece, which does not specify instrument though is often performed on tam-tam, consists of a whole note with a fermata and roll indication; above this is the marking “(very long)”, and below is a crescendo from pppp to ffff, followed by a diminuendo back to pppp.

27 Despite not necessarily being immediately audibly noticeable, these large-structure processes harken back to the Minimalist tradition of Steve Reich’s Drumming more strongly than almost anything else Adams has written: the

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The instrumentation that Adams has chosen for these six movements is, for the most part, very reflective of the word “Noise” in the title: most of the instruments incorporated have timbres that consist of a number of complex overtone relationships, leading to complicated sonorities and a general lack of recognition of pure pitch or tone (though relative pitch, at least between multiple instruments of the same type, is still quite clearly detectable). These are instruments that are not often featured as solo instruments, and certainly wouldn’t be described by the average classical music aficionado as “melodic” or “musical”, at least in the same vein as that one might typically describe a violin, piano or flute. Of course, as Steven Schick points out, “…melody derives from similarity of attack and colour and not the ‘melodiousness’ of any given attack or colour. Melody does not result from sweetness but from sameness.” (2006, 32) It is the variations on “sameness” within the instrument groups that gives this piece a great deal of its colour and timbral interest, and that delineate its structure to the listener.

The first movement is scored for two snare drums and two field drums, though Adams is clear that all four drums should together cover the widest field of “coloured noise” possible (i.e. a wide pitch spectrum). These movements are the “sonic equivalent of the Cantor dust – a fractal model of behaviour of electrical noise”. This form involves removing the middle third of a given one dimensional line, and then successively removing the middle thirds of the resulting lines, ad infinitum. In the case of “…dust into dust…” the one dimensional line is represented by 27 beats (nine bars of 3/4 time) of nonuplets played on the snare drum. Sections are “removed” by switching from loud articulated notes to quiet buzz rolls, and then switching to silences. (Steven Schick describes this process as “fenestration”, or a sort of making windows of sound within an otherwise dense sound field. [Schick 2012, 86-88]) Within a single part, this begins in the middle three bars of the nine total bars of 3/4 time per section, and moves outwards in smaller intervals; between parts, it happens in canon (that is, letter A for player 4 is the same as letter B for player 3, letter C for player 2, and letter D for player 1). Eventually the sound gets “refilled” with loud strokes, again by beginning with the middle thirds of largest chunks and moving “outward”. The sixth and final movement, entitled “…and dust rising…”, uses the same

idea of gradual change unfolding for the listener, and with processes/forms that I would argue are more audible than in many of his works for pitched instruments, in part because the parameter of discrete pitches is more or less removed.

50 instrumentation and general processes, though begins in something much closer to silence than the very forceful opening of “…dust into dust…”.

Figure 3-2: Measures 100-108 of "...dust into dust..." from SASN. Note that the middle thirds of the motives are removed in ever smaller iterations from players 1-4. Copyright 1997, John Luther Adams/Taiga Press.

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The second movement, “solitary and time-breaking waves”, is scored for four tams-tams (again graduated to give the greatest spectrum of noise when played together), and dedicated to James Tenney, having been inspired by his work Having Never Written A Note for Percussion. This movement consists of overlapping crescendo/decrescendo cycles in ratios of 1:3:5:7 (i.e. Player 1 excecutes a total of seven cycles, while Player 4 executes only one cycle). The third movement, “velocities crossing in phase space” is for six tom-toms and four bass drums, and the gradual accelerandi and ritardandi throughout, while not written metrically, could be the considered further development of the multi-tempo concept articulated by Cowell and observed in Adams’ The Time of Drumming, among other works. Adams notes that this movement is inspired by Peter Garland’s Meditation on Thunder and Conlan Nancarrow’s Canon X. “triadic iteration lattices” is dedicated to Edgard Varèse and Alvin Lucier; even if the dedication note were not present, a homage to Varèse could be interpreted in the instrumentation choice of four sirens. Its structure, like that of “solitary and time-breaking waves”, is a series of crescendos and decrescendos, but this time roughly structured to represent iterations of the Sierpinski gasket, a triangular form of the Sierpinsky carpet (Feisst [2012, 38] suggests that there are three interlocking iterations of 128 measures each). Though the musical gestures are similar in nature to those of the tam-tam movement, the overall effect is strikingly different: the sirens have a much clearer perceived pitch with less harmonic overtones, therefore the change in pitch associated with an increase in dynamics (or vice versa) seems somehow to be clearer, or at least more urgent, then the tam-tams. Additionally, the fall of the dynamic levels and pitch in the sirens is somewhat cleaner and more regulated than the tam-tams, giving the movement an impression of greater symmetry and order.

Figure 3-3: The Sierpinski gasket, iterations 0-3. Illustration by the author.

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The fifth movement, divided perhaps appropriately into 4 sections, is “clusters on a quadrilaterial grid” and is scored for four marimbas, four vibraphones and four glockenspiels (or crotales): one type of keyboard instrument is used per section per player, and Adams writes in the notes to the score that the desired effect is to have the ensemble sound like one player. The structure of this movement is based on the Menger Sponge, a cube which, when iterated ad infinitum, paradoxically heads toward a surface area of infinity and a volume of zero, by removing the centre square of each surface with each iteration. (The Menger Sponge is a three dimensional model of a fractal called the Sierpinski carpet; this in turn is the two dimensional version of the Cantor set.) Erik DeLuca notes that both the pitch gamuts and the determinations of rhythm (that is, in this case, space versus silence) are determined by mapping notes onto a 27x27 version of the Sierpinski carpet grid, and that the distribution of these devices “exemplify the inward motion and the gradual reduction of surface area found in a Menger sponge.”(2014, 18) This movement is dedicated to Morton Feldman, one of Adams’ main influences regarding the importance of sound; Adams considers that the movement “invokes [Feldman’s] explorations of the chromatic field, and the quiet, uninflected character of his surfaces.” (DeLuca 2014, 8)

Figure 3-4: Menger Sponge, Iterations 0-2. Illustration by the author.

One of the things that makes SASN stand out amongst other Adams works of a similar vintage is the period of incubation to bring the work to its final form. Adams worked on the various movements starting in 1991 and didn’t complete the piece until 1997. This was due in part to a collaborative workshop process involving Percussion Group Cincinnati and Allen Otte – Adams would work on a movement, then fax or mail the parts to PGC, and then wait for their

53 comments.28 Both Adams and Otte have noted that PGC’s feedback was essential to the overall sound and structure of the piece.29 For SASN, the collaboration discussions started with a discussion of the forces involved in the piece.30 PGC initially wanted a collection of pieces ranging from percussion solos to sextets (Otte suggested that perhaps each movement could be for different number of players and group of instruments, much like Philippe Manoury’s Le Livre des Claviers). Since PGC, despite occasionally augmenting their forces with exceptional graduate students, was a trio, Otte was hoping to have at least some of the movements of Adams’ piece written for trio. (Otte 2019) The more he started developing ideas, however, the more Adams became convinced that the piece had to be for a quartet. Otte’s original response was “If you need a quartet, then we’re not your guys.” Adams eventually swayed PGC by sending a full “prospectus” about the piece, which included a sort of essay on each movement with details of the form, the instrumentation and the dedicatees. Although this information didn’t specifically make the argument for why quartets were necessary, PGC was impressed enough with the ideas contained therein that Otte sent Adams a postcard which simply read “J – Yes – A”. (Adams 2005)

Adams’ goal for the piece was aligned with his usual objectives: “I want it both ways at once: rigorously constructed, intellectually airtight, but I also want it to be sonically arresting, ravishing, sensual.” (Adams 2005) PGC’s role in the collaboration was to give feedback from the performer’s perspective: not only about what was possible or not, but also how the piece felt to play. This was an important point for them and became an important issue for Adams as well. Originally drafts of the piece were described as too focused on the “math” aspect of fractal patterns and forms; an early draft of the tom-tom movement led to questions about the “essential

28 It should be noted that while working on SASN, Adams was also composing other works, including Five Athabascan Dances, Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing, Five Yup’ik Dances and The Time of Drumming.

29 For most of his other compositions, Adams’ composing process is much more solitary: he alone decides what he wants to the piece to sound like and feel like, and he’s unlikely to incorporate any suggestions of major changes that might come from the musicians or conductors. Adams does collaborate more regularly with others for his installations and electro-acoustic works, in part because he recognizes that his collaborators can bring technical skills that he himself lacks. (Adams 2019a)

30 Otte recalls that Adams may have already begun working on one of the snare drum movements before the collaboration “officially” began. (Otte 2019)

54 nature” of drumming, especially given that all involved felt Adams had tapped into that essential nature in his earlier drum quartets. Adams noted that the collaboration was challenging for him in a positive way, and spurred him to make improvements on his draft based on PGC’s feedback. One entertaining example of their tight and sometimes blunt collaborative relationship concerns an early draft of “triadic iteration lattices”, which was initially composed for eight timpani and about which Adams was really excited. PGC’s succinct response, after an initial read through, was that it was “bullshit”; Allen Otte said “I care enough about [the piece] that I wasn’t going to play that.” (Adams 2005) That exchange prompted Adams to rework the concept of the movement, and led to the experimentation with sirens, which subsequently worked much better; it was a concrete example of him trying to “do something radically different and have it work.” This informs much of his compositional manifesto: although process is clearly important and he often speaks of getting “out of the way” of the music,31 his composition style does not place process above all else: he has to be happy with the results, and in this case, it was important for him that the performers were equally happy. He quotes artist Robert Müller: “Whether or not it works is the sole criteria [of success].” (Adams 2019a)

SASN marked an important milestone in Adams’ compositional life. He considers it one of a handful of his “breakthrough” pieces and still wonders “where did it come from?” (Adams 2019a) In it Adams began to stake out areas that would come to define further periods of his artistic output: ideas of noise, of extremes (in dynamics and textures), of formal rigour almost to the point of abstractness through “sonic geometry”, and of sonic geography, as much “of” place rather than “about” place. It actively combined part of his background (as a rock drummer) with questions far removed from typical contemporary rock and roll or pop, but rather regarding making “something real”. Most importantly, it led to the development of further extended works for percussion, including being the direct inspiration for the extended solo The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies.

31 While composing SASN, Adams realized that when he started to make the forms too complicated, that what the piece wanted “mostly was to be left alone – have as little of my hand in it or on it as possible”. (Adams 2005)

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3.2 The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies

John Luther Adams’ longest solo work (for any instrument), The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies was a direct descendent of the concepts of noise that Adams had started exploring in the movements of SASN. Though how we define noise, at least in aesthetic terms, is very much determined by what we consider to be “music”, for now it will suffice to define noise in a more concrete way as “complex and aperiodic sound”. (Adams 1997, DeLuca 2014) It is these two aspects of “noisy” sound that initially interested Adams: a multiplicity of overtones, leading to complex timbres and a veiled idea of tone, and sounds that were not necessarily regular or predictable in their timbres or resonance.

Having spent six years composing SASN, and having been in regular contact with PGC during the process, he thought that he knew that piece very well. While rehearsing with PGC for a performance of SASN, however, he heard some of the parts combine in auditory ways that he had not been expecting (or at least to an extent that caught him off guard); this circumstance made him realize, in part, that performers often end up knowing more about a work than the composer. (Adams 2005) Adams was quite familiar with Tenney’s Never Having Written A Note for Percussion, and thus had had occasion to hear the harmonic and timbral results of a slow- motion crescendo and decrescendo on a tam-tam. It was this experience that served as one of his artistic inspirations for SASN. However, when he heard PGC rehearsing “solitary and time- breaking waves”, the experience of different sized tam-tams resonating at the same time but following their own dynamic periodic cycles was “more complex” and led him to hear “disembodied voices” that sounded like “angels” among the frequencies.32 This experience ignited a desire to explore the worlds of discrete pitch inside “noise” sounds. It also emphasized for him the “primal power of noise in music, ritual and nature”, and in fact “changed my way of listening to the world.” (Adams 2019a)

32 These sounds, the result of combinations of harmonics, are often identified as “difference tones”. While it is not the intention of this paper to go into detail about the acoustic science that leads to this impression, I can report that it can be a very powerful effect. As a both a performance and audience member, I’ve had the same experience with Steve Reich’s Drumming; particularly in the second (marimba) movement, the sense that there were sustained sounds that no one was playing but that were somehow existing somewhere above our heads was very strong.

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The genesis of MRB began with interest from famed contemporary percussionist Steven Schick to have Adams compose a new solo work. Schick had first met Adams around 1995 at a Bang On A Can marathon concert event. Though they had limited contact in the intervening years, they had both expressed interest in working together. In 2001 Schick arranged to play a recital in Fairbanks, in part so that he could meet Adams to discuss this possibility. They spoke about Cage, and about his enduring influence on percussion music. They also spoke of the possibility of commissioning a piece with a large, expansive form. Schick was motivated to commission Adams to write what would become MRB because he was interested in developing the concert percussion repertoire in a different direction. He felt that, at the time, the solo percussion repertoire consisted mainly of many pieces that were roughly six or seven minutes long, and many pieces that were roughly 11 or 12 minutes long; Schick characterized the former as (mostly) “a simple exploration of timbre” and the latter as (mostly) pieces that “seek to build beyond that simple exploration of timbre, but their formal structure doesn’t allow them to develop in any way that is longer than a kind of essay length.” (Schick 2019) He was also interested in using this opportunity to think about aspects of “place” in music. Apart from being an enduring aspect of Adams’ music (and something that he had been focused on with SASN), “place” was something that Schick had begun to consider in a slightly different way: not only as a setting for a performance or the sonic environment created by a composition, but as a terrain that a performer must navigate. He had recently played a 65-minute percussion solo by James Dillon and had the “unsettling” experience of feeling disoriented with the scale of the piece. This led to a realization that he enjoyed the feeling of being lost in a large-scale formal structure:

I craved it. Or perhaps more accurately, I loved playing music that impeded the conditioned interpretative responses that come from always and automatically understanding where you are and where you are going. In this vein I challenged John to create a new piece with unmapped topography, a new kind of piece of sufficient length, rigor and difficulty to thwart any standardized approach in interpretation. He did not disappoint me. (Schick 2006, 80-81)

The process of composing MRB began, like SASN, with acoustic quartets. Adams was interested in finding the tone inherent in noise, in finding the “inner voices” that he had heard emerge from examples of complex, aperiodic sound. In order to do that, however, he needed

57 noise that he could “sculpt”.33 Adams has recognized (as have many percussionists; see Schick 2006) that supposedly similar unpitched percussion instruments (e.g. two 22” tam-tams of approximately the same weight) will not necessarily sound the same. He also recognized, however, that much of that difference in sound is related to the acoustic properties of the attack (assuming the same striking implements for both instruments) rather than the resulting tone or resonance. He therefore decided to filter out the attack sounds to try to arrive at the “pure tone” inside of noisy sounds. He first used a recording of PGC rehearsing “solitary and time-breaking waves” as a trial: when the experiments with that seemed to be leading in a successful direction, he began to write new music to sculpt. This came in the form of new quartets, modeled in general terms on SASN.34 Steven Schick travelled to Alaska to record each part of the new quartets; the parts were then combined and mixed and the sonic fenestration process began.35 At the time, the software he was using was new and somewhat unfamiliar, and he was figuring it out a bit as he went; rather than using any specific filtration method, he was “ear sculpting”, and simply experimenting with filtration techniques based on the aural outcome. Once Adams was satisfied with the sounds that resulted – now sometimes referred to as “auras” of the instruments – he then wrote a new solo percussion part for each movement, using the same basic structure as the previous parts he had written for recording and filtration purposes.36 This new solo part became the “live” component of the piece, with the recorded aura designed to blend seamlessly into the sound of the live performer. The entire composition process for MRB took approximately two years. Both Adams and Schick (2006) have described their collaboration as

33 Adams has often spoken of his affinity for contemporary visual art and artists and has revealed his envy of those same artists for the direct contact that they have with their respective mediums. To that end, he sometimes describes working with compositional materials as though he were a visual artist. (Adams 2004:174)

34 At the time, Adams thought that he was perhaps working on two pieces at once: the percussion solo for Steven Schick, and a “second book of Noise”. Adams insists he may yet still finish and publish this potential sequel to SASN and has been encouraged by his colleague, programmer Nathaniel Reichman, to “polish up” the material. (Adams 2019a, 2019b)

35 Both Schick and Otte noted that the source material for the “auras” and the map of the formal structure of the two snare drums movements in MRB ended up being the PGC recordings of the snare drum movements of SASN. (Schick 2019, Otte 2019)

36 Adams has said that some of the auras have “not aged as well as I’d like”, and that he has considered remaking some of the auras using “new software” and with the help of colleagues who are intimately familiar with the methods and capabilities of it. (Adams 2019a)

58 extremely successful and satisfying; Adams noted their shared passion for the project and respect for each other’s talents, and joked that it was as though they were “young and in love”. (Adams 2019a) He was also aware that MRB, while challenging in many aspects, wasn’t the sort of virtuoso contemporary composition with which Schick had earned his reputation; nevertheless, both were quite pleased at the outcome of the partnership. Schick has described MRB as “a kind of pivotal piece in that evolutionary arc of John’s [from earlier, more compact works to larger continuous sonic explorations like Inuksuit, Sila and Become Ocean] that led him to explore fewer sonic resources at greater depth.” (Schick 2019)

There are many structural similarities between SASN and MRB. Although it is not noted in the score, it is clear both from listening to the auras by themselves and through score study that some of the fractal-based forms used in SASN are once again present here. MRB has eight movements, compared to SASN’s six movements. Instead of movement titles which suggest form, however, each MRB is a sort of layman’s description of the general sound of the featured instruments. Many movements utilize forms and instrumental forces similar to SASN: movements 1 and 8 (“burst” and “stutter” respectively) are for four graduated snare drums, and use the Cantor set as a formal organizational basis. The difference here, of course, is that one person is playing all four drums, and cannot feasible execute a smooth closed roll on two drums at the same time; therefore, there are far fewer instances of the timbres of two drums being heard at once.

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Figure 3-5: Measures 100-108 of "burst" from MRB. Note the structural similarities to Figure 3-2. Copyright 2003 John Luther Adams/Taiga Press.

Movement 4, “roar” is written for a large tam-tam, and is a continuous roll; the dynamic swells, which are symmetrical themselves and overall within the form, are again in a ratio of 1:3:5:7:5:3:1 (where one cycle is three bars of 7/4 time at quarter note = 50bpm). Movement 6, “wail” uses the exact same form and tempo but is written for a hand-cranked siren. Movement 2, “rumble”, again uses the same structural ratio, but is written for a continuous roll on concert bass drum; each cycle here is 9 beats at quarter note = 60bpm. Structurally, each of these three movements is quite simple; it’s likely, given that only a single structural layer exists in each movement, that a listener might pick up on the basic shape of the form, even with no background knowledge of the work.

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Figure 3-6: Measures 1-54 of "rumble" from MRB. Letter F represents the peak dynamic of the longest (middle) cycle. Copyright 2003 John Luther Adams/Taiga Press.

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The interest in these particular movements comes not from any developments of form, but from sound, much like James Tenney’s Postal Pieces. There are two components to this “sound interest”. The first is the combination of acoustic instruments combining with the electronic, pre-recorded “aura”, ideally in a blend that would make it tough for the listener to be able to separate exactly which part of the sound colour is coming from what source. The second (though related) area of interest is in what we might describe as “participatory discrepancies”. The long duration of these pieces combined with constant and at some points extreme physical motion on the part of a human perform must naturally result in small “hiccups” in consistency in either dynamics, roll speed or both; though performers’ technical prowess is ever increasing, it is impossible for a performer to achieve a perfectly consistent and exact dynamic shift over an extended period of time in the way in which a synthesized sound might. Additionally the “part art, part science” nature of acoustic instruments – especially the tam-tam – ensures that, combined with the “humanness” of the performer, the sound will never decay in exactly the same way as it built up, and that exact instrument response will vary based on miniscule changes in striking position, velocity, and even the mode in which the instrument is already vibrating when reattacked. It is these shifts, these tiny surface disturbances that occur in any otherwise symmetrical system, that make the sound interesting and engaging for both performers and listeners. Charles Keil suggests that music must be “out of time” and “out of tune” for it to be “personally involving and socially valuable” (Keil 1987:275), and I have no doubt that Adams would agree. Further, one could view these participatory discrepancies as analogous to natural environmental processes: appearing simple in broad strokes, but with an underlying stochastic complexity.

Movement 5, “thunder”, is one of the most musically and technically demanding of the performer. This movement, like “velocities crossing in phase space”, is written for two bass drums (here, they are kick drums instead of concert bass drums used in SASN) and eight tom- toms. It also, like “velocities”, features accelerandi and ritardandi between all the drums; these cycles, much like the other movements discussed above, occur in gradually longer then shorter periods (this time in a ratio of 1:2:4:5:6:7:6:5:4:2:1, where one cycle is two phrases of 11 beats at quarter note = 176bpm). Unlike SASN, however, these tempo changes are written out exactly. This is necessary because the different tempo cycles result in complex polyrhythms against the written time signature and tempo, as well as between limbs. “thunder” is also distinct from the

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“roar”, “wail” and “rumble” because instead of phrases based on soft-loud-soft dynamics, each period phrase starts at its loudest point, decrescendos, and then returns to its loudest point.

Figure 3-7: Measures 173-187 of "thunder" from MRB. The top two staves represent the tom-toms; the bottom stave represents the two kick drums. Note the transition from "horizontal" to "vertical" in the tom- tom parts. Copyright 2003 John Luther Adams/Taiga Press

One of the most interesting musical (and technical) challenges in “thunder” is the transition of musical thinking and phrasing from “horizontal” to “vertical” (see Figure 3-6); though one could argue that this juxtaposition is an inherent feature in much of Adams’ work, it is explicit here in a way not seen in other movements (or works). Part of the challenge has to do with the nature of percussion instruments and the way our brains adapt to what we hear. As mentioned above,

63 with instruments whose sound is primarily attack and have little or no duration, percussionists often compensate by playing many attacks as densely as possible, as a “roll”. Our brains (especially those of percussionists, who are the most attuned to this sound and technique) are able to accept this sound as a substitution for a longer duration, and so we tend to perceive this action as one note with a long duration, much as a cellist might take many seconds to draw their bow over a single note. In “thunder”, however, the deceleration of fast sixteenth notes means that our perception shifts. The slower/less dense the notes get, the more we are able to perceive the (empty) space in between them, and the more we begin to hear individual notes in time against other rhythmically contrapuntal notes in time. This is especially true when the sixteenth notes are played as a “double stop”; that is, each hand plays a different drum, making the “roll” sound as though there is a sort of drum harmony. This transition is explicit in this movement because as the deceleration occurs, the different pitches – which began at the same speed/density – begin to decelerate at different rates. Throughout each large period of the piece, “harmony” becomes “counterpoint” becomes “harmony”, and horizontal motion becomes vertical alignment becomes horizontal motion.

MRB includes two instrument groups not found in SASN. The third movement, “shimmer”, is scored for eight triangles. Though not specifically specified in any instructions in the score, the usage of eight different note placements on a double percussion staff (from second line to the space above the staff) indicates that the pitches of the triangles should be graduated. This movement, like “thunder” is challenging for musical and technical reasons. Although the polyrhythmic activity is not as complex (there are only two different polyrhythms happening simultaneous, instead of up to four in “thunder”), this movement requires complete physical control of beaters and instruments. The tempo is the same fast tempo as “thunder” (quarter note = 176), but now the performer must play sixteenth notes at that tempo with one hand, which requires playing on two sides of the “inside” of the triangle with the beater, while either rolling or playing a different rhythm or tuplet with the other hand. This technical requirement is made all the more difficult because of the need for precise but minute rhythmic shifts in tempo (e.g. changing from sixteenth notes to fifteen notes in the space of four quarter notes), and because the resonant nature, small size and generally more “pure” tone of a triangle can result in a slightly different stroke weight leading to an obvious dynamic difference (a quality that is certainly useful and desired when playing in an orchestral setting, but one that makes consistent

64 performance of this movement that much more demanding). This is especially noticeable in the sections of the movement which require sustained rolls at a very soft dynamic (e.g. measures 153-192). The triangle is much less forgiving in this way then the tom-toms and pedal bass drums used in “thunder”.

The macro structure of this movement is, like other movements of both SASN and MRB, based on a 1:3:5:7:5:3:1 ratio, with an introduction of 5 bars of 4/4 and a coda of 5 bars of 4/4 plus one beat. The movement is divided into two lines: the top line represents the top four triangles (presumably played with the right hand), and the bottom line represents the lower four (played with the left). While the cycles of both hands follow the same macro structure and the same dynamic curve (loud to softer to loud), they do so in different ways. The “right hand” cycle starts with the fastest notes (in this case, sixteenth notes). The longer the cycle, the less dense the notes become, until the lowest point is reached in the middle of the longest cycle: two consecutive notes that are held for 29 beats each (in this case played as a roll, probably to represent the extremely long duration of a single note). The “left hand” cycle starts with the notes of the longest duration (again, represented by a roll) and reaches its apex in the longest phrase cycle with a group of notes that are denser/faster than sixteenth notes. Intriguingly these notes are also notated/represented as a roll, leading to the only instance (other than the very start and very end) of both hands rolling on triangles together, perhaps a gesture of formal unity and a hint to the listener that the middle of the piece has been reached. The contrary motion of densities is also mirrored in the triangle selection: the shortest periods use the highest-pitched triangle in the right hand and the lowest triangle in the left; each new cycle brings the triangles closer together in pitch, until the middle two triangles are used for the longest period. The process than reverses itself as the cycles once again decrease in length.

Despite the obvious aspects of symmetry apparent on many different levels, it is important to note that the symmetry doesn’t carry all the way through the individual cycles. Though some cycles appear exactly symmetrical, building to an apex at the mathematical halfway point (for example, the “right hand” cycle at rehearsal letter A [mm6-19]), others are not. All of the periods appear to have the apex of the cycle appear at the same middle point. However, it is the attack of a note that marks the apex; the longer the duration of that note, the more the exact symmetry of the cycle is somewhat skewed Additionally, Adams has structured the “curves” of the rhythmic patterns – essentially, how fast they decelerate and accelerate – to favour a greater

65 increase of movement leading up to the loudest dynamics (that is, the beginning of the next cycle, rather than the apex of a cycle). This is especially true of the longer cycles, or shorter “left hand” cycles which rely on longer durational notes, represented by rolls. For example, the durations of notes in the “left hand” at rehearsal letter A are 16, 13, 8, 10 and 11 beats respectively. The start of the 8-beat note marks the midway point for the cycle, but because of that note’s duration, and a desire for increased motion at the tail end of the cycle, the durations in the second half are shorter and change faster than the durations of the first half. These seeming anomalies in form are excellent examples of Adams’ process in microcosm: he tends to favour symmetry in his forms, but also won’t hesitate to “break” the symmetry “when required”. (Adams 2004, 132)

Figure 3-8: Measures 6-22 of "shimmer" from MRB. Copyright 2003 John Luther Adams/Taiga Press.

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The other instrument grouping that is unique to MRB as compared to SASN is a set of eight suspended cymbals, used for the seventh movement, “crash”. (Like the triangles in “shimmer”, it is assumed to be a graduated set based on staff spacing, though this isn’t indicated specifically in the score.) The cymbals are to be played with yarn mallets, a choice based solely on articulation preference rather than utility (since there are no sustained rolls in this movement). There are some formal and structural similarities to “shimmer” – there is a five-bar (25 beat) intro and a five-bar-plus-one-beat coda, and the large cycles are delineated by loud-soft-loud dynamic phrases (with the apex, marked by the softest dynamics and resulting change in dynamic direction, once again in the mathematical middle of each cycle). The ratio of these large cycles, however, is unique to this movement: 1:2:3:4:3:2:1. Another important difference between “crash” and “shimmer” is that while both movements have the music separated by hands for practical and structural reasons, the assignment of tempo layers between the hands is more complicated, in part because while “shimmer” had only two cycles happening at once, “crash” has multiple cycles that cross between the hands. While there are the familiar accelerating and decelerating cycles – highest notes starting fastest and getting slower at the beginning of the cycles, played with the right hand, and lowest notes starting lowest and getting faster, played with the left hand – there are also at least two other tempo layers that are more static (for example, in the cycle starting at rehearsal letter A [m6], the cymbal represented by the note in the third space from the bottom occurs every 21 beats, and the cymbal represented by the note in the second space from the bottom occurs every 35 beats – the 3:5 ratio perhaps a nod to Adams’ often used 1:3:5:7 forms). These more static and much less dense cycles tend to shift (in relative pitch) around the two more constant voices; they start at first in the left hand, and eventually move to the right hand as the left accelerates and the right decelerates, then return to the left. This rhythmic counterpoint achieved through different tempo layers can be seen as an example of Adams’ desire to treat rhythm in the same way as one might treat melody, and certainly points to the influence of Henry Cowell and his goal of “unity of materials” on Adams’ compositional style.

Overall The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies is an unusual tour de force for solo percussion. Though it is not perhaps traditionally virtuosic, it demands a high degree of preparation and concentration from the performer. The usage of one percussionist, rather than a quartet, brings the focus of listening to the sound of a percussion instrument and its colour in an even more

67 immediate (and, perhaps oddly intimate) way then in SASN, even while the “aura” (which can be played back in either stereo or quadraphonic sound) adds some mystery and “tone” to the instrument. The variety of instruments chosen for the different movements helps to retain interest for both performer and audience member throughout its approximately 75-minute duration. Perhaps most importantly, MRB proved to Adams that an extended length non-pitched percussion solo could be not only musically and logistically feasible, but successful.

3.3 Ilimaq

Much like SASN and MRB, Ilimaq is unusual in John Luther Adams’ greater compositional output because of its extensive process of collaboration with performers. Although the process of composition of llimaq itself was relatively short, the work and collaboration that led to its creation took place over a period of many years, and began with an association with percussionist Scott Deal, who had moved to Fairbanks in the late 1990s to teach at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.37 In Deal, Adams found a “musical playmate”, someone who brought new energy into Adams’ musical world. Adams was, at the time, a timpanist in the Fairbanks Symphony – he describes how he “learned [about the] orchestra” by playing in that ensemble – but with the arrival of Deal, he had a local professional percussionist with whom he could regularly collaborate and workshop musical ideas.

As mentioned above, Adams had (and still has) an abiding interest and fascination with the concept of extracting “discrete tones” from noise, particularly broadband noise.38 One of his concepts for experimentation in this area was to create a percussion version of Alvin Lucier’s seminal 1969 work I am sitting in a room. In Lucier’s work, a speaker records themselves saying a phrase, then plays the recording of that phrase back through loudspeakers in the room, while also recording that playback. As the iterations continue, natural frequencies in the room

37 Information regarding the history and development of Ilimaq comes from Adams 2019a, unless otherwise cited.

38 This fascination has, in subsequent years, been reflected in works such as his installation The Place Where You Go to Listen, a permanent exhibit at the Museum of the North on the UAF campus in Fairbanks. The Place uses a process of “sonification” – the mapping of different types of noise and other synthetically-generated sounds to various real-time geographic data streams, including seismic readings, from around Alaska – to create a constantly changing sound and light installation, For more detailed information about the place, including journal entries and a wealth of technical data, see Adams’ book of the same name (Adams 2009).

68 are emphasized in the feedback loop. Eventually, those frequencies become the dominant sound, and the speech becomes unintelligible, leaving only tones where there was once text. The piece will have a different result depending upon the room in which it is performed; every different room will have different modes of vibration and therefore different resulting frequencies.

Adams wanted to experiment with a similar process but using a single drum instead of spoken text. He and Deal took up residence in the C.W. Davis Concert Hall at UAF (also home to the Fairbanks Symphony), and experimented with this concept, beginning by using a single bass drum. As the unofficial workshop progressed, Adams also added another section at the end of the piece featuring tam-tams and cymbals. Deal would play the percussion parts, and Adams would be responsible for recording and playback. Unlike Lucier’s approach, which emphasized the process over the exact final product, Adams was interested in getting results that were sonically pleasing to him, so he took time to “tune” the hall by shifting the loudspeakers and recording locations around until the sounds that were generated were satisfactory. Excited about the work and the resulting sounds, they performed it at a concert in Oberlin, where Adams was teaching occasionally at the time. However, the results there were unsatisfactory to both Adams and Deal. Adams realized that all the time they had spent in Davis Hall in Fairbanks was crucial to the overall effect of the piece, and that it would be impossible to get the same result in a different hall without weeks of preparation (“Even if we had a few days instead of just a day, it still wouldn’t have been enough”). This experience led Adams to wonder: would it be possible to create a work that was more performance oriented and less installation-like, and still be possible to do what they’d done in Fairbanks? His initial answer was a “yes”, but the first result was in a reduced form. Adams’ piece Qilyaun (an Iñupiaq word which translated literally means “device of power”, and typically refers to a shaman’s drum) is a 15-minute work for solo bass drum and digital delay, or for four percussionists on four separate bass drums, dedicated to Scott Deal. In it are many of the same compositional devices that Adams employed in both SASN and MRB – decelerations and accelerations, along with dynamic shifts in mathematically related cycles.

Several years later, the rock band Wilco was scheduled to perform in Fairbanks. Glenn Kotche, Wilco’s drummer but also a respected solo percussionist and composer in his own right, had been an admirer of Adams’ compositions, and asked him to get together over dinner, and invited

69 him to the concert. Kotche describes himself as a “total drum enthusiast, a percussion enthusiast”, and was interested in expanding the solo drum set repertoire, particularly in different contexts than his work with Wilco. He had previously reached out to other composers, but those entreaties were usually met with a “tepid reponse” beause of the “daunting” nature of writing for drum set. Having listened to many of Adams’ compositions, however, he figured that Adams was a composer who “loved to take chances.” (Kotche 2019b) Adams was “charmed” by Kotche at the dinner, and found him “generous and warm”. He attended the show and was “blown away” by Kotche’s performance. While Adams recognized that Kotche might have been somewhat limited in that format, as a drummer in what was essential an alt-rock/alt- country band, he was still amazed by Kotche’s “touch, his colours, his sensitivity and power” – “he had me!” As a former rock drummer himself, Adams had found another kindred-spirit collaborator. As they continued discussions about what sort of piece Adams might compose for Kotche, Adams told the story of the piece that ended up as Qilyaun, and that he was still searching for a larger scale, performable version of the work that he and Deal had started in Davis Hall. Kotche’s response: “Let’s do that!” Kotche’s then-manager was able to put a commissioning consortium together that included the University of Texas, Walker Arts Centre, Duke University and Stanford University. At that point Kotche didn’t quite know what Adams was going to present him with, but figured that after Adams saw him play at soundcheck, he would want to incorporate the aesthetic of rock drumming and use a basic instrument configuration that resembled a drum set. The result was Ilimaq (translated roughly as “spirit journey”), composed in 2012, premiered and recorded by Kotche for the Bang on a Can label.

Much like Qilyaun, Ilimaq is structured in such a way that it may be played with either a solo percussionist or a percussion quartet: the piece is essentially in perfect canon, so three lines of digital delay (from the soloist) are a performance possibility.39 (Indeed, it seems that this is the preferred performance method; I am unaware at this time of anyone who has performed it as a quartet.) Unlike Qilyaun but like MRB, Ilimaq also includes a separate pre-recorded audio component that plays with the performer (because of the lack of articulation in the audio

39 Whenever there is more than one percussion part, the form is a perfect canon. There are spots in the score, however, where only the first percussionist is performing (that is, where the multiple delays, if only using one performer, are not required).

70 component and the extended rolls in the performance part, the performer may opt to use the supplied click track to remain in sync with the tape part). This audio component includes tones that have similar qualities to the auras used in MRB: pitches that waver, fade in and out, and sound sometimes crystalline and otherworldly, that are likely the result of the noise filtration processes from which Adams takes so much inspiration. Additionally, though, the audio component also contains sounds that seem to hark back to the natural environmental soundscape that was such an important feature of the full version of Earth and the Great Weather. These sounds are not as clearly defined as many of the sounds in Earth or in other soundscape compositions or installations; it often seems that there is a layer of filtration, distortion or other manipulation applied to them, perhaps so as not to make them too life-like and therefore take away the focus from the performer. Nevertheless, within the aura track, one might detect hints of rain, rushing water, a sparking fire, thunder, and a rock slide, infused into the filtered noise and into the percussionist’s instruments. Kotche recalled really “pushing and encouraging” Adams to include recordings of animals (such as orcas) under the ice that Adams had made in the electronic component of the work, partially because of Kotche’s own long-standing fascination with working with field recordings; Adams initially was not planning to include them, but later changed his mind. (Kotche 2019b)

The setup for the percussion is not as extensive as the other works discussed as part of this paper. (This is assuming, of course, that it is to be played as a solo; if one has to multiply the required instruments more-or-less by four for the quartet version, the requirements are considerably greater. This is likely a contributing a factor in a lack of quartet-version performances.) Unlike MRB which had seven separate groups of instruments, or SASN which required a number of large mallet instruments, the requirements for Ilimaq are (relatively) few and can be essentially set up in three stations. In the program note to the score, Adams suggests that station one consists of a large concert bass drum, station two consists of seven suspended cymbals (played mallets and brushes) and a tam-tam , and station three consists of two kick drums, eight tom-toms and eight suspended cymbals (played with sticks or occasionally with a bass bow). However, in the score itself, at rehearsal letter L5, Adams also specifies the use of “Bell cymbals (with bow)”. Bell cymbals are typically a very different construction and sound than suspended cymbals – they are considerably thicker and heaver, with an oversized bowl- shaped bell, and a very thin flange, leading to a much more direct, sometimes piercing sound,

71 and also having a much more defined pitch centre than a typical suspended cymbal with a wide spread of harmonics. Because of the potential difficulty (not to mention cost) of acquiring 15 different suspended cymbals and eight bell cymbals, I would suggest that the cymbals used in the third setup – that is, the one integrated with the drums – could also be used in sections of the piece where the performer plays cymbals alone.

In the score, Ilimaq is divided into three movements, performed continuously. “Descent”, which is in 4/4 time at quarter note = 80bpm, starts with thirty-second notes on the bass drum, essentially a measured roll, moving in ever decreasing and then expanding dynamic swells. At rehearsal letter L, a decrease in density begins; just before letter Q, the performer plays only 3 notes evenly spaced over every two bars. The decrease in theoretical density continues at letter Q, with one attack every bar, though the practical density increases: because of the increasing duration of notes, they are now to be played as soft unmeasured rolls instead of single attack strokes (much like “shimmer” in MRB). By rehearsal letter S, the longest duration has been reached: one attack that is 8 bars in length. The process then begins in reverse, symmetrical to the first half of the movement.

Movement II is titled “Under the Ice”, and is played almost exclusively on the seven suspended cymbals and tam-tam. From the beginning of the movement until rehearsal letter Q2, the musical material consists entirely of unmeasured rolls on one cymbal at a time, again with dynamic swells. These swells start at their shortest duration and smallest dynamic change (one bar from pppp to ppp, another bar back to pppp), and hit the apex of the macro cycle at rehearsal letter A2-B2, where the crescendo and decrescendo are eight bars each, and the loudest point is a double forte marking. Once again, the form (until rehearsal letter Q2) is essentially symmetrical. At this point where there is a discrepancy between the score and the recording: on the recording, this spot is designated as movement three, entitled “The Sunken Gamelan”, while there is no such designation in the score. (I believe this additional movement designation makes sense, as the nature and timbre of the percussion parts are suddenly different at this point, and grouping this in with the rest of the movement seems like an odd coda to the symmetrical forms that Adams has used to this point.) At rehearsal letter Q2, the percussion part is suddenly less dense. Instead of playing constant unmeasured rolls with dynamic swells, the performer now plays occasional single attacks (with mallets on cymbals, and with closed fist on tam tam),

72 interspersed with bar-long crescendo-ing unmeasured rolls played with brushes, a texture not found anywhere else in the work.

Figure 3-9: measures 241-288 “Under the Ice” from Ilimaq. Copyright 2012 John Luther Adams/Taiga Press.

The next movement (“III. To the sky” in the score; “IV. Untune The Sky” on the recording) is scored for the two kick drums, eight tom-toms and eight cymbals.40 Though there is no specific

40 At the start of this movement, the score erroneously lists seven cymbals and seven tom-toms, even while showing eight of each on the notation legend.

73 indication given for striking implements, the nature of much of this movement (measured rolls in sixteenth notes at half note = 80bpm, the equivalent to the thirty-second bass drum notes of the first movement) indicates that either hard mallets or sticks should be used, in order to best hear the articulation of the notes amongst the other parts and recorded sound. There are multiple tempo and dynamic cycles that occur within a single part in this movement (and therefore occur in canon amongst the four percussion parts or soloist and digital delay). Though the part begins with the maximum density of sixteenth notes, there is an immediate switch to quarter-note triplets at rehearsal letter E3. Every 16 bars thereafter, the density increases: four notes per half note, then five, six, seven, and eventually back to eight notes per half note (that is, sixteenth notes) at rehearsal letter O3. At the same time, the peaks of dynamic swells, which are getting shorter, are marked by cymbal accents and kick drum notes, so their density is also increasing. This is another example of the interplay of “horizontal” and “vertical” perceptions in Adams’ music: the cymbal notes are first heard as isolated incidents that line up with phrase peaks, but as they get closer together, they begin to be heard as their own line. Though the dynamic swell cycles stay at one bar per direction as of rehearsal letter O3 (that is, a peak every other bar), the cymbal and kick drum notes keep in increasing in frequency, even as the density of all the tom- tom notes also stays static. As the cymbal frequency increases, the relative pitches traverse the entire pitch range. At their densest point, the cymbal and kick notes occur every second sixteenth note (beginning the third bar of rehearsal letter B4 and continuing until the end of the second bar of rehearsal letter C4). At this point, as with the other large movements of the work, the entire process reverses itself in symmetry. This continues until rehearsal letter F5. At rehearsal letter H5, as a transition towards the “coda” section of the work, the solo percussion part performs two bowed cymbal notes of 8 bars each (though the second note is offset by two bars and thus does not begin at the start of a marked section).

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Figure 3-10: Measures 113-160 of "To the Sky" from Ilimaq (player 1/solo part). Copyright 2012 John Luther Adams/Taiga Press.

The coda section of the work, not separately named in the score but identified as “V – Ascension” on Kotche’s recording, features the bowed bell cymbals. The metric, pitch and durational organization of these cymbals don’t follow the same symmetrical form as the rest of the large sections in this work, nor do they appear to follow an obvious structural organization.

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I believe that this section is another example of Adams breaking the symmetry of his forms, and inserting a slight air of “mystery” to the ending – these seemingly unstructured notes with little attack, combined with the fading aura in higher and higher frequencies, do seem to lend a sense of wonder to the conclusion of the piece, especially after the previous 12 minutes of extremely athletic and metrically precise drumming. Again, I believe that considering this coda section as a separate movement is appropriate, given its total aesthetic difference from the previous section.

Like his other extended concert works for percussion, this is a tour-de-force for the percussionist(s) involved. Unlike his other works, however, there are no real breaks here; because the movements are connected, there is no opportunity for the performer to relax their mental focus, or to get any sort of meaningful physical respite between sections. Another element at work in this composition that is not present (or at least certainly not overtly present) in SASN and MRB is one of narrative. As mentioned in previous sections, Adams often structures his work so that it is not concerned with narrative; the form is simply a functional container for the sounds he wants to use. Here, however, that isn’t the case: when listening to the work, one gets a definite impression that there is a story of some sort being told.41 I would suggest that there are three reasons for this. The first is the nature of the titles and the program notes. Adams writes in the score,

In Inuit tradition the shaman rides the sound of the drum to and from the spirit world. In Ilimaq, the drummers lead us on a journey through soundscapes drawn from the natural world, and from the inner resonances of the instruments themselves.

This suggestion of journey – along with descriptive movement titles such as “Descent”, “Under the Ice” and “To the Sky”/”Untune The Sky” (along with the additional recording titles “Sunken Gamelan” and “Ascension”) will naturally lead anyone aware of them to try to superimpose some sort of narrative journey on the music. The second reason is the presence of the smaller sections that don’t have the obvious symmetry and canon of the larger sections: they function as a sort of musical “interrupter”, a break in the flow of what is otherwise a symmetrical and

41 Adams has since said that if he had one retrospective criticism of Ilimaq, it would be that it is “too cinematic”, especially since his music is usually about experience rather than about a story. (Adams 2019a)

76 predictable use of form. They provide an element of tension and release that is often not present in an explicit way in Adams music. Finally, I believe that the usage of natural elements in the sound component of the composition lends itself to narrative thinking: it is easier for a listener to picture a journey if there are (somewhat) familiar (sonic) landmarks, then in the more abstract sound fields of SASN and MRB. It is as though Ilimaq functions as a sort of return to emphasis on environment over abstract place, and a return to the subject matter used in compositions like Earth and the Great Weather. I believe that this return to environmental imagery is also reflected in the titles and subjects of many of his subsequent compositions, including the Become Ocean/Become Desert/Become River trilogy of orchestral pieces and Sila: Breath of the World.

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Chapter 4 Performer Reflections 4 Introduction

In seeking to better understand the features that may lead to effective and engaging performances of Strange and Sacred Noise, The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies and Ilimaq, I felt that it would be imperative to discuss the works with musicians who have performed them. For each work, I spoke with the original commissioner/presenter of the work, as well as an additional performer of each work. I was interested in knowing more about the performers’ perceptions of Adams’ music, if their reactions to the music changed through the process of performance prepation, and their reflections on preparing and performing the works. For each interviewee I began with a list of questions to use as an outline (see Appendix C). However, as will often happen when performers get together to discuss music in which they share a mutual interest and enthusiasm, the conversations sometimes meandered and departed direction from the original questions. I also became aware that some of the questions (particularly ones about programming choices, concert marketing, additional concert material) were not applicable to some interview subjects, as they were not responsible for these aspects of their concerts. Nevertheless, I feel that the information gleaned from these discussions is useful and informative, so I will provide a summary of some of the answers here.

4.1 Interview Subjects

• Steven Schick, Distinguished Professor of Music at the Department of Music, University of California San Diego. Schick also serves as the conductor of the La Jolla Symphony and the artistic director of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, is the author of the book The Percussionist’s Art: Same Bed, Different Dreams. Schick is generally regarded by North American percussionists as one of the continent’s foremost performers of and authorities on contemporary percussion music. He has commissioned or premiered more than 150 new works for percussion42 including The Mathematics of

42 http://music-cms.ucsd.edu/people/faculty/regular_faculty/steven-schick/index.html

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Resonant Bodies. He has also enjoyed recent success as a conductor of chamber and orchestral music. (For more, please see Schick 2006, Schick 2012 and Schick 2016.)

• Allen Otte, Professor of Percussion, College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati. Otte is a founding member of Percussion Group Cincinnati, which has had close relationships with many contemporary music composers, including John Cage, and was also a member of Blackearth Percussion Group, one of the seminal percussion ensembles in the 1970s in the United States. Percussion Group Cincinnati commissioned and premiered Strange and Sacred Noise, and played a vital role in the development of the piece, with Otte acting as the main liaison between PGC and Adams. In 2017 PGC was elected to the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame.

• Glenn Kotche is perhaps best known as the drummer for rock band Wilco, but is an adventurous and diverse percussionist and composer. In addition to appearances with Wilco, he plays in a number of other ensembles including the duos On Fillmore and Loose Fur, and has written music for Bang On A Can All-Stars, Kronos Quartet, Third Coast Percussion, Silk Road Ensemble, and So Percussion, amongst others. His solo and ensemble percussion works have been performed all over North America. Kotche requested and premiered Ilimaq.

• Benjamin Reimer is a percussionist and contemporary drum set performer currently based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He is a member of Architek Percussion. Reimer has become known across Canada for his integration of drum set into contemporary music performance, thanks in part to his frequent collaborations with Canadian composer Nicole Lizée. In addition to his performing work, Reimer is an adjunct professor at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University, teaches at École FACE in downtown Montreal, and has served as coordinator of percussion studies at Brandon University in Manitoba. He presented the Ontario premiere of Ilimaq at the Open Ears Festival in Kitchener Waterloo in June 2018.

• TorQ Percussion Quartet consists of Richard Burrows, Adam Campbell, Daniel Morphy and me. Formed in 2004, TorQ has commissioned or premiered close to 100 new works for percussion ensemble, and has been active in promoting new Canadian music through

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performance and education. We presented what we and Adams believe to be the Canadian premiere of the complete Strange and Sacred Noise at Church of the Holy Trinity in Toronto in May 2014.

o Richard Burrows is a founding member of TorQ Percussion Quartet, and currently serves as the artistic director of the Open Ears Festival of Music and Sound in the Kitchener-Waterloo region of Ontario, Canada. In addition to performances with TorQ, he frequently plays with orchestras, and in the new music/improvisation duo Stealth with bass clarinetist Kathryn Ladano. He also serves as a clinician and adjudicator for music festivals across Canada.

o Adam Campbell is a percussionist and member of TorQ Percussion Quartet currently based in Toronto. He is also a member of Ladom Ensemble, a chamber music group that integrates classical music and various world music traditions. He has performed with the Canadian Opera Company, the Stratford Festival, the Toronto Wind Orchestra, and Evergreen Contemporary Gamelan.

In addition to information gleaned from these established percussionists, I will also reflect on my own experiences performing both MRB and SASN. For the sake of clarity, unless otherwise noted, all information that follows comes from personal interviews with the subjects in question (Schick 2019, Otte 2019b, Kotche 2019b, Reimer 2019, Burrows 2019, Campbell 2019b).

4.2 Initial reactions to the compositions

As musicians who presented the premieres of their respective pieces, Schick, Otte and Kotche were familiar with Adams’ past compositions; the workshop processes43 involved meant that the final result wasn’t an unexpected surprise. (Kotche does mention that he at first had assumed that the entire Ilimaq was going to be drumset-oriented, rather than just one movement; he was initially a bit surprised, though ultimately pleased, at the extended sections for concert bass drum and for suspended cymbals.) Reimer’s first reaction to hearing a recording of Ilimaq was

43 Some details about the workshop processes can be found included in the respective summaries of the selected works in Chapter 3.

80 that it was “gorgeous”, and he became excited for the opportunity to perform the work, especially as he had been also been working on 4000 Holes, which he found very “technically dense” and “[very] complex”; Ilimaq seemed “freeing” in comparison, and was written for a combination of instruments with which he was intimately familiar, yet was “different than anything else I do normally”. He was intrigued about the lack of overt technical complexity, especially as compared to multi-percussion/drum set parts written by composers such as Nicole Lizée; he realized that in Ilimaq, the drum part was “not the most important thing”, and was curious (before he had seen the score) about how the part was going to “fit into” the entire soundscape.

Upon listening to SASN for the first time, Burrows decided that the greatest potential for the work resided in a live performance; he thought that it would be “more invigorating and visceral” than listening to a recording. He realized that the piece would require “deep listening” on the part of the (potential) audience, and could be more or less transformative depending on the performance space. Burrows believed that listening to SASN at home on headphones required a large of amount of dedication on the part of a listener, and surmised that many listeners would not want (or be able to) listen to a recording of the entire work all the way through; he hypothesized that the visual aspect of live performance in an interesting performance space would make the listening experience more engaging and exciting for listeners.

My initial reaction to both MRB and SASN was similar to Burrows’; I found the pieces intriguing, and was interested mostly in the possibilities that they presented for live performance. While I found the recordings interesting to listen to, I recognized that the added sensory experience of watching performers and experiencing a greater “immersion” in sound (rather than coming from a pair of speakers) would be factors that would help me feel more engaged with the works.

Unlike other interview subjects, Campbell’s initial reaction to Adams’ music (particularly SASN) was one of resistance. The work was outside of his normal preferred aesthetic, and he was concerned that such a piece would be too far outside of TorQ’s usual concert offerings, which to that point had been largely pieces that would be considered “audience friendly”; however, he “grudgingly” went along with a plan to perform “…dust into dust…” as a stand- alone movement. He was unsure of what impact a single movement of the piece would have.

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He also had listened to a recording of select movements, and found the snare drum movement initially somewhat “disorienting” and generally found the effect of each movements to amount to a sort of sonic “wash”.

4.3 Challenges in preparation

When asked about the biggest challenges in preparing the respective works, two themes emerged: building the endurance necessary to sustain an energetic performance, and the logistics of rehearsal. For the most part, the percussion parts that Adams has written in each piece are not themselves terribly musically or technically challenging as compared to other standards of the percussion solo or chamber repertoires (e.g. Stockhausen’s Zyklus, Xenakis’ Rebonds or Pleiades, or Reich’s Sextet); the challenge comes not from the material itself but from its repetition and duration. Otte described SASN as music “not for middle aged players” and noted that the piece had made “demands on my body that were substantial, that were different” (Adams 2005); Adams also noted that Otte looked “different” when playing, particularly in the snare drum movements, perhaps out of the necessity of maintaining a “huge” sound over an extended period of time.

Like Otte, Kotche similarly suggested that Ilimaq was written “for someone in their early twenties, not in their mid forties”, implying that he had to put in more work than usual to feel as though he had the stamina to perform the piece. Likewise, Reimer described the intensity and dynamics as the biggest challenges of Ilimaq: he described almost all of the written music as “sight readable, if you can read polyrhythms”. In order to build up his physical stamina, Reimer repeated sections of the piece (especially from the third movement); leading up to the week of the performance, he would run the entire piece at least once a day. Schick mentioned that in order for him to feel most comfortable playing MRB, “There’s a technical aspect to the practice of that piece which allows you to get on top of the sheer hand speed that’s necessary to play the snare drum stuff. […] I need a few days of work until I feel like I can relax at that speed. […] When [a movement] gets physical and you’re moving around the drums, you have to have an unbelievable sense of calm in the upper body or it just doesn’t work.”

When preparing MRB, I found the biggest physical challenge to be the sustained rolls on bass drum and tam-tam; the necessity of using larger, heavier mallets (as compared to snare drum or timpani) means that the extremes in dynamics are harder to control and make consistent,

82 especially after a few minutes of continuous playing. Consistency is the real challenge in all of the movements, especially those that require extended passages of very soft dynamics: the physical effort of maintaining loud dynamics (and/or the switch between dynamic extremes) can lead to fatigue before the end of the piece, especially in the smaller muscle groups, making it harder to control the very fine movements and adjustments necessary to produce consistent sounds at the softest dynamics. That muscle exhaustion may also lead to a build-up of tension throughout the body, and especially in the arms; this lack of reaction may in turn make it more difficult to produce a full, open, weighty and consistent sound at all dynamic levels, instead forcing the sound to be somewhat “choked”.

The other area that may present difficulty in the preparation of each of these pieces is consideration of logistics. Unless one has access to a university percussion department, finding a large enough rehearsal space for consistent use can be difficult (or expensive), as is collecting all the necessary instruments in one place. This often means that it might be impossible to rehearse the entire piece all at once until shortly before a given performance. Kotche reported that because he didn’t have enough space in his own rehearsal area, he had to set up and rehearse Ilimaq in the Wilco rehearsal loft; though he had enough of his own drums for the third movement, and was able to select all the necessary cymbals from a large variety provided to him by Zildjian, he still had to borrow a concert bass drum to complete his setup. Though Reimer was eventually able to set up all the necessary equipment for Ilimaq in the Architek Percussion rehearsal space, he was limited in the amount of hours and time of day he could practice because of that room’s proximity to a retail store front: he recognized that it was “unfair” to others around him to be constantly subjected to loud, repetitive drumming during regular business hours. His other logistical challenge was to find cymbals that matched the pitch of Kotche’s recording as closely as possible, so that he could integrate their sound with the provided delay tracks (instead of using a live delay signal from his own performance). He achieved this by working with staff from the Sabian Cymbal factory, who assisted him in selecting appropriate suspended and bell-type cymbals.

All this is not to say that the pieces are completely devoid of any musical challenges. Campbell spoke of the occasional difficulty of maintaining concentration on one particular part/rhythm/pulse while still listening (and responding to) other parts:

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[…] I felt that individual practice of the material didn’t really help me as much as it usually does for other pieces. In [SASN’s] most difficult movements (outer [snare drum] movements especially), the real trick was being able to concentrate on maintaining pulse and rhythm subdivisions against the sounding material of the other players. Consequently, we had to rehearse as an ensemble for quite a while to prepare the individual movements and really get them “in our ears” as much as our hands. (Campbell 2019a)

Burrows concurred: “The piece was fairly straight forward to rehearse on my own, the main challenge was the ‘chamber’ rehearsal. The ability to play your part with the other players was the most challenging.” Even when using a click track, it can be difficult to split one’s focus between one’s own playing and that of others, especially if those other players are located physically farther away (which generally leads to a “delay” effect between players).

The issue of “ensemble playing” also arises in its own way with the two solo pieces, since the performer is playing with a fixed electronic track. When Schick was first helping Adams to develop MRB, the click track guide that is now part of the piece didn’t exist. “When I first played the piece, the learning process was complicated not just by memorization of all of that music, but because I didn’t intend to play it with click, I just wanted to learn it… I think we really came very close, at the very least I spent a lot of time on it.” This was especially challenging in the two outer snare drum movements, because the “auras” for those pieces are derived from the Percussion Group Cincinnati recordings of “…dust into dust…” and “…and dust rising…”, which were not recorded to a click track. Schick said of these tracks that “the time is very good, but it’s not on a click, it was a performance… it moves ahead, it moves behind.” Eventually Adams created a click track for each movement: “We all have our various relationships with click tracks… takes a lot of the fun out it, and it also provides a sort of necessary level of support, so now it’s just the way that is.” In certain movements Schick still does not use a click, preferring to “tune [his playing, e.g. in ‘wail’] to the [sound of] the aura… if you have the right kind of siren, you can hear the change in harmony.”

I found the hardest technical aspect of MRB to be the physical coordination of all four limbs playing different polyrhythms/rhythmic cycles in “thunder”. Because this movement is written in a way that is very “vertical” (as compared to “velocities…” in SASN, which is written in a more “horizontal”, processual way and leaves the exact acceleration and decelerations up to the players), I found it difficult to properly gauge the exact rhythmic relationship of each limb to

84 one another. I counteracted this issue in part by inputting the entire movement into a music notation program in order to produce a midi file; I was then able to play this midi file at different tempos, providing me with accurate rhythmic relationships which I could then learn aurally and subsequently play along with. Being able to hear an accurate version of the “shapes” of different polyrhythmic combinations was an invaluable learning tool for developing a sense of line and forward motion when performing this movement. Other learning techniques included general polyrhythm and acceleration exercises against a steady metronome pulse, and drum set- style hand and food co-ordination exercises, as well as video recording of practice sessions to help evaluate the “smoothness” of my playing, especially between pulse shifts.

4.4 Circumstances of Performances

The premiere performance of SASN took place on January 30, 1998 in the Patricia Corbett Theatre, College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati. The players in that performance were Percussion Group Cincinatti (Allen Otte, James Culley, Russell Burge) and three graduate percussion students (Stuart Gerber, Matt McClung and Brady Harrison), who each played one or two movements as the fourth performer. (Otte 2019a) The theatre had an amphitheatre-like layout, with audience seating fanned out and raked, containing approximately 400 seats and no balcony. The tam-tams were surrounding the space; one was at the back of the hall, and one was on stage, with the others spaced equally around. Otte recalled that for the sirens, they received permission to perform up in the catwalk/lighting area of the theatre, above the audience; he believed that the two smaller sirens were placed there, while the two larger were in a more traditional location relative to the audience. He thought that perhaps they had the bass drums and tom toms “spread out on the small stage”, and that the keyboard instruments were also on the stage. Mindful of the extremes of dynamics involved in the piece, someone in PGC purchased a large container of “industrial style” foam ear plugs, to distribute to audience members as they entered the hall.

The TorQ performance of Strange and Sacred Noise took place on May 9, 2014 in Toronto. The decision to program the piece came, as mentioned above, after playing only the first movement as part of other concerts; the audience reaction to the piece was consistently positive, which we found encouraging. Because of the nature of the music – the extended-length through composed structure, the dynamic extremes, the sonic repetition, and the physical and visual

85 aspects of performance that became a sort of choreography - we endeavoured to make our presentation of SASN seem “almost more of an event or ritual than a musical performance” (Livingston 2014). In order to create a different “atmosphere” than that of a standard Western classical music concert, we wanted to emphasize (and control) the visual aspects of the performance. We chose a space that incorporated the “sacred” aspect of SASN: Church of the Holy Trinity was built in what is now the core of downtown Toronto in 1847, and features a large sanctuary with intricate stained glass windows, a high ceiling, moveable pews and relatively resonant acoustics. Campbell described the reasoning behind the venue selection: “Given the nature of the piece (inspired by both nature and geometry, the physical and the abstract), we decided to present SASN in a church, a place very much treated as a bridge between the physical and abstract aspects of religion.” (Campbell 2019a) TorQ hired lighting designer Oz Weaver to help enhance the visual aspect of the performance.

The flexible nature of the seating in the sanctuary gave us freedom to utilize all areas as performance space (see Figure 4-1 for performance layout), We felt this varied, surround-style positioning would highlight the contrapuntal nature of some of the movements, as well as acknowledging the geometric structure of the piece. One prospective challenge was ensemble playing in this environment: distance between chamber musicians is always a challenge even to a very “tight” ensemble, and the timbres and musical materials of these movements (not to mention being in a resonant space) made those challenges even greater. To help counteract these issues, I created guide click tracks for each movement; the use of earbuds plugged into wireless receivers meant that we were able to have total freedom of movement from station to station within the work. In order to help facilitate transitions between movements and eliminate any potentially awkward motions, we selected five quotes (either about Adams or from his writings); these were spoken and recorded by a colleague, and then played to the audience over a public address system as we moved from section to section.

Instruments used in this performance included a Black Swamp Percussion 13x3.5” piccolo snare drum, Yamaha 14x6” concert snare drum, Black Swamp Percussion 14x10” field drum and vintage Slingerland TDR 15x12” field drum with gut snares; 36” and 28” Yamaha concert bass drums and a variety of Yamaha concert toms; two small and two large imported hand-cranked air-raid sirens; four Dream chau gongs from 22”-36” in diameter; four Yamaha YG-1210 glockenspiels, two Yamaha YV-3700 vibraphones, two Musser M55 ProVibe vibraphones, two

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Yamaha YM-5100 marimbas, one Yamaha YM-4600 marimba and one Adams Artist Classic marimba.

Figure 4-1: An approximate stage plot of TorQ's presentation of SASN, May 2014, Church of the Holy Trinity, Toronto

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Plate 4-1: Dress rehearsal of "clusters on a quadrilateral grid" from TorQ's presentation of SASN, May 2014. Lighting design by Oz Weaver. Photo by Alice Ferreyra, used with permission.

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Plate 4-2: Dress rehearsal of "...dust into dust..." from TorQ's performance of SASN, May 2014. Lighting design by Oz Weaver. Courtesy Alice Ferreyra

Schick’s first performance of MRB occurred in Los Angeles, sometime prior to fall of 2003. This performance featured the previously mentioned original version of “thunder” and the since- replaced snare drum movement “buzz”. The performance that Schick considers the “premiere”, where the current versions of the movements were performed for the first time, occurred in October or November of 2003 in the Winter Garden Atrium at what was then called the World

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Financial Centre (now Brookfield Place) in Manhattan.44 The Winter Garden Atrium has an amphitheatre-like layout of marble steps, and features a 10-storey paned-glass vaulted ceiling; despite not being a traditional theatre or concert hall, it often holds performing arts events. The performance took place on a constructed platform stage, and the audience sat in a “conventional” arrangement; Schick didn’t recall the particular setup of the instruments on the stage.45 Schick used click tracks as a guide for the performance of some movements but didn’t (and currently doesn’t) use them for “rumble” and “roar”, as he felt it was possible and more musically satisfying to base his performance of the audible structure of the aura tracks.

My performance of MRB took place in Walter Hall, a roughly 500 seat amphitheatre-style recital hall in the Edward Johnson Building (Faculty of Music) at the University of Toronto on May 24, 2011. Because of the layout of the hall, all my instruments were located on the stage. Though I was somewhat restricted with instrument placement, I grouped the instruments so as to vary my positioning to the audience, and to offer excellent sightlines so that my various striking motions could be observed (see Figure 4-2). In between the click tracks for each movement, I added 30 seconds of silence. From a practical standpoint, this helped ensure careful, deliberate transitional movements between instruments groups; it allowed my body to recover somewhat and “reset” between the movements, so that I might be as focused as possible at the start of each section. More importantly, however, those silences served to act as an important structural contrast. By extending the silence, the impact of the next playing motion, whether frenetic and intense or slowly deliberate, was intensified. Other than the necessary movement from station to station, I attempted to remain as still as possible, almost as though those moments were a meditation on silence in the way that MRB might be considered a meditation on percussive timbres.

44 Schick noted that at that performance, he did not play “wail”, the movement for sirens; they were rehearsing the same day that plans were to be unveiled for what would become the Freedom Tower in New York City, and there were families of some survivors of the 9/11 terrorist attack in the building the day that they were working. Schick was told, “You cannot have sirens.”

45 Schick has since established a practice of setting the instrument groups up in an “orbit” on stage, starting with the snare drums downstage right; inspired by his experience playing Strange and Sacred Noise on the Alaskan Tundra in the midst of the solstice and watching the sun circle the performers, Schick now travels a path between instruments groups that circles towards the back of the stage and “re-emerging in front”.

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Figure 4-2: Jamie Drake's approximate stage plot for MRB, Walter Hall, University of Toronto, 2011.

I selected groups of instruments to be as homogenous as possible. Snare drums include a 15” field drum, a 14x6.5” concert snare, a 14x5” snare and a 13x3” piccolo snare drum. Though each of the shell materials and brands were different, together they provided a continuity of timbre and pitch (both amongst themselves and the electronic aura) that I found pleasing while still maintaining distinct pitches. Likewise, with triangles and cymbals: though different brands were used, I was able to get a sound spectrum that had pitch variation but a relatively homogenous timbre. The instruments that I took the most care in selecting were the toms-toms; I felt that because of the relatively pure nature of their timbre (i.e. no ringing harmonics like metallic instruments, no snares to hide pitch and tone colour), they needed to be the most closely matched. To that end, I used an entire set of double headed, fibreglass-shelled tom-toms, in sizes from 8-16” diametres, all from the same manufacturer. I also made sure they all had the

91 same head combination.46 The two kick drums were also from the same manufacturer: the lower pitched drum, placed among the tom stands, was 22” in diameter; the higher pitched drum, played via a “slave” double bass drum pedal and therefore positioned somewhat off to the right side, was 18” in diameter.

The premiere of Ilimaq was given by Kotche at the University of Texas at Austin 2012, in a recital hall of approximately 600 seats. The concert consisted of a first half performed by Kotche’s duo On Fillmore; the second half was the performance of Ilimaq. Kotche had spent approximately four or five days at the university before the performance, in order to “tweak” the sound system to ensure a good balance between live sound and the aura parts and delays. The premiere came after he had recorded the piece (though before the recording was released). Though Kotche was unable to recall the exact details of the instruments used for the premiere, for the recording, he used birch-shelled drums: two 22” diameter kick drums, 10” and 12” single headed concert toms, 12” and 13” “standard” depth double headed toms, 13” and 14” “power” (i.e. deeper shell depth) double headed toms, and 16” and 18” floor toms. The concert bass drum was approximately 40 inches in diameter. (For subsequent performances, drum sizes have varied somewhat, based largely upon what is logistically feasible or available at a given venue. For general instrument guidelines, please see Figure 4-3, Kotche’s backline instrument rider for Ilimaq.) The cymbals were all chosen to provide a warm, full sound when crashed, and were a mixture of crash and suspended cymbals from Zildjian’s “K” and “K Orchestral” series.47

46 The heads that seemed to work best on those particular drums were Remo Clear Ambassadors on the resonant side, and Aquarian Studio-Xs on the batter side. These batter heads helped to take out some of the highest overtones and focus the pitch and articulation, without making the drums sound “dead”.

47 Adams happened to be in Chicago when Kotche was initially preparing the piece and helped select the cymbals used. Doug Perkins, who produced the recording, was also instrumental in helping to select bass drum mallets and coach Kotche on the bass drum section of the piece.

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Figure 4-3 Glenn Kotche's backline rider and tech requirements for his performances of Ilimaq. Courtesy Glenn Kotche

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Plate 4-3: Detail of Glenn Kotche's setup for the premiere of Ilimaq at UT Austin. Photo courtesy Glenn Kotche

Mallets used include heavy mallets with latex bands to provide a full sound on the suspended cymbal section, and Pro-mark wooden-headed timpani mallets on bamboo shafts for the drum set section, in order to again provide a full sound without being too heavy (and therefore more tiring to play). Kotche experimented with different implements for the sections that required brushes (mm263-320 of “Under the Ice”, marked as “The Sunken Gamelan” on the recording), as the brushes didn’t seem to always provide the “right” sound for the cymbal trills; one solution that he hit upon was the placement of washers on the end of “little drink mixers”. For Kotche it was important to have “a lot of consideration for little moments of sound”. He also suggested that he “obsesses over this stuff [i.e. the choice of instruments and the desired sounds]” for Ilimaq perhaps more than other performers of the piece might. In order to make the performance cleaner, Kotche used pre-recorded versions of the delay and a click track, rather than relying on a live delay, as everyone involved thought that that might be more enjoyable for the audience, and took one element of risk out of the performance equation.

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ILIMAQ Management contact: Ben Levin for TMM, (413) 529-2830, [email protected] Backline questions: Dennis Crommett for TMM, (413) 529-2830, [email protected] STAGE PLOT Audio tech questions: Jody Elff, (917) 514-9115, [email protected]

DRUM KIT

CYMBALS BASS DRUM & GONG

^^^ AUDIENCE ^^^

Figure 4-4 Stage plot of Kotche's Ilimaq setup. Courtesy Glenn Kotche

Kotche knew that for live performances the visual aspect of the work was important, especially given the duration and lack of movement breaks. He typically sets up the piece in three separate stations: the first features the concert bass drum, the second featuring eight cymbals and additional bell cymbals, a feng gong or cymbal mounted perpendicularly to the floor for bowing, and a large tam-tam, and one with the drum set and eight cymbals. The bass drum station is used for “Descent”; the cymbal station is used for “Under the Ice”/”The Sunken Gamelan”, as well as mm509-565 of “To the Sky” (identified as “Ascension” on the recording); the drum set section is used for the main body of “To the Sky”. Kotche wanted to have an “arc of movement” that mimicked the structural arc of the piece. (See Figure 4-4, the stage plot included in Kotche’s Ilimaq rider.) He also noted that “erasing the performer/audience line” and integrating the audience in the performance has been important in On Fillmore, and though he was on stage for some of these performances, he hoped to similarly engage the audience with the visual as well as sonic aspects of performance. One of Kotche’s favourite performance settings occurred at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis in 2016, where he was positioned

95 in a common area, at the bottom of a wide flight of stairs. This served as a sort of natural amphitheatre: Kotche had hard walls behind and around the setups (which helped with acoustic projection), and audience members were seated on chairs and on the stairs in front of him (see Plates 4-4 and 4-5). The space also had a balcony above, which meant that additional audience members were above and “all around” him, and resulted in what seemed to him like a more integrated performing experience.

Plate 4-4: Aerial view of Kotche's Ilimaq setup at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, 2016. Courtesy Glenn Kotche

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Plate 4-5: Kotche's Ilimaq setup in the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis. Courtesy Glenn Kotche/Instagram

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Reimer’s performance of Ilimaq occurred on July 3, 2018 at the Apollo Cinema (a single-screen movie theatre with a shallow proscenium stage) in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, a part of the Open Ears Festival of Music and Sound.48 Like Kotche’s premiere, Ilimaq was the second feature of the concert; the first was a screening of the film version of Reimer’s recording of Lizée’s Katana of Choice.49 Reimer’s setup was somewhat more compact than Kotche’s. A set of eight bell cymbals, custom made by Sabian for the performance and used only for the last section of “To the Sky” (“Ascension” on the recording) was positioned mid stage left; the drum set, with eight suspended cymbals, was positioned mid stage right, with the concert bass drum furthest to stage right. Reimer used the same eight cymbals for both “Under the Ice” and for “To the Sky”; this was a practical choice for reasons of obtaining the necessary instruments and for comfortably being able to fit everything on the stage. This set of cymbals had been hand selected with assistance from employees at the Sabian Cymbals factory: Reimer’s goal was to get as close to the pitches of Kotche’s recording as possible. Reimer and the Sabian employees selected a set of graduated Sabian AAX cymbals. The bass drum was a Yamaha concert bass drum of approximately 36” diameter; Reimer placed a towel on the edge of the head to control the resonance and therefore help to clarify the articulation. Drum set drums consisted of two 22” Yamaha Club Custom kick drums, 8x7”, 10x7”, 12x8” and 13x9” rack toms, 16x15” and 18x16” floor toms, as well as two additional Maple Custom Absolute toms (12x10” and 14x12”). Reimer’s mallet selection included hard felt beaters for the concert bass drum, mallets with small heads covered with a neoprene-like material for the cymbal sections (which allowed him to get a big sound but still maintain control in the quieter sections), and Vic Firth Peter Erskine ride sticks (with a long taper and oval beat) for the drum set sections.

48 I attended this performance, because of my interest in the work and a desire to see Reimer perform it live, and also because I provided some of the instruments and the hardware necessary for the performance.

49 Katana of Choice is a work for drum set soloist and percussion quartet, commissioned, premiered and recorded by Reimer and TorQ Percussion Quartet.

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Plate 4-6: Ben Reimer performing Ilimaq at the Apollo Cinema, Kitchener, Ontario, for Open Ears, July 2018. Courtesy Ben Reimer/Facebook

Because of the cinema-style fixed, raked seating in the venue, this stage was the only option for instrument placement. Surround speakers were placed at the right, left and back of the auditorium, forming roughly a diamond shape. Open Ears provided some white and coloured lighting; these lights were aimed at the stage, and not only lit up Reimer’s performance area but also added some ambience to the performance (during the piece the lights gradually morphed between pink and blue shades). All drums and cymbals had microphones to help with amplification and overall balance between the live element and the pre-recorded tracks. Like Kotche, Reimer used the pre-recorded delay tracks rather than taking a true delay signal.

4.5 Initial performer impressions

Otte’s reaction to performing SASN was in part determined by his experience in the workshop process. He commented that “percussionists will always know their instruments better than composers”, and as such found the workshop process with John very helpful, as Otte and PGC were able to make suggestions which made the piece ultimately more enjoyable and challenging for them. In initial drafts of “velocities crossing in phase space”, Adams had exactly written out each acceleration and deceleration for every drum (much like he would later do with “Thunder”

99 in MRB). Otte described that initial draft as similar to other music that Adams was beginning to write: “complex X against Y against Z” and suggested that the result would be more organic if instead Adams simply presented signposts and just “let us do it” [the slowing down and speeding up]. The result was a feeling that Otte described as one of the most “thrilling” experiences in playing music, and admitted that there is a real “terror” to playing the movement, especially as, playing the highest part, he is the last person to perform the last phase. In speaking with Adams, he describes it another way: “…as the freight train rushes by, [am I going to be able to] run [with] the freight train fast enough to be able to catch it?” (Adams 2005)

Figure 4-5: Player 3, measures 1-40 of "velocities..." from SASN. PGC requested this notation over exact, written-out decelerations and accelerations. Copyright 1997 John Luther Adams/Taiga Press.

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Playing SASN, especially the drum movements, was for Otte a version of chamber music at its most pure: “if it really is chamber music, the two things that I’m doing… one, experiencing all the things, the visceral and organic elation to my instrument, controlling the breathing… of the drum… at the same time, I’m aware of what all my colleagues are doing.” (Adams 2005). In that same interview, Adams noted that because of the physical demands of the piece, Otte looked “different” playing “…dust into dust…”; something was “different physically” that allowed him to “get a huge sound”. Otte responded that the piece had made “demands on my body that were substantial, that were different” (Adams 2005) but that he enjoyed the technical challenge of performing the piece, particularly the snare drum movement. He recalled that the experience of presenting the premiere was “an emotional experience, the wake of which lasted for days. I felt pretty vulnerable for days after that… It was a total immersion of physical exhaustion and intellectual rigour... [also] being in that massive sound for that hour… I was surprised… I’m not sure that I had ever had that kind of experience before, that for some day or two afterwards, I was absolutely somewhere else.”

Both Burrows and Campbell found their experiences performing SASN to be overall very positive. Burrows appreciated the challenge that the piece presented to performers and stated that “It was my first time digging into a piece of this magnitude (length, dexterity, concentration etc.) [sic] The piece had a great listening challenge and required me to be very ‘in-tune’ with the other players.” He also came away with a “greater appreciation” for the work and had a desire to perform it again in the future and reported a high feeling of “satisfaction” with the performance, especially as he was unsure of what to expect from the performance ahead of time. Campbell, who had initially expressed some reservations about performing the piece and about possible audience reactions, had first been swayed when TorQ performed “…dust into dust…” at an Open Ears concert in May 2012. “For SASN, I initially worried that performing this piece might not be a positive experience for an audience. Without seeing the score/notation and being able to see the blueprint of its underlying structure/math, would it be interesting or just abrasive and cold? But once we performed even a single movement for a live audience, the visceral impact and ‘life’ of the piece just sort of coalesced and became undeniably apparent.” (Campbell 2019a) He also noted that the rehearsal and performance of SASN had been a “different way of experiencing” music and sound in a chamber setting, and that the performance was “one of the coolest things we’d done”. (2019b)

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My first hands-on experience with one of Adams’ chamber works was the coaching and playing “…dust into dust…” for a University of Toronto Percussion Ensemble concert in April 2011.50 Putting that initial performance together was challenging, despite working with skilled percussionists: there was a relative lack of rehearsal time, and not nearly enough time for players to learn the intricacy of each other’s touch, body language and time feel. Having different time feels and different ways of expressing that time through one’s body (i.e. physical gestures and/or breathing) proved especially demanding because of the long periods of silence that serve an important structural function in the movement, and the related need for all four members to enter back in exactly together and in perfect tempo playing very fast single strokes after these silences. Though I recall the performance generally feeling like it was a success, the hyper-awareness of the other musicians and relative lack of familiarity with the intimacies of their playing meant that much of my awareness was focused on trying to make sure everyone was “right”, rather than being able to immerse myself in the feeling and sound of the piece. When playing the same movement roughly a year later with TorQ, I was able to place a greater degree of trust in my colleagues and was therefore able to relax somewhat into the feeling of performing the movement. This was music that I knew that I enjoyed, both from a performance and theoretical perspective, but I was somewhat surprised and encouraged to find that the audience seemed to enjoy it as much as I did.

That experience was amplified when we performed SASN in its entirety. Performing the whole piece felt as though I was participating in some sort of ritual, both for myself and for the people who had come to experience the performance; I recall feeling as though it was my responsibility to help guide everyone through this piece that represented extremes of sound and timbre. Though I did not have as distinct an “out of body” experience as when playing other Adams works, I do recall feeling as though my body was not entirely my own in performance; I felt as though somehow I was moving differently and with a greater intensity than usual in order to produce the sounds on the instruments. I was also hyperaware not only of my own body and the sound and feeling of the instruments that I was playing, but also of my colleagues, doing the

50 The other quartet members were Greg Harrison, Stefan Kitai and Jonathan Smith. The performance was part of the Percussion Ensemble’s concert “Mostly Minimalism”, held in Walter Hall at the Faculty of Music, April 10 2011. …and bells remembered… was also performed as part of that concert.

102 same thing at their respective instruments. Though I was unable to directly feel what they may have been feeling at the time, I was certainly attuned to the nuances of their playing and to the musical lines that they were creating.

Schick recalls that his very first performance of MRB was slightly different than the currently published version – one of the snare drum movements was a different movement from the current published version,51 and “thunder” was originally written for four tom-toms and a single pedal bass drum instead of eight tom-toms and pedal bass drums – but the number of movements and general structure was the same. He described the feeling of “weird, almost out- of-body buoyancy that comes from concentrating for that long” after the first performance; this feeling comes from “the intense focus on small details in the context of a large piece”. The feeling to him is similar to conducting Bernstein Symphony No. 3 (which has no breaks between movements): you’re “paying attention to every single note, and you’re in the middle of this ocean”. Despite the long duration and necessary concentration required for MRB, however, Schick didn’t have that same feeling of being lost: for him, the “signposts” or structural “markers” in the piece are very clear (especially as the work is broken into distinct movements) so that you “always know where you are”; by way of example, he contrasted this with Morton Feldman’s For Philip Guston, which has few obvious markers. It felt to him more like “being a solitary presence in a large landscape.” He suggested that they “did and they didn’t” fulfill a goal of creating a solo longer than “essay length”: while the whole work is approximately 75 minutes in duration, each of the eight movements is a self-contained shorter work of approximately eight to 10 minutes in duration. Nevertheless, Schick still feels as though the piece is very successful on its own merits.

During and after my performance of MRB, I had two main reactions. The first was of experiencing a certain out-of-body-ness that manifested itself as a feeling that at certain times, I was watching myself perform; I was able to think of small details (and notice things that I wish I had done “better”), while also still being immersed in the large scope of the piece. The second was a general feeling of exhaustion and accomplishment. The performance had an impact on

51 Schick first recalled that a movement titled “buzz” the predecessor “burst”, but later said it might have been replaced by “stutter”.

103 both body and brain: I felt mentally both drained and elated, while my body was extremely physically tired, yet still pulsing with adrenaline. In certain moments of performance, it felt as though I had been able to access something greater than myself; I recall having the impression of channeling some greater percussive force while playing, especially during “roar”, “thunder” and “wail”, perhaps because of the huge amount of sound that I was producing at the loudest points of those movements. At the same time, I recall having some minor trouble controlling very fine movements by the end of the piece; this became especially apparent during the pianissimo closed snare drum rolls in “stutter”. There was also a certain euphoria at having completed what seemed like a monumental performance (especially since, because of practical instrument and rehearsal space limitations, the performance was the first time that I had performed all the movements consecutively).

Kotche was excited by the concept of Ilimaq from the time they started collaborating, especially as he had seen its creative predecessor Qilyaun live in concert more than once. He also enjoyed the general arc of the piece, especially how the different moods and timbres contrasted each other, and the “audaciousness” and “shamanistic” aspects of the section for drum set. As a musician, he felt that there was enough stimulating musical material (including “odd time groupings”) to offer him a gratifying challenge. Kotche also described his preference for emphasizing the power and physicality of the performance, and noted that he performs the whole piece (including the bass drum section) “like a rock drummer”, as he believes this helps to engage the audience. In summary he described performing the piece as “a lot of fun”.

Where Kotche emphasized the “shamanistic” and narrative elements of performance and was especially taken by the additional electro-acoustic sounds Adams had included in Ilimaq, Reimer’s main focus was on the physicality of the piece. As a performer who often played very technically-demanding and musically-dense contemporary music on drum set, his initial reaction to receiving the score was the realization that a different (for him) sort of preparation would be required: the main challenge of the piece was not necessarily practicing complex phrases to embody the necessary coordination, but rather was to build up the endurance to play the whole piece from start to finish. He relished the prospect of tracking his progress of that aspect of Ilimaq through his practice sessions. His reaction after his performance was one of euphoria, as he felt that he had “accomplished something that he hadn’t done before”. He also described being “addicted” to the feeling of performing the piece, because of the physicality and mental

104 state required: for him, it was something that was outside of his normal performance mentality (perhaps because of concentration or endurance rather than complex musical details) but “very rewarding”, in large part because of the feeling of accomplishment. Despite not being the commissioner of the work, he still felt a sense of ownership of the piece and his performance, in part because of the challenge it presented.

Mostly, you’re detached from the writing of this piece; but somehow you play it, you finish it, and it feels like it’s yours. You’ve gone through some sort of mental battle, in some ways, to get through it all… even for me, I’m so attached to my instruments, so even getting new instruments and developing a new setup, for me, is very, very important. […] I think that whole thing to me was very special, because of that. I was presenting new sounds, with new instruments… I was offering what I thought sounded like really great instruments in this crazy environment set up by this guy… yeah, the whole thing was very positive.

4.6 Initial audience reactions

It must be noted that these recollections of audience reactions should in no way be taken as a necessarily representative example of the feelings of all (or even a majority) of audience members towards the pieces that they had just heard.52 There can be many factors beyond the scope of the performance circumstances that influence a listener’s reaction to a new or unfamiliar work. I would also suggest that concert-goers have a greater tendency to publicly express opinions the further their reaction is to one end of the enjoyment spectrum. Further, I believe that most audience members are much more likely to express a very positive reaction to a performer than a neutral or negative reaction. Reactions are also often context-based: every audience member brings a different lived experience to their engagement with a performance, and with it, a different set of conscious or unconscious expectations. Nevertheless, as “enjoyment of music” is not (yet!) something we are able to quantify or analyze in a scientifically objective way, it can be useful for (potential) performers to gauge audience reactions. These reactions may extend from dichotomies of “like/didn’t like” to explore specific

52 The fact that these audience reactions are being recalled by the performers and not the audience members themselves adds another layer of subjectivity to the responses. It may be useful for further research to conduct a more objective survey of audience responses to future performances of these works.

105 factors of a piece or performance that led to an overall verdict on the piece. Reactions may also help performers understand the type of mood that they are conveying through performance.

In broad strokes, audience reactions seemed to vary with time. Anecdotal audience reactions at premiere performances were mixed, perhaps in part because of the novelty of Adams’ musical language. Audience reactions seemed to be generally more positive at subsequent performances; though these works are not performed frequently (at least in their entirety), recordings and performances of specific movements (especially by Schick, who will often perform individual movements of MRB as part of solo recitals) have led to a greater familiarity with Adams and his compositional style. A summary of reactions is provided below:

Performer/Piece/Year Initial Audience Reaction

Allen Otte/PGC – SASN (1998) Mixed

TorQ – SASN (2014) Positive

Schick – MRB (2003) Mixed

Drake – MRB (2011) Positive

Kotche – Ilimaq (2012-2016) Generally Positive

Reimer – Ilimaq (2018) Positive

Table 4-1: Audience reactions to performances

One of the most memorable comments that Otte recalls about SASN is that some audience members found “triadic iteration lattices” to be disturbing; they didn’t find the sirens “thrilling, or great fun […] like we did”. Other audience members complained that the tam-tams were too loud, even while wearing the supplied ear plugs. Otte did not recall any specific positive comments, though he did have the impression at the time that the audience generally seemed to enjoy the performance.

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Reactions to the TorQ Performance of SASN were generally very positive. The audience applause began after a period of silence at the end of the piece; although the audience itself was not large, the applause itself was sustained and appreciative. Many comments made after related to the “experience” that the audience member had had. Campbell remembered an audience member mentioning that although they enjoyed the performance, it was an “exhausting” piece to listen to, while others describe a sense of being “in it the whole time”. Burrows recollects that composer Peter Hatch was in attendance and described it as a “magical experience”. I was most struck by the reactions of audience members who identified themselves as not typically interested in “new music” concerts: they found the experience deeply and (for them) surprisingly affective. Cecilia Livingston, a Toronto-based composer, wrote an impression of the concert on the blog formerly known as Musical Toronto:

The most strange and sacred moment of TorQ’s May 9 performance of Strange and Sacred Noise was the start of the fifth movement: four marimbas stood in the central aisle of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Toronto. [TorQ] waited, mallets in hand, to begin “clusters on a quadrilateral grid.” […] Would there be melody and harmony – a tune perhaps? Would we abandon the liminal world where music blurs the boundaries of noise, where sound simply as sound becomes an enveloping, body-saturating experience? Then suddenly, the quartet began to play: soft, rolled chords – one of the marimba’s signature sounds – but here in a cluster that seemed to defy all harmonic implication, instead opening a vast sense of echoing space. One could hear, see, taste, feel the huge arctic sweep of snow, stone, ice… cold that sings in the ear. The church and the city fell away to reveal – in sound – the natural world. […]

In the second movement (“solitary and time-breaking waves”) the tamtams played in each corner of the nave swelled in their shimmering, crackling sheen to overwhelm all conventional listening, sweeping us past ear-wincing discomfort as the sound kept unfurling, revealing layer upon layer of timbre: much as sunlight can be pretty and then blinding, both gentle warmth and all-consuming fire. In “velocities crossing in phase space” (movement III) the surround-sound placement of the drums and tomtoms allowed each slowing, thunderous voice to speak distinctly, while the wooden pews shook with the gathering vibrations. The very earth seemed to shift, to slow and shudder. (Livingston 2014)

The audience reactions that Schick recalls are at least somewhat related to the contexts of both him as a player and the sort of “high-modernist” compositions that he was most well-known for

107 performing. The first performance in Los Angeles was part of a series of concerts in which he played all of his solo repertoire, including works like Stockhausen’s Zyklus and Ferneyhough’s Bone Alphabet, works that are very dense and rhythmically complex. Some people in the audience were therefore “disappointed” that he wasn’t going to perform a new piece that was akin to “Ferneyhough on steroids”; people described it as “too simple” and lacking “overt virtuosity” and suggested that it marked a “change of direction” for Schick’s style and repertoire. (Schick himself enjoyed those aspects of MRB as he felt that to keep attempting to play pieces that were more and more difficult and complex was to be entering a musical “cul-de- sac”.) Schick suggested that another sort of “confused” audience reaction may perhaps have been borne out of unfamiliarity with the style of the music (e.g. an extended-length work whose primary focus was sound rather than narrative or complex rhythmic/harmonic development). Works like Lucier’s Silver Streetcar for the Orchestra or Tenney’s Having Never Written a Note for Percussion were perhaps similar to MRB in that they focused on the development of a single timbre, but MRB was composed in a detailed and structured way that those are pieces are not. In other words, at the time of the premiere there was “nothing like it” written for percussion. Schick mentioned one percussionist who found the piece “really boring”, which Schick took as a compliment, because “what [the other percussionist] was [playing] was really exciting, and I hated it!” Schick decided that the piece was “boring like a sunset […] or like the tides”: it is predictable in some ways, but no less spectacular for it. He did point out that he recognizes that some people find the lack of [traditional] “narrative and dramatic energy” unappealing.

My performance of MRB seemed to be very well received. As the performance served as one of my doctoral recitals, I suspect that audience reaction was duly influenced by that context. Nevertheless, I did have multiple people who attended the performance express to me that they were surprised by how much they enjoyed the composition. It was interesting that a number of these patrons also took time to express which movement was their favourite (or at least which movement they found the most effective, or the most engaging to watch). I also received comments commending me on my endurance throughout the performance.

Kotche recalled that the audience reactions to the first few performances of Ilimaq were overall fairly positive, and included some standing ovations. The most memorable comment he received was a tongue-in-cheek one after his performance at Carnegie Hall from Adams’ wife Cindy: “You didn’t fuck it up! Congratulations!” Kotche also mentioned that there are always

108 a number of Wilco fans at non-Wilco gigs that he performs; he suggests that these fans likely may not have come to his non-Wilco performances were he not associated with the band, but that they are generally “open minded and receptive and very appreciative” when watching him perform in different contexts. These recollections are supported by at least one review: writing of the Pullitzer Arts Foundation performance in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sarah Bryan Miller described the audience as “enthralled” during the performance, and suggested the piece doesn’t feel as long as its 50-minute duration.

Reactions to Kotche’s performance of Ilimaq serve as representative of the divide between reactions to a particular performance versus a particular composition. While reviews from Kotche’s performances laud (or at least acknowledge) his strong playing, critical reactions to the piece itself seem to be mixed: Stephanie Orientas (2016) describes Kotche’s “fierce” and “almost violent but passionate” performance in Carnegie Hall as part of the Ecstatic Music Festival, but has little to say about the work itself, other than a brief description. Joshua Kosman (2013) described Ilimaq as a “letdown” while noting Kotche’s “ferocious technique” on the first half of the program at the Stanford University performance. Andrew Sigler reviewed the 2012 premiere at UT Austin for NewMusixBox; he noted Kotche’s endurance (and noted that it was a subject of discussion amongst other patrons), and described parts of the work as “…actually able to tap into the whole shaman/hypnotic thing and it was really quite effective.” (Sigler 2012)

Reimer experienced near unanimous positive feedback after his performance of Ilimaq at Open Ears, receiving a sustained amount of warm applause, some cheers and an eventual standing ovation. Ray Dillard, a percussionist and recording engineer and producer noted for his long association with the percussion ensemble Nexus, said that it “sounded great”, and another patron told Reimer that they considered the performance the “highlight” of the festival. A review in Canadian magazine MusicWorks described the performance as the “pièce de résistance” and “a fitting tour de force finale to the festival.” (Andrews 2018)

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4.7 Perception of Ritual Elements

There appeared to be a broad universal agreement among all the performers questioned that there was some element of ritual integrated into the performance of each of these pieces. The concept of the works having a liminal effect, particularly on performers, came up often (though it was not necessarily described using that particular term.) Otte recalled his experience of performing the premiere and the lingering effect: “I was surprised, I’m not sure I’ve ever had that experience before… that for some day or two afterwards, I was absolutely somewhere else…” Further, “…my experience in the days afterwards confirms that whether or not I was thinking of it, it was, it had that effect on me. I did think of it that way [as ritualistic]. I liked the idea of [settling in to one musical and emotional space]. […] The fact that the piece has a little bit of [variety] in its own right, but still stays in one ritualistic space for that whole hour, yes, I liked that.” Burrows also noted the sense of settling “into” and “out of” the piece at the same time: “Yes, [I] feel it is ritualistic. The piece becomes very meditative for the audience…. It has the ability to take the performer to an ‘out of body’ experience where you becom[e] less concerned about performing the piece, and more concern[ed] about “being inside” the piece. What I mean, is there is a heightened sense of listen[ing] and physical dexterity to be able to pull the piece off. It is easy to let yourself go, and really get into it.” Campbell described performing SASN as an “experience” and somewhat like being in an “altered state”, and noted that the act of performing doesn’t feel like “playing a concert” in the same way that one might play the works of Beethoven or Orff. (2019b)

I do consider SASN to be highly ritualistic in nature. As a performer, this piece epitomizes that ‘get on the bus’ feeling, where once the piece starts it is a non-stop journey to the end of the piece, no matter what. This aspect felt especially heightened for me given that the piece is so serious, austere and focussed, and we decided to play up that side of it with our choreography, staging and lighting choices. There was also this juxtaposition of feeling connected with everyone in the venue, while simultaneously feeling almost isolated. A very strange feeling that was both cerebral and emotional, and made me feel pulled between being an active participant and being a passive observer. (Campbell 2019a)

Schick agreed that MRB seems ritualistic. Implicitly referencing Baranowski’s idea of rituals as “patterns in time”, he suggested that part of the ritual sense comes from “local” (that is, smaller-

110 scale) musical material that is “quite self-similar, and so then you’re involved in these actions… the focus of the listener is on the action, then, which somehow seems ritualistic. There is the ritual aspect of moving from station to station and circling.” Switching to a more philosophical perspective, Schick continued that

…there’s this way in which John provokes memory. How you do remember what do to next? And not even so much as a performer, but how does an audience remember this piece? Especially Mathematics, over the 80-whatever minutes that it is. Because that’s such an important part, I feel like that ties it really to ritual, which in essence is a gestural or a choreographed dramatic moment that excites a body of memory. That’s what it is in the church for example, and it feels like that’s what happens in Mathematics as well.

Schick also suggested that the focus on or inspiration from noise has a relation to the ritualistic nature of these three compositions: “Noise is an inherently ritualistic sound source in any event. We associate it with the sounds of rituals, whether they are religious or spiritual… the kind of cracking open of the earth at the big bang, all of these kind of grand thoughts, those are all noises.”

As mentioned throughout this dissertation, I feel strongly that ritual is an important element in each of these three works, and essential to how I approach these pieces as a performer. Much like Schick, the way in which I first and most immediately connect to elements of ritual is through the gesture that comes with repeated motions. My experience playing both MRB and SASN has only encouraged my belief as a performing percussionist that it is necessary to somehow embody not only the composition that one might be playing, but also the spirit behind it. To that end, when I perform these pieces, I find that the repetitive and cyclic nature of the material, combined with a sometimes severe and uncompromising structural construction, lead me to present my body in a different way in performance. These pieces, for me, are an offering, perhaps even a physical and mental sacrifice of sorts: I present myself as a participant in the act of playing these compositions so that I and others might have this ritual experience. There is more weight in my core and in my limbs; there is more purpose in my actions; there is more gravitas in my demeanor. This, for me, is how Schick’s “gestural or choreographed dramatic event” excites my body of memory. It is important to recognize that this process is cyclical: I use an imagined memory of ritual to help guide the gestures that I create; these gestures in turn create sound, and this sound in turn [re]excites the memory. This cycle in turn helps to create

111 the liminal effect that other performers have mentioned: I am at once present and not present, playing and watching myself play. The event becomes an experience, and not just a concert. I have felt in these moments (especially during SASN) as though I was somehow connected to everybody in the venue, even while being, in another sense, fully apart from them. (This strange dichotomy is made all the more noticeable when playing to a click track: focusing the click track forces me into myself, but listening outwards connects me with others.) Perhaps my favourite part of this experience is the moment right after the final note has been played: there often hangs in the air a sense of mystery and wonder, and a feeling that everyone is collectively holding their breath, which finally releases when we relax our bodies and the audience starts to applaud. Afterwards, I have found that it takes longer to come “back to earth”: even after packing up instruments and leaving the venue, perhaps even the next day or two, there is a sense of not quite fully being present in everyday life in the way that I was before the performance.

Kotche admitted that while he didn’t particularly feel a sense of ritual when first listened to MRB or SASN, he felt that Inuksuit actually provided more of a ritual experience as a listener. Ilimaq, however, gives Kotche a ritualistic feeling “100% - that’s what it’s all about, the shaman’s journey, to and under the ice and to the spirit world. So that to me was really easy to embrace and to embody in the performance, [because of] the way it’s written. It’s completely successful, that concept with the music, in my opinion.” Kotche particularly emphasized the sense of feeling part of a ritual as a performer, and also touched on the liminal aspects of performance:

When I perform it [the bass drum movement], I have to get to that state – I’m already in an altered state of concentration, of letting go as well, and not being concerned about the smallest things. It’s a concentration that goes beyond the notes. […] I’m so in the present, in the moment, when I’m doing that part, that it is a kind of a trance like state almost. […] It definitely has that feel to it. When I’m doing the drumset thing at the end, yeah, it’s 100% like [I am] out of my body, performing this thing.

Kotche noted that while he is typically the type of performer who is constantly engaged with the smallest details of performance (e.g. how a slight change in grip might affect the sound or feel, and how that in turn might effect the reactions or performances of other musicians on stage), that

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with this piece, you have no choice. It’s so intense, physically, mentally, and for it me it was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I feel like a […] shaman at the end’ because I feel like I’m in a dream state, I’m in a trance state, and I’m doing something that’s beyond me as a performer. Hopefully the audience gets that instead of ‘Wow, that guy’s working his ass off on stage.’ Hopefully that translates. But for me, this piece, the concept of it, the dream state and the performance of it are so intertwined, I can’t think of a more successful piece, in those regards at least.

Reimer experienced a feeling of ritual in a slightly different way from Kotche. Whereas Kotche’s feeling of ritual was something generated by the elements of the piece itself and its performance, Reimer found hints of ritual surrounding the preparation of the work. The amount of “sheer repetition” of musical material combined with the practice regimen of many repetitions of the piece itself (or sections of it) felt to him like a type of ritual.

It’s a pattern for yourself that you’re going to do to prepare… you know [that] it’s impossible unless you revisit it a certain amount of times regularly […] so suddenly… your life has sort of changed to accommodate this little habit, or this little daily ritual. And it’s different than usual practicing, because every time you go in there you might be practicing a different section … here it was very much, every time you go there, you’re playing the same thing, you’re just doing it. You’re doing it again, you’re doing it again. And you’re reflecting on it afterwards.

He described getting into a “contemplative state”, and suggested that he experienced the same aspect when performing Inuksuit. He also stated that he didn’t think Ilimaq was necessarily interesting to watch as an audience member, especially with the performer behind a drum set, and therefore it was necessary to go into the piece able to “sit back” and be in an “introspective state”; partially because of the audio tracks involved, the piece is “not just about [the performer]”. He recognized too that no matter his feelings as a performer, there is an element of ritual built into the programmatic pretext of the piece.

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Chapter 5 Conceptual Framework and Performance Practice Suggestions

5 Introduction

In How Music Works, musician David Byrne examines the various “functions” of music, and how it integrates in various modes into society. He recognizes that one of the ways in which music affects us (and is, therefore, something desirable) is its connection to what we think of as some “supernatural” aspects of the world in which we live.

We’re fascinated and drawn to stuff that science can’t explain – the transcendent, the uncanny, things that affect us without words – and music both touches on and emanates from those mysteries. It reconnects us to that lost time of enchantment.

I think that this semi-mystical sense of the world has also begun to re-emerge explicitly as music over the last fifty years or so. A lot of post-war musicians and composers began to think of music in completely new, or maybe in completely old, ways. John Cage is maybe the most famous of them. He likened his view of music to what was then contemporary architecture. Those modern buildings and houses had lots of massive glass walls and windows, and in Cage’s view this meant that the outside world was being allowed in, was being considered part and parcel of the architecture, instead of being shut out. Compartmentalization, the difference between inside and outside, between the environment and oneself, was breaking down. (2017, 358)

Though Byrne references Cage, this description is perhaps an even more adept summation of John Luther Adams’ compositions, and particularly his extended percussion pieces. Though his musical means and language are different than Cage’s, Adams too is interested in creating a new music that was linked to sounds that were very old. He is interested in connecting to the earth, in the reclamation of noise as musical material, in the “re-enchantment” of sound as a way of feeling and perception; he is attempting to bridge the outside world to the listener through creating a “place”, a “sonic geography”, and through elements of ritual.

In the same chapter, Byrne also touches on music as ritual: “Without music, the social fabric itself would be rent, and the links between us would crumble.” (354) This echoes Christopher

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Small’s view of music and ritual as something that helps to enact an idealized set of relationships.

What, exactly, are those relationships? Or, to frame the question slightly differently: since through ritual, we have the power to (re)imagine these relationships, what should they be? In Musicking, Small examines the ritual of the stereotypical Western classical music experience: attending a performance of a major professional symphony orchestra in a purpose-built venue. The various relationships present – especially from score to conductor, from conductor to musicians, and from musicians to audience – suggest, in the way they are traditionally viewed, a sort of hierarchy. Those who insist that music is a “thing” whose ultimate representation is the dots and lines that are written on a page would also suggest that the flow of information (and also, by implication, of energy) travels in one direction: from composer to score to conductor to musicians to audience. Small notes that aspects of the western classical music performance ritual (for example the barriers – either physical or invisible – between the performers and audience, and the unwritten rules of decorum that typically prevent interaction between performer and audience and dictate the “acceptable” ways for an audience to express an opinion about the performance) often seem to promote this linear, unidirectional concept of flow. This suggests an especially passive ritual/experience for most participants, one that may serve as a representation for relationships in other non-musical areas of life: “A ritual in which the majority watch and listen in stillness and silence, unable to influence the course of the event, while a minority acts can be a vivid representation of certain types of political relationship; many of the rituals of the modern nations-state are of this kind.” (1998, 105)

Small, argues, however, that the score (or however the music is created/transmitted/archived in memory) is simply a vehicle for the experience of performing or hearing; it is a set of “coded instructions” (Small 1998, 112); it is the thing that acts as a conduit for musicking. A composition is an object that exists in order to facilitate the activity of music, and not the other way around. (108) Given that, and even in the stratified circumstances mentioned above, he suggests that the flow of energy can still be cyclic: performers will be affected by the energy of an audience (however that energy may be expressed) just as much as the audience will be affected by the output of the performers. (One only need talk to any performer who’s played a number of similar shows to hear stories of how the performance was affected by the character of the crowd.) This type of cyclic exchange of energy is one condition necessary for liminality and

115 what Schechner (1985, 125-127) describes as “transportation”. This process of transportation indicates that performers (and therefore, hopefully, audience members) are “inside” the experience of performing, and that this experience may therefore lead to a state of communitas for all involved.

Music is participation (whether active or passive) – it is an activity. (Small notes that if it were not, music would theoretically exist just as fully in memory as in live performance.) Ritual is also an activity – it is action, a way of embodying a series of relationships, or “the great pattern that connects.” (Small 1998, 130) Admittedly searching for an objective way of viewing ritual or performing music becomes problematic: relationships, and therefore the activities that foster them, are necessarily context dependent and “socially constructed” – they may also be complex, contradictory and overlapping (131). Howard Becker recognized this in his concept of “art worlds”: communities roughly organized around some sort of artistic activity and related collective aesthetic judgement, but which may have vague or porous boundaries. (Becker 2008, 34-40) There is no one objective “correct way” to perform, no more than there is any one right way to conduct yourself in relation to those around you. Schechner notes that for many long running performances or rituals, the “right” way is constantly being modified through a non- linear process of experimentation: he quotes Brecht in asserting that a performance is an assembly of “the least rejected of all things tried.” (1985, 120)

Even if the transcendental and transitory nature of musicking of a given piece doesn’t suggest or require one objectively “correct” method outside of one’s particular aesthetic preferences, I would still suggest that there is a worthy general goal for performance: to aim for the goal of communitas, and more broadly a sense of community among those present for a performance. As both a performer and audience member, I often feel that many of the current conditions of Western classical music concerts/presentations are not conducive to creating the most engaging experience for listeners or performers. Though many would argue that sound is the ultimate language of the performing musician, I believe that just aiming to produce the most “correct” sound or the “best-sounding performance” is doing a disservice to the somewhat magical potential of live performance. While the presence of “beautiful” sounds – whether heard or produced – is certainly a prerequisite for a “successful” performance, my most affecting musical

116 experiences have also included an experience of connection to others who are also musicking.53 If we follow Small’s suggestion that music and ritual can enact idealized relationships, I would continue that my idealized relationship is a general one that tends towards equality over hierarchy, towards togetherness over separation. I concur with Small that a feeling of participation leads to empowerment, which in turns leads to experiential satisfaction. (Small 1998, 106) I believe that, as performers, we should create a performance environment that invites listeners into the experience; if the circumstances align, it may be that this experience leads to communitas. Though this phenomenon is not objectively predictable, we may, by giving careful consideration to certain aspects of performance, encourage it through engagement with certain aspects of performance, including environment, place, sound and gesture. These elements can collectively be shaped to highlight the sense of ritual already present in Adams’ compositions; this sense of ritual may in turn help to provide an aspect of community/communitas to those present at a given performance, and serve to highlight the engagement with the “semi-mystical sense of the world” of which Byrne speaks. Schechner agrees that “either permanently as in initiation rites or temporarily as in aesthetic theatre and trance dancing, performers – and sometimes spectators too – are changed by the activity of performing.” (1985, 4)

One of the ways in which we might accomplish these goals is by taking a broader view of what music performance is. In the Western classical performance tradition, the main aspect of concern in regards to performance preparation is fidelity to the written score. For many, this idea of “score above all” was (and is) the genesis for a definition of music as a “thing”, and may result in a desired goal of an “accurate” interpretation, and gave rise to the stereotype of classical musicians engaging only in “data transfer” rather than creative musicking. While I am not suggesting that we abandon all attempts to “accurately” perform the symbols which the composer has put on a page, it is also a worthwhile endeavor to consider that whether or not an interpretation is “accurate” and/or “traditional” is often very much an open question (see Taruskin 1992), and like many other things in the world of the arts, dependent on context, much of which is socially constructed. Admittedly, this is not as much of an issue in SASN, MRB, and

53 This feeling of connection may result from a number of different factors; certainly, knowing that one is producing your “best sounds” can help with a feeling of connection through an artistically satisfying performance.

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Ilimaq as it might be with other works by other composers: the composer is still living and available to offer performance guidance, for one thing (though even that does not necessarily mean that his way is definitively, objectively “better”), and the nature of the music itself leaves perhaps less room for personal interpretation then, say, a Bach violin sonata. Nevertheless, some interpretive room is still there, as I will discuss below. And just because we can approach musicking with a broader goal of performance doesn’t mean that one should make the mistake of thinking that the way a piece sounds isn’t necessarily important. The importance of the sound of a performance as an ultimate goal varies, again depending on the context: I would suggest that it is somewhat of a sliding scale, mattering a bit more when the composition is fully notated and has a lengthy performance tradition, and mattering a bit less if the music is more experimental and therefore process driven.

Despite its importance in the world of musicking, the resulting sound is not the only aspect of a performance that one should consider. While “theatre” and “concerts” have, by many, been thought of as separate types of performances, I would suggest that all performances (including everything from formal classical concerts to casual improv jams) can and should have an element of theatre in them, even if minimal; that is, all performances necessarily include visual elements (whether explicitly or implicitly), and the enacting of relationships between performers (and between performer and instruments), consciously or otherwise.54 Indeed, theatre and ritual are considered to be closely associated with each other. The “boundaries” between the two are often not boundaries at all; rather they are two similar and often blurry and overlapping concepts. Schechner asks “To what degree are performers of rituals… aware of the performing- arts aspects of their sacred work? Also, what about large-scale performative events that cannot really be easily classified as belonging to either theatre or ritual…?” (Schechner 1985, 4) In this case, I am using the term “theatre” in the broadest sense of the word: not in the sense of following the structural and narrative guidelines of Aristotle’s Poetics, but rather in a more general sense as conveyed by definition 3.a. in the Oxford English Dictionary: “Dramatic performances as a branch of art, or as an institution; the drama. Also, the drama of a particular

54 This is not to suggest that all concerts need visual projections or special sets or lighting. Rather, it is a reminder that even elements that may not be consciously decided upon (e.g. the architecture of a given performance space or the colour of the stage) are, by default, part of the experience of performance.

118 time or place; dramatic art as a craft, the theatrical profession.” Note that this definition does not include any requirement of spoken text, nor of the presence of a linear narrative (i.e. a “traditional plot”).

In the case of these percussion works of John Luther Adams, I would suggest that they are works of theatre in that, as articulated above, a performance of them should include considerations not only of sound, but also other elements more typically related to “traditional” dramatic theatre: considerations of gesture, of place (setting), of overall visual presentation. Although Adams’ pieces don’t strictly speaking fall into the definition of “composed theatre” – that is, the “non-musical” elements are not composed (or, in fact, even indicated) with the structure or level of detail that the musical elements are – there are nevertheless some similarities. Particularly, Rebstock (2013, 19) suggests that “composed theatre” addresses those areas of performance that fall between the “classical” disciplines or “conceptions” of music, theatre and dance. As noted by multiple performers, there are aspects to these compositions and their respective performances that seem to be more than a simple musical concert. The way that one presents themselves while performing these works likewise seems to indicate that aspects of both theatre (presentation) and dance (gesture/choreography) are necessarily present.

5.1 Conceptual Framework for Performance

To that end, I therefore propose the following conceptual framework relating to live performance of these works:

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Figure 5-1: Conceptual Framework of Performance

The components of sound, gesture, environment and place are all necessary ingredients that contribute to the act of performing a musical work. All these four components are, to an extent, linked to each other, but also exist as their own factors. “Sound” includes not only the

120 sound that the performers produce, but also takes into account other sound-related factors such as instrument selection and acoustics of the hall (which in turn is related to “environment” and “place”). “Gesture” includes not only performer gestures which produce sounds, but also those that are considered “extra-musical” (e.g. movements that don’t directly affect sound production), such as the way that performers transition between physical stations. It’s also clear, however that gesture and sound have an intimate relationship – not only do percussionists’ gestures produce sound, but the sound they produce can in turn influence the way that we formulate the succeeding gestures. Likewise, as discussed in Chapter 2, “environment” and “place” can exist as separate concepts, one more concrete and one more abstract, yet they too are intimately connected. All of these contribute to the performance. The nature of Adams’ compositions is such that elements of ritual and theatre are already built in to a performance; I suggest that these elements can be emphasized through sound, gesture, environment and place. Consciously examining these elements is recognition that a “performance” is in fact “the whole constellation of events, most of them passing unnoticed, that takes place in both performers and audience from the time the first spectator enters the field of performance … to the time the last spectator leaves.” (Schechner 1973, 8)

The acting of musicking is, by definition, an experience for all those who take part. Whether participating more actively (performing) or more passively (listening and watching), all who are present are somehow involved. This experience, assuming that there is more than one person involved (i.e. there are some number of listeners in addition to a performer) may lead to a sense of liminality, of “in-between-ness”, especially for performers; this liminality, of being “in” a performance, may be experienced as what Schechner (1985, 120-127) describes as “transportation” – the feeling of being “taken” somewhere, and then returning back to a pre- performative state sometime after the performance is completed.55 It could also be that even if a feeling of liminality is not achieved, those involved in the experience of musicking may yet feel

55 Note that Schechner differentiates between “transportation” – which is a temporary state where a participant may return to their “normal” or previous state after the performance/ritual – and “transformation”, where a participant is somehow indelibly changed after the performance/ritual. I have used transportation here as I suspect that it is closer to what many performers and audience members who are musicking with compositions very loosely associated with the Western classical tradition experience. Schechner also notes, however, that multiple transportations over a (long) period may in fact lead to a transformation of some nature.

121 a sense of community develop: a kinship from simply having taken part in the experience with a group of like-minded people that are there for the purpose of engaging in musicking, of experiencing something important with people who also find it important to them. Either of these outcomes, however, could conceivably lead to a sense of communitas: that idea of a reshuffling of a hierarchy, so that, at least for a time, structural barriers between participants seem to fall away; a sense, especially in the more environmentally-focused works, that the “distinctions between culture and nature” (E Turner 2012, 143) also fall away; and, importantly, a sense of “collective joy” in having taken part in the experience. This transportation and communitas may affect performers and/or audience in various ways. For performers, even/especially if they are in this state, the “flow” of performance may cause them to make adjustments to how they are performing: it may affect their sound and gesture, and possibly how they interact with (or, in the case of Adams’ compositions, how they are sonically creating) a sense of place. For audience members, it may lead them to continue to seek out other fulfilling musicking experiences.

5.2 Performance Practice Suggestions

Strange and Sacred Noise, The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies and Ilimaq are each relatively contemporary pieces that require a substantial commitment of both time (in preparation and in performance) and effort on the part of the performer. As noted in Chapter 4, much of this effort comes not in the form of tackling a complex technical challenge or delving deeply into musical interpretation issues, but instead happens primarily through constant repetitive rehearsal of the material (ideally well before a scheduled performance) in order to build stamina; this sort of musical effort is not one which all performers will necessarily find enjoyable or rewarding. Furthermore, these pieces can be logistically challenging to rehearse and perform because of spatial and instrumental requirements. Though Schick (2019) suggests that there are now more composers56 writing music of a similar nature to something like MRB – that is, music that

56 Schick mentions Sarah Hennies as one example of a composer/performer interested in a similar type of compositional process.

122 focuses on sound, timbre and experience over narrative and traditional structural melody and harmony – these works can still seem unusual or challenging to an audience, some of whom may be unsure what to listen “to” or “for”. These considerations have resulted in each piece being performed relatively infrequently as compared to many other pieces in the performance repertoire (for example Cage’s Third Construction for percussion quartet or Andrew Thomas’ Merlin for solo marimba, two pieces not without musical and technical preparation challenges). This relative lack of performance has meant that there is not an established “performance practice” for these three works. That may not, in fact, be a bad thing: as someone who musics through both performance and audiation, I have found that one of the great joys of live performance in music is a freedom of expression, and that one piece may have many different interpretations between performers (or even between different performances given by the same performers). The individuality of Adams’ compositional voice also suggests to me that these pieces are in many ways ripe for experimentation in all areas of performance presentation. Nevertheless, in the hope of encouraging future performances of these works with the eventual (if perhaps sometimes elusive) goal of communitas for all involved, I will make some suggestions regarding the four aspects of performance (sound, gesture, environment and place) detailed in the conceptual framework above. Note that, as with the diagram, these elements are not always separate; what affects one may often affect another. For ease of organization, however, I shall use these four categories as a starting point for these ideas.

5.2.1 Sound

Aspects of sound are generally the first things that most musicians are concerned with when preparing a performance, and certainly they should not be neglected here. Adams is, after all, interested in creating a sense of place through sound: his whole notion of “sonic geography” rests on it. Because the structure of each of these pieces is geometric and lacks a linear narrative, and because the sound is the main thing that Adams is therefore interested in (and which the listener therefore focuses on), care should be taken in selecting and creating sound. There is no one right “intention” in performing these pieces, especially with no traditional narrative or strongly programmatic aspects, however there should be an intention behind every aspect of the piece, including sound and instrument selection. Additionally, each of these pieces

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(SASN and MRB in particular) are structurally built around large dynamic contrasts. It is important that a performance fully embrace these extremes, and that there is a difference in character between dynamics; “loud” requires a different, heavier, fuller touch, and is not simply an increased-volume version of “soft”. Louder playing should, especially in the drum movements, have a generally more aggressive character than soft playing. This change in character as well as dynamics will help to even more clearly illustrate the structural markers delineated by the dynamic instructions.

5.2.1.1 Instruments and Implements

As much as possible, instruments for all of these pieces should be selected with two goals in mind: unity of sound (within a given instrument group) and openness/resonance. The unity of sound is especially important for movements such as “thunder”, in which the accelerations and decelerations of the drum parts suggest both vertical alignment and/or horizontal motion, and which results in an unusual sort of counterpoint. At the very least, drums within a given setup should be unified in sound: one could argue that slight differences between each player’s setup might in some instances or acoustics may serve to highlight the different lines. The most important aspect of achieving a homogenous sound is drumhead selection and tuning. If it all possible, any given tom-toms within a setup should have the same general type (if not the exact same model) of batter heads, so that a given pair of sticks or mallets will produce a similar timbre from drum to drum. Exact head selection preference may be determined somewhat by the acoustic environment of the performance; my own suggestion is that coated heads are an excellent default choice, as they take away some of the “plastic-y” attack sound that can be present with clear batter heads (especially when using drumsticks or wood-tipped timpani mallets). For the drum set in Ilimaq or “thunder” in MRB, using one type of head across all the toms-toms is highly recommended. Drum tuning need not be exactly prescribed, except to suggest that there are obvious pitch differences between consecutive drums; having the pitch relationships be too close together will muddy the counterpoint of some of Adams’ writing here. Some judicious muting of the drumheads may be quite useful in these movements. Though I suggest instruments with lots of resonance above, I do so because it is much easier to take resonance away from a lively-sounding instrument than it is to somehow add it to a “dead” or “muted” sounding instrument. For the drums, the faster the overall character of the part, the dryer or damped the sound should be, so that clarity of sound is achieved. For the drum parts

124 which play the lowest, longest-duration single notes (and/or simulate a long duration with sustained rolls), much more resonance will be wanted.

Snare drums (for the outer two movements of both SASN and MRB) should also have a gradual continuum of pitch. (The same drums can be used for both pieces, since the movements of MRB are based directly off the movements of SASN.) Adams suggests two snare drums and two field drums, but I believe that the exact designation or size is not as important as having a noticeable pitch difference between each drum.57 They should also aim for a continuation of timbre, especially in regards to how much the snares affect the overall sound of the drum. Given the important role that noise plays in each piece (especially in SASN), and given that the sound of snare drums are often thought to be “noisy”, perhaps because of the apparent sonic similarities to timbres of white noise, I would suggest drums in which the snare sound is a major component of the overall sound when struck by a stick. I would also suggest that brighter snares (versus warmer, “throatier” snares such as gut”) may be more appropriate in order to emphasize the “noise” aspect of the sound, especially at the loudest dynamics. Having brighter, “wetter” snares will also help with producing a smoother roll sound when playing at a pianissimo dynamic. Overall articulation of the drum, however, should still allow for the quick forte single strokes to be heard clearly. Again, any dampening of the head will likely depend on the acoustic properties of the performance space.

Stick and mallet selection is always a difficult topic, as so much depends on personal playing style, on the instruments at hand and on the nature of the performance space. As a general guideline, for all drum parts I suggest a stick or mallet that strikes a compromise between being weighty enough to produce a full sound, especially at the extreme ends of the dynamic spectrum, yet light enough to enable continuous and sometimes rigorous playing for an extended time. General mallet head size will likely change in proportion to the overall size of the drum in question: the smallest/highest tom-toms may do fine with a drumstick with a small bead tip, but larger drums will likely want something closer to a wooden timpani mallet. Other than perhaps

57 TorQ’s performance have typically featured a piccolo snare, a concert snare, a small field drum and a larger field drum; University of Toronto’s performance utilized a medium size field drum and three sizes of “standard” snare drums.

125 bass drums, I would in general recommend using wooden-tipped beaters: the sharpness of attack that they provide (especially at louder volumes) helps to increase the dramatic effect of those attacks, and gives the overall sound more drive and energy.

If at all possible, the mallet instruments should be the same model and brand, to help minimize any small differences in timbres between instruments. I would suggest that, following their natural properties, performers should aim for the marimba section to sound “darkest” (that is, with more emphasis on the fundamental and lower overtones and a smoother attack), the vibraphone section to be brighter, and the glockenspiel section to be the brightest. Mallets should be selected to produce a homogenous sound between instruments of a given type. Marimba mallets should be soft enough that so that the rolls sound more like a continuous duration of sound – individual sounds from hand motions shouldn’t be obviously apparent – but may need a little bit of weight to ensure that the pitches are still being heard, and that the resulting sound isn’t too “airy” or “on the surface” (again, this may be more of a concern depending on performance space and size, audience proximity to the performers, etc.). Vibraphone mallets should be very articulate and cutting, though I would suggest that they don’t need to be too “glassy”: finding an articulate mallet that also sounds a little bit “dark” will help leave the brightest sonic space to be occupied by the glockenspiels. It is also important that the pitch material in this section remain clear: to my ear the “noise” aspect of this movement comes in large part from what we typically perceive as many closely voiced “dissonant” intervals, so mallet selection shouldn’t be so attack-heavy that the tone is ever lost. Glockenspiels should be played with bright, articulate mallets: one of the most interesting acoustic phenomena of glockenspiels is the way in which the harmonics of a multiple played notes combine and produce acoustic beating, and sometimes seem to even produce “additional” notes that aren’t there (difference tones). In keeping with the spirit of “noise”, this aspect of the sound should be encouraged and need not be minimized.58

58 If performers are not already wearing some sort of partially sound-blocking headphones or earbuds for purposes of listening to a click track, it is strongly recommended that they wear ear protection in general, but especially for this movement. Indeed, depending on proximity to a given instrument or setup, performers may also consider supplying ear protection to audience members as a precaution for potential hearing damage from the loudest dynamics.

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Cymbals and triangles (for SASN and MRB) should be selected so that they either have a unity of general timbre, or create a continuous timbre spectrum. By way of example, it would not be appropriate to use a “trashy”-sounding Chinese-style cymbal59 in amongst a group of “smoother” crash cymbals: the shorter and harsher attack and sustain sounds of the former would not blend well with the latter. The “bell cymbals” required for the third movement of Ilimaq are different than traditional Turkish-style cymbals. They are typically smaller in diameter but much thicker and heavier: the resulting sound has far fewer harmonics than a typical Turkish or Chinese cymbal, and therefore a much more obvious fundamental pitch, without being a totally “pure” note.60 The triangles required for MRB should have similar timbres and, perhaps most importantly, similar resonances. The “dinner-bell”- or “blacksmith”- style triangles, typically made out of hammered iron, are not generally recommended as they lack the resonance and “shimmer” of orchestral-style triangles. In order to facilitate ease of one- handed playing while also keeping as much resonance as possible, it may be desirable to mount the triangles in a row between two horizontal rack pieces, spaced just above and just below the edges of the biggest triangle. The use of fishing line to loosely tie the triangles to both the upper and lower rack pieces will help keep the triangles in a static position, particularly when playing fast sixteenth notes by alternating strokes on multiple inner sides of a given instrument.

Tam tams should be mounted on racks to facilitate ease of playing with two beaters, in order to generate the smoothest continuous roll at all dynamics. Instruments with a wide spectrum of harmonics are preferred (especially for the largest tam tams) – the type of gongs known as “chau gongs” are generally the most suitable for these huge dynamic ranges, as they are heavy enough to emphasize the fundamental and lowest harmonics at quiet dynamics, but can sustain the higher fundamentals during a sustained forte roll. It is this wide spectrum of harmonics that produces the gongs that sound the “noisiest”; the unpredictable combinations of these harmonics when multiple instruments are being played are, of course, what inspired Adams to begin

59 “Chinese”-style cymbals typically have a square cup-style bell and an upturned flange on the hedge. Most modern cymbal manufacturers make some version of this type of cymbal, often designed to emphasize a harsh, cutting attack and with very little natural sustain.

60 These types of cymbals are commercially available from most major companies: Sabian’s “Ice Bell” or Zildjian’s “Zil-Bel” are two such examples. It would also be possible to use something like Dream’s “Jing” cymbals for a similar effect.

127 looking for “the pure tone” inside noise sounds and so to write MRB. Gongs that have a raised centre boss or otherwise have a very pronounced fundamental pitch with fewer overtones are not appropriate for either SASN or MRB.

5.2.1.2 Electronic Sounds

One major challenge of both MRB and Ilimaq is the integration of acoustic instruments with electronic sounds. As much as possible, I believe these sounds should be closely integrated. For MRB, because the electronic sounds were created by applying various filters to recordings of the acoustic instruments and match the structure and general contours of the acoustic instruments, integration is especially important: in a perfect scenario, it should be difficult to tell exactly what parts of the “total” sound are being produced acoustically or electronically. This integration has partly to do with a balance of volume levels. In order to achieve excellent and consistent balance throughout, it is strongly recommended that the electronic playback be controlled or monitored by a separate sound engineer (rather than by the performer), a recommendation that holds for Ilimaq as well.61 Depending on the venue, the instruments for MRB may need to be amplified in order to help achieve that balance.

Another aspect of the balance comes from placement of the speakers for the electronic sounds. MRB offers a choice of stereo or four channel playback. Because the sounds are so closely linked to the acoustic music, my own preference would be for stereo sound, with the speakers situated closely to the performer, so that all the sound seems to be coming from the same physical location. If, however, the performer is also amplified, then there are considerably more options available (since the performer’s sound may now also be routed so that it is coming from four channels, or wherever the audio is coming from in a given setup). These decisions will be closely linked with the circumstances and properties of the performance venue.

The questions surrounding amplification and sound placement in Ilimaq are a bit more involved. The sound design is to some extent more determined: in order for the structure of the piece to function, there must be at least four speakers surrounding the audience; three of those will

61 Glenn Kotche suggested that sound engineer Jody Ellf was an “essential” part of the performance of Ilimaq and stated “I wouldn’t want to do it [perform the piece] without him.” (Kotche 2019b)

128 represent the “ghost players” that echo the live performer. Nevertheless, the location of the speakers must be chosen. In the technical materials included with the score, audio files for both “quad cross” and “quad corner” configurations are included: which configuration is more appropriate may be determined by acoustics, general layout or technical limitations of the performance venue. Another important choice is whether to produce the other “ghost players” through live digital delay – taking a signal from the performer and sending it with increasing delay through each directional speaker - or through playback of the supplied tracks. The advantage to live signal processing is that the resulting sounds will much more closely match the sounds that the performer is creating in real time. Using the supplied tracks offers more security in playback, as any technical issues with micing the acoustic setups wouldn’t be transmitted into the additional tracks; it also allows an easier integration with click tracks and the supplied “aura” tracks. It does mean that the sounds used by the performer have to be selected to match the sounds on the recording as closely as possible. (One solution to this last problem would be for a performer to record their own “ghost player” tracks ahead of time on the performance instruments, rather than on relying on the tracks recorded by Glenn Kotche, but that scenario presents its own logistical and financial challenges.) In either case, it’s imperative that the “ghost” tracks sound as integrated with the acoustic performance as possible. The “aura” tracks – those elements of the electronic sound that featured the processed instrument and environmental sounds – should also be distributed throughout the sound system so that there is a sense that the audience is surrounded by these sounds.

Figure 5-2 Possible Ilimaq speaker configurations: quad cross (left) and quad corner (right). Illustration by the author.

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5.2.2 Gesture

One of the great pleasures of musicking as part of a live performance is the ability to not only hear but to see the music being performed. Much has been written about how we “hear” with our eyes – in other words, that performer’s gestures will affect the way that our brains interpret the acoustic information that we are hearing. This is perhaps especially true for percussionists. My own personal experience has made me realize that I generally prefer watching musicians perform percussion solos or chamber works rather than simply listening to them. The visual element of performing on percussion instruments is an integral aspect of performance in part because of the variety of instruments (and necessarily related variety of performance gestures) that one may witness in a single concert. There is a certain fascination for both fellow percussionists and “lay people” in observing and constantly trying to answer an implicit question: “How are they making that sound?”

5.2.2.1 Ancillary Musical Gesture

Musicians – especially percussionists – use gestures not only to create sound, but to emphasize musical aspects of their performance, even if those gestures do not affect the acoustic result. Schutz and Manning, among others, discuss the importance of “ancillary” gestures to percussionists’ performance, suggesting that their observation and examination may add to traditional score analysis as a way of most fully understanding the structure of a composition. They even suggest that they are a necessary part of a “complete” performance: “[Ancillary gesture] holds clear practical value. Additionally, it raises the issue of whether audio-alone formats such as radio broadcasts and mp3s full capture the musical experience.”62 (Schutz and Manning, 2013, 27) Given that percussionists often cannot directly control the duration of an instrument’s sound merely through the necessary striking motion (i.e. when one plays a snare drum stroke or a marimba note, there is no option to sustain that note any longer than its natural decay), we use gesture to suggest elements of phrasing and articulation that may not be present

62 Regarding Adams’ compositions and SASN specifically, Burrows (2019) noted that he didn’t think that a recording of the work, which he had heard before playing the piece, accurately or fully captured the experience of a live performance.

130 acoustically. We also tend to “dance” while playing or listening to music – that is, to move our bodies in response to an implied series of pulses – and these movement can also demonstrate multiple layers of rhythmic structure in the composition. (Schutz and Manning, 2012, 10)

Much of the work that Schutz and Manning have done on ancillary gestures focuses specifically on playing marimba, and how stroke gesture and duration, particularly post-impact, affects the perception of sound (versus the acoustic measurement of the sound): they found, through an experiment with audio and video analysis and a number of participants, that percussionists can create the illusion of a single struck marimba note having a longer duration through a longer and more legato post-strike gesture. Though none of these Adams compositions involve rubato marimba playing, the implication of the research is still useful when performing some of the drum movements, particularly moments in “thunder” and “rumble” (MRB), “velocities….” (SASN) and “Descent” (Ilimaq). As the rhythmic density of the drum parts lessens and the theoretical duration of the note lengthens, performers may help provide that illusion of duration through their pre- and post-stroke gestures. A similar approach may be taken with cymbals and triangles in “crash” and “shimmer”, as well as the cymbal-only sections in Ilimaq.

5.2.2.2 Performative/Theatrical Gesture

Gesture is not only useful in helping to express specific musical ideas, but also from a broader performance standpoint: ancillary gestures may also help to create a mood or atmosphere or provoke some sort of emotional response. In one sense, percussionists are leaders in this field as compared to other instrumentalists: we now have a whole sub-genre of “theatre music” that is more focused on gestures and body movements than on sounds produced on or with instruments (e.g. Vinko Globokar’s ?Corporel, Cage’s Living Room Music, and Mark Applebaum’s Aphasia, to name but a few). Yet, when it comes to compositions more aligned to the traditional Western classical music canon, it seems like gesture as an important visual and performative element is less often considered. Schechner highlights the contrast between “musicians” and “actors”: “…in American society musicians are performers, not actors; their role-playing is a life-style role-playing not ‘characterization’ as in drama.” (1973, 12) While I do not necessarily think that anyone who performs these Adams compositions needs to fully immerse themselves in actor training from a given culture, I do think that it is important to remember that all our gestures as percussionists are observed as part of the performance, and should therefore have

131 some sort of thought and intention behind them. This part is especially crucial: gesture simply for the sake of gesture may in fact decrease the effectiveness of a performance, as it can “lower ratings of performance quality (Wapnick, Mazza, and Darrow, 1998) when used in a displeasing manner.” (Schutz and Manning, 2013, 26)

Some of the performers that I interviewed mentioned the importance of gesture in their performances. Glenn Kotche stated that in Ilimaq he “performed like a rock drummer”, in order to help get the intensity of the piece across, as well as to provide “a show” for the audience; he was often “dripping in sweat” before the end of the first movement. Adams suggested that Allen Otte looked somehow “different” when performing SASN and that difference (i.e. the weight of the stroke) was necessary in order to get a huge sound. Campbell mentioned the importance of “choreography” in helping to foster the “serious, austere and focused” character of SASN. Schick (2006, 141) says that “The way a percussionist looks and moves on stage is among the most important and highly personal aspects of percussion playing. For percussionists the goals of individuality, complexity and coherence are as important in the world of gesture as they are in the sonic and interpretive aspects of performance.” In other words: the most important thing is the intention, and how connected that is to an individual performer.63

While I fully encourage an individuality of gesture and performance practice, and do not intend to describe exactly how I think each piece should be played, I would like to encourage future performers to engage in thinking about how intention can be manifested through gesture. One aspect that should be considered is how gesture can be used to heighten contrast (especially dynamic) and tension (both rhythmic and dynamic), and therefore to make the structure of the work clearer. By way of example, for TorQ’s performance of SASN, we were careful to remain as still as possible in any of the silences, particularly in the outer movements with their multiple bars of rests. We felt that this stasis was an effective visual connection to the (semi-) silences,

63 When performing both MRB and Strange and Sacred Noise, I see myself as a sort of sonic priest performing rites that are alternately subdued and intense; they are not necessarily negative, but they are also not particularly “happy” or “joyful” in a light-hearted sort of way. This intension is transmitted both through facial expression (generally as neutral as I can make it during the more subdued moments, and perhaps showing signs of strain or pent-up emotion during more intense sections), and through body movement and tension: though I try to keep some amount of relaxation in my arms and body to enable proper technique and the production of a large, warm sound, I also feel a certain amount of tension in my core and limbs that keeps me planted and very focused.

132 just as the action of rapid strokes was a counterpoint to extremely loud and “noisy” sections. In particularly intense sections, such as the third movement of Ilimaq or parts of “thunder” in MRB, one may want to manipulate arm motion to increase the sense of “attack” towards the drums; higher lift between strokes and/or “sharper” movements can indicate a greater level of ferocity. In terms of tension on a more macro level, I would suggest that in both SASN and MRB, it is effective to not totally release until the very end of the performance: some perceived tension between movements is helpful in connecting the disparate sections. To that end, I suggest that any transitional movement (including the initial entrance of the performance space and moving from station to station) should be done slowly and deliberately, with as little extraneous movement as possible. To me, this slow deliberate movement is also associated with a sense of mystical ritual, part of the reason that I find it so effective. This is specifically important in the handling of sheet music: it should be placed beforehand in which a way that any established emotive or atmospheric state is not disturbed by the inadvertent rustle of paper or a frantic page turn. The question of “where do I put the music” is most difficult in the Ilimaq drum set movements, there are many pages and no opportunity to turn because of the constant playing; the other works are more easily solved.64

5.2.3 Place

Place – in all its different senses and meanings – is perhaps the most abstract all four identified considerations that go into a performance of Adams’ percussion music, yet it is no less important for that. Adams’ own philosophy focuses so heavily and repeatedly on ideas of place, and his music so replete with experiences and timbres instead of narratives, that it is an unescapable factor. As noted in Chapter 2, “sonic geography” is the idea that Adams’ compositions can, when performed, create their own “acoustic space-time”; the self-similar structures and masses of sound act as features in a sonic landscape, a landscape that one explores and engages with through hearing rather than seeing or touching. I believe that this aural sense of place is created mostly through the sounds produced when the music is performed: one could, theoretically, create that sense of sonic geography without any

64 Glenn Kotche placed a row of stools and benches around where the snare drum would usually be played, and rested his music on that – see Plate 4-3 in Chapter 4 (92).

133 consideration given to the location of the performance or any visual aspects, especially if any listeners simply closed their eyes. This is exactly what may happen when one listens to a recording of one of these works.65 However, the goal of a live performance is a sense of communitas, which occurs through aspects of performance, ritual and theatre: all of these involve visual elements. To that extent, I believe that the place of the performance can have a substantial effect on the overall success of a performance, at least in terms of helping the performers and audience to feel as though they had an “experience”. I also think that it can serve to heighten a feeling of ritual, as well as a sense of community, even before the actual playing of the music begins. To that end, considerations of place are very important. I am by no means the first or only one to reach this conclusion: Esler (2007), Carl (2012) and others have written about aspects of this question, but I wish to link place explicitly to ideas of ritual and community.

5.2.3.1 Physical Space

Many different logistical and aesthetic factors must be considered in determining an appropriate performance location. Is the potential space big enough for audience and performers and instruments? Is it accessible, both in itself and for people to travel to? What are the acoustics like? Does the (usual) function of the building or place have any relation to the music being performed? Should it? The answer to each of these questions will likely be different for any potential and performance, as well as for each of the three works discussed here.

While the default type of venue for performances that fall loosely in the Western classical music canon is typically some sort of purpose-defined hall, I do not agree that this is necessarily the best option for any of the pieces: each of these works is “different” from much of the canon in its own way, and I believe that their performance therefore deserves a different space – a “default” location may do a disservice to the efficacy of the performance. Esler suggests that “Place informs performance and performance reveals place” (2007, 86) and suggests that SASN and MRB should be performed outside in the environment, so as to provide more implicit

65 Personally I find recordings of these pieces most effective when played at a high volume through excellent speakers, so that I really feel “immersed” in the music; they are less effective when played a softer volumes or through a delivery system that makes the music sound “small” or “tinny” in any way.

134 meaning to the performance. While I agree with his general assessment of performance and place, I don’t concur that SASN should be performed outside. In my experience with the piece, one of its most powerful aspects is how noise is portrayed through dynamic extremes: the sounds of many of those instruments together, when playing at the same time at the loudest dynamics, can be overwhelming and almost unbearable. It becomes something that one feels as much as one hears. This is the power of noise, of sound, and of the natural processes that inspired Adams’ writing of the piece: they exist on a scale much greater than that of an individual human being. Though performing the piece outside would return it to its “environmental” roots, the nature of outdoor acoustics (especially if the space is open, and there is any sort of a breeze) is that sounds that are powerful or even overbearing indoors can suddenly seem much smaller and more inconsequential. This is where Esler and I differ: he suggests that place/environment must always be the primary concern (2007, 86), with sound second. I contend that sound can and should still be primary; or at least, that it is possible to find a place of performance where they can both be equal. Place becomes less important if the compositions can’t be heard in an effective way.66

I agree with Esler that concert halls are not “real places” for music performance (or at least for performances of this music), in the sense that they don’t foster an experience of “intimate connection” with performer and audience. (2007, 94) I think therefore that a more effective space for a performance of SASN is one that incorporates some element of ritual in its usual function or use. Comparisons of Adams’ compositions to architectural landmarks, especially those with a ritual/sacred purpose, is apt: in addition to the ritual feeling of a work like SASN, the geometric structure of the works suggest a kinship to the construction of physical buildings. Esler suggests that “Performing [SASN] is a ritual without culture” (2007, 83) so the specific cultural relation is not necessarily important; Tarantino (2009, 220-223) compares Adams’ For Lou Harrison to both the Circular Alter at the Temple of Heaven in Beijing and the Tholos

66 While I do feel strongly that SASN should be performed indoors, I am more open to the suggestion that MRB or Ilimaq could be performed effectively outdoors. Each already requires amplified audio as part of the performance, so the possibility of amplifying all the acoustic instruments and sending that signal through the same speakers – and therefore perhaps having more control over the volume – is one worth exploring. There is certainly something to be said for integrating the sounds of the natural environment with the composed music, not only from an aesthetic perspective, but also from the Cage/Adams philosophical perspective of “sound = noise = music”, and from the unexpected synchronicities that can occur between “musical” sound and “natural” sound”.

135 tombs of Mycanae, and Joann Faletta has compared Adams’ music to a cathedral (Sirota 2014). Why not, then explore the possibility of a performance in a “sacred” building? Performing in a building associated with the sacred has advantages in addition to the explicit association with ritual: often the acoustic properties of such a building are quite resonant, and therefore may help to make the power of the sound more dramatic (as opposed to a drier acoustic, where one might have to work considerably harder to make what is perceived as a “big” sound). Additionally, these spaces, as physical representatives of sacred traditions, are often constructed to be visually impressive, or even intimidating; this sense of awe that one may feel inside such a building can contribute to the feeling of a performance of an Adams composition being an “event” or something “out of the ordinary” or “more than a concert”, and can serve as a visual connection to the immensity of the some of the sounds. This sense of wonder at a physical location can be enhanced through considered lighting design. As well as offering another layer of visual enhancement, the addition of coloured and/or patterned lights can also help differentiate the performance experience from the usual cultural function of the building.

5.2.3.2 Performance Layout

One of the biggest determinations of the hierarchy of relationships before, during and after a performance is the layout or configuration of a performance space. Christopher Small writes extensively about the nature of these relationships as they typically occur in Western classical music:

The modern concert hall is built on the assumption that a musical performance is a system of one-way communication, from composer to listener through the medium of performers. […] Nor does the design of the building allow any social contact between performers and listeners. It seems, in fact, designed expressly to keep them apart. It is not only that the orchestra musicians enter and leave the building by a separate door from the audience and remain out of sight when not actually playing, but also that the edge of the platform forms a social barrier that is for all practical purposes as impassable as a brick wall. (Small 1998:26-27)

If we are to encourage a sense of community amongst all present at the performance in the hopes that it will lead to communitas – the (temporary) breaking down of structural hierarchies, “a recognition of a generalized social bond” (V. Turner 2008, 96) – then rethinking standard performance configuration to remove any barriers, physical or otherwise, can be an important consideration.

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One of the easiest ways to do this is to have audience and performer on the same plane: a lack of raised performing platform immediately lessens the feeling that the performers are being put on a pedestal, literally and metaphorically. I would also suggest that non-traditional audience layouts are called for, especially those that integrate audience with performers. This assertion is partially borne out by two very different responses to performances of Ilimaq. Kotche recalled his performance in St. Louis as a personal favourite in large part because there were people all around him – sitting on stairs, on multiple sides, and above him, on a balcony – and this helped him to feel a strong connection to the audience. Reimer, on the other hand, performed on a raise stage in front of people seated in fixed seats that were slightly raked. While he reported being generally very happy overall with his performance (and while audience members had good sightlines and seemed to very much enjoy it), he did mention that he felt somewhat disconnected from the audience while playing, in part because he was on a stage and behind his drum set. On a similar note, one of the aspects of the TorQ performance of SASN that was remarked on by audience members was the manner in which we were spaced out throughout the performance space (refer to Figure 4-1). I found myself feeling quite connected to the audience in that performance; I felt less connected during my performance of MRB, which took place in a traditional recital-style concert hall, where I performed on a raised stage with the audience in front of me.

Ideally a performance of any of the pieces would take place in a space that has flexible/moveable seating. This allows any number of configurations of performer and audience. For SASN, some sort of “surround sound” placement of instruments can be very effective, to help stimulate a sense of being “immersed” in the sound. For MRB, the stations could be arranged in such a way that travelling between them forms a specific path, perhaps a circle (like Schick’s “orbit”) or a representation of one of the structural shapes on which the movements are based. For Ilimaq, it would be possible to have the performer in the very centre of the space, with audience members seated all around them, facing inward from all directions. If these ideas are not possible, even making small changes in setup can help: the simple act of making sure that music stands aren’t blocking the sightlines from audience members to a performer’s hands, or angling a particular instrument group so that the audience may get a better view of what the performer is actually doing, can each add to the visual engagement and overall sense of atmosphere and emotion of the works. There are many potential performance

137 configurations that may add to the feeling of an out-of-the-ordinary “event” and a sense of ritual; the important thing, as with gesture and sound, is not necessarily the specific solution selected, but rather to consider visual aspects of the performance and to have an intention behind any choice that is made.

5.2.4 Environment

Environment (in the sense of the natural world) is the factor that is generally the hardest to integrate into a performance; this is somewhat ironic, since so many of Adams’ compositions have ideas of environment as part of them, either explicitly or implicitly. Environment may be considered either in the literal or representative sense. To literally include the environment, one either has to perform the works outdoors, in nature, or perhaps to find an indoor performance venue which looks onto the natural world outside.67 As stated previously, I don’t believe performing these pieces outside will necessarily lead to the most effective performance from a “sound” perspective, though it may be engaging in other visual or sensual ways.

Including representations of the environment is almost certainly more practical, and can be done in ways that don’t affect the sound quality of the performance. One suggestion is to include program notes about the pieces with a performance; these notes should include the environmental references to the pieces’ meaning, structure and musical materials and/or Adams’ anecdotes about their creation (e.g. how watching and hearing the ice break-up on the Yukon River was the inspiration for SASN or a note detailing the various sounds that have been integrated into the tape part of Ilimaq). Another is to incorporate elements of the environment more directly into the production design: lighting could be designed to mimic the effect of rippled sunlight or to suggest colours of a forest. It could also be incorporated in a slightly more abstract sense: one could project diagrams and explanations of the fractals that are the building blocks of both our natural world and some of Adams’ compositions.

67 Such a building that is designed for music is, I believe, not common, as large areas comprised of glass windows are unsuitable for the highest degree of acoustic control of a concert hall. Small also suggests that most concert halls are very much designed to keep everything that happens inside, away from the outside world (Small 1998:25)

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I believe that perhaps the best incorporation of environment, however, is through the addition of outreach. Adams’ care for environmental issues resonates with many people today, especially in the era of increasing concern about global climate change. A performance could include a pre- or post-show talk with the performers and an expert from the field of environmental science: each could give their perspective on topics such as the melting of Arctic ice, how noise is transmitted in nature, or aspects of Indigenous environmental knowledge and beliefs. This would ensure not only a connection to the environmental aspects of these pieces, but could also serve to provide everyone with a greater awareness of some of the issues currently facing our environment, something whose purpose I believe Adams would appreciate.

5.3 Conclusion

In this dissertation, I have attempted to fully explore different aspects of three of John Luther Adams’ most interesting and most challenging works: Strange and Sacred Noise, The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies and Ilimaq. I have examined Adams’ musical compositional influences, placing him as an ideological (if not stylistic) descendent of a previous generation of “American maverick” composers, and suggested that three major non-musical influences in Adams’ work were environment, place, and especially ritual. I then examined the details and structure of these three works, including aspects of instrumentation, and suggested the reasons that they are considered “challenging” works for both performer and audience. I interviewed a number of prominent performers of Adams’ compositions, including Steven Schick, Allen Otte, Glenn Kotche, Ben Reimer and members of TorQ Percussion Quartet to offer their reflections on experiencing and performing his music; I also offered my own reflections as a performer. Finally, focusing on live performance and framed by Christopher Small’s reading of music as a participatory activity, I suggested a conceptual framework for the performance process, with the end goal of achieving a state of “communitas” for both performers and audiences. Further, I have presented a broad spectrum of ideas about possible directions in performance practice.

I believe that these pieces represent a special sort of musical event, an event that transcends the way that we “usually” listen to music, and therefore lend themselves to performances that are more immersive and more communal than a “standard format” concert in the Western classical music tradition. I hope that my work here will lead to further interest, further study and more performances of these unique and stunning compositions.

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Appendix A: Terminology

Music

When we think about the term “music” in the context of the Western classical canon particularly, it is often used as a noun: “music” is taken to mean “a particular composition”. Very often in this tradition, this piece of music will be written down by one or more composers and notated using a mostly-agreed-upon series of symbols and certain descriptive words (often, as a nod to classical music’s European roots, in Italian, German or French). This score – whether printed and bound, or distributed digitally via PDF – and any associated writings (e.g. specific parts if many potential performers of different instruments or voice types are involved, any related diagrams, performance notes, annotated histories, etc.) tends to be thought of as a thing that subsequently exists independently of any human interaction. It is taken as a sort of Platonic symbol of Music with a capital M, a thing that is reified and considered in some circles to be a sacred object. Thus, when a performance of a certain piece of classical music deviates from what we might call standard or common performance practice, sometimes the response is: “Let the music speak for itself!”68 The translation of this is, of course, that the whole of the “music” is contained within the score, and that anything that either deviates from the score or any part of the music making that is not included in the printed symbols is “extra-musical”69.

The problem with this sort of objectified, idealized notion of music as an object – as a thing contained in and symbolized by these markings, and that is therefore the ultimate version of that object – is that it is a definition of music that is almost wholly inapplicable to music in many other cultures and time periods. Unlike the Western classical music of almost the last 300 years, many other types and regions of music do not operate around the centrality of the printed score. Examples of such music include everything from Afro-Peruvian folk music to Japanese taiko drumming to Andalusian flamenco to Balinese gamelan: all of these musics are passed down

68 The ideas in this paragraph owe a great deal to the writings of Richard Taruskin, particularly “On Letting Music Speak for Itself” (1982:338-341).

69 See Bowman (1994) re: incorporating “pre-musical” and “extra-musical” processes or components into a broader idea of “music”, particularly pages14-15.

149 through oral transmission and learned by rote. Indeed, even the majority of current North American popular music doesn’t revolve around a written score as a primary object or outcome. Much of this music is composed either on instruments or on computers with digital audio workstations, and is transmitted through listening rather than through score form. Though some of these pieces are subsequently written down either for archival purposes or for commercial distribution, the creation of a score is never the primary goal; many musicians who want to learn these songs do so through learning them by ear, as the scores are often missing subtle but crucial nuances of this music such as timing, tuning and phrasing nuances which define the performance. The definition of the score as ultimate musical object fails to take into consideration the important considerations of music passed through oral transmission, music as improvisation, and music as experience. And though one could perhaps argue that John Luther Adams’ music – written down in score form, as it is, for others to play – falls squarely into the Western classical tradition, the somewhat maverick spirit of his aesthetic approach, the fresh and innovative sound-worlds of his compositions, and his compositional philosophies of music as place and music as experience, suggest that this very restricted definition of “what music is” is likely not the best or most appropriate fit.

I submit that a more appropriate definition for what music is – both for the context of this paper and for a varied musical life, generally – is one of process. Jacques Attali said of music that it is “…more than an object of study: it is a way of perceiving the world. A tool of understanding” (2006, 4) and that “…we must learn to judge a society more by its sound, by its art, and by its festivals” (3). Rather than being a noun, music should be thought of as a verb. Musical thinkers have expressed this idea in differing degrees of inclusivity, a sort of set of concentric circles of ideas of music participation. Wayne D. Bowman offers an excellent starting definition when he suggests that “musics are actions in which people engage with sounds” (1994, 15). Although Bowman doesn’t explicitly state that music is a verb (and in fact uses it here in a way that falls somewhere between noun and verb), the relevant idea of “doing” or somehow participating in – via “actions” – is clear. He expands on this notion by suggesting that “There may be no such ‘thing’ as music, only a constellation of doings with sound we find convenient to loosely call musics” and further that “Music is the name of a field of activity that is largely fluid and unstable.” (1994, 15, emphasis added) Howard S. Becker, in his sociological investigation of artistic processes, goes further by suggesting that, in addition to all art being an activity, that that

150 activity necessarily encompasses a wider variety of people (an “art world”) than just the performer, or even the performer and audience:

All artistic work, like all human activity, involves the joint activity of a number, often a large number, of people. Through their cooperation, the art work we eventually see or hear comes to be and continues to be. The work always shows signs of that cooperation. The forms of cooperation may be ephemeral, but often become more or less routine, producing patterns of collective activity we call an art world. (2008, 1)

This idea of art as activity, especially as it relates specifically to music, is best expressed by Christopher Small. Small’s concept of “musicking” is that of music as a verb. For Small (and, indeed, for many cultures outside of the Western classical tradition), the main focus of music is not a specific composition cast as a central “thing”, especially those that are written down: rather, it is performance, music as action. Small emphasizes that “performance does not exist in order to present musical works, but rather, musical works exist in order to give performers something to perform.” (1998, 8, original emphasis) To Small, “musicking” involves all those who participate in the musical activity. In essence, “To music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing” (9). Throughout his book, Small emphasizes that each of those parties have a relationship with one another, and that each of those relationships are important and reciprocal. (For example, although the performers are performing for an audience, that line of communication is not unidirectional: the audio and visual feedback from the audience, and the atmosphere that they create in the venue is a channel that goes back to the performer, influencing the performance. This exchange continues throughout the performance in a sort of “feedback loop”, each influencing the other.) Extending the boundaries of inclusion still further, he suggests that “musicking” may not be limited to those who engage directly in the activity, but can also involve anyone who has contributed to the event (an idea analogous to Becker’s “art worlds”). This includes not only the obvious exchange between performer and audience, but could (depending on the particular event’s context and circumstances) also include a cast of characters as diverse as light and sound technicians, venue staff, marketing staff, etc.

It is this definition of music – music as action, as inclusion, as a process involving many people with different roles, and as a sort of “broadening of the circle” – that I believe that performers

151 should strive for, and that is especially applicable when discussing aspects of performance of the compositions of John Luther Adams.

Performance

A “performance” can encompass a vast number of areas – indeed almost all – of the actions that we engage in or watch others engage in in the course of everyday life (see Schechner 2013, especially 29-51). Even objects or things can be thought of as performance, if we consider the relationships that the thing in question engenders, between itself and others, or between groups of “others” in relation to it. In other words, ultimately performances “exist only as interactions, actions and relationships” (2013, 30)70. For purposes of this investigation, we will focus on what might be termed “musical” (or perhaps more broadly, “theatrical”) performance: an event during which a person (or group of people) creates or enacts sounds and gestures. This type of performance is a double-restored behaviour: Schechner suggests that all performances inherently used “restored” behaviours, in that almost every action we take is composed of snippets of actions that we have enacted at some point previously; a musical performance, whose actions involve a representation of something that is purposefully rehearsed ahead of time, is thus doubly restored. The vehicle of such a performance – the subject, the “thing” that is “performed”, or perhaps arises from the performance – is typically described as an improvisation or a composition (or, perhaps, both).

Typically, a performance is also defined by having an audience: a person(s) who is in attendance to witness the performance but does not actively take place in the creation of the sounds or processes, and instead is a more passive participant in the event. For centuries this witnessing took place in person and in real time, but with the rise of recording technology and, more recently, internet movie streaming services such as YouTube, many performances are now also witnessed by audiences in a multitude of locations after the real-time event has taken place through various audio and visual media. (Depending on whether or not the main intention of the performance was to cater to a live, real-time audience or a future, mediated audience, some performances may be referred to more specifically as “recordings”, if their original aim was to

70 Note here the parallels to Small’s definition of music as activity. There are also parallels to Small’s idea of ritual, as will be discussed below.

152 cater to the latter group.) Some performances are highly structured and codified (for example a symphony orchestra in a concert hall), with an implicit set of rules, codes and behaviours for both performer and audience; others are much less formal. Performances defined as “music performances” or “concerts” will often have sound and listening as the primary sensual focus, though depending on the setting visual aspects may also play an important role. As the importance of the visual aspects increases, the “genre” of apparent performance might shift, and they may begin to fall under the heading of “composed theatre”, “music theatre”, or perhaps “drama” or straight “theatre”. As should be obvious by the general description of the term, a performance can happen in many different ways, in a myriad of styles and settings. Indeed, some performances may defy categorization of any specific genre or area. Though John Cage’s seminal work 4’33” is ostensibly a music composition, it involves no active creation of musical sounds in any traditional contexts; it is instead a performance whose purpose is to provoke the audience to re-examine what it means to “listen to music”. Performances may also have an explicit focus on the body/self of the performer, such that the body/self is both subject and object of the performance (see Jones 1998 for an in-depth examination of “body art” and how it relates to postmodernism and subjectivity), or they may focus entirely on the musical instrument, but in a context that is expanded and therefore outside of the Western classical tradition (see Nyman 1999, 20-21, especially the example of Brecht’s Incidental Music).

Composition

That which many people describe as the noun “music” – the sounds that performers perform and listeners listen to – is best described as a composition (other more colloquial terms could include “piece”, “song”, “tune”, etc.). A composition is a semi-set group of (musical) sounds, related and arranged in a way that can be recognizable or repeatable. (This definition has, with the rise of experimental music in the latter half of the 20th century, expanded to include repeatable processes leading to sonic results; those results may be very different from performance to performance.71)

71 See Nyman’s Experimental Music (1999), particular pp 4-22 and 110-138.

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In many traditions, compositions are passed on through an oral/aural tradition. These compositions will almost certainly not sound exactly the same each time they are performed, as imperfections in human memory tend to lead to small changes and evolutions over time, but there are typically enough recognizable elements that remain for separate performances to be classed as the same composition. Small describes compositions not relying on a musical score as “non-literate” (1998, 101).72 Examples of “non-literate” traditions include much of what Western music scholars classify as “world music”, e.g. Ewe music of Ghana or flamenco of Andalusia.

In Western music, and particularly Western classical music since the eighteenth century, compositional focus (and the ways that performers interpret those compositions) has gradually shifted from a focus on performance to a focus on the creation of a score. Despite the rise of musical notation in the Renaissance, many compositions still had “non-literate” aspects: one need only look to the tradition of Baroque continuo playing, involving a semi-improvised accompaniment based off a melody and a set of chord symbols to dictate the harmony and general motion of the bass line. There is a parallel to that tradition that exists today in the form of jazz compositions, especially those intended for soloists or smaller groups. Jazz musicians often will play off a “lead sheet” which contains only the melody and accompanying chord symbols. In this case, the style and tempo are often left up to the performers, and the melody and harmonic structure (as well as the exact rhythm and even the time signature) may be altered somewhat, while retaining enough of the original that those familiar with the “original” tune would still find it recognizable. In this case, the tradition of improvisation (sometimes known as “instant composition”) is retained.

Many “classical” compositions (especially those composed since the early 1800s) are written down very specifically, with many parameters such as pitch, rhythm, dynamics, phrasing, style, and tempo all indicated in the score. In these cases, it is not assumed that any improvisation will occur: all the information necessary to perform the piece is (theoretically) included in the score and/or parts. This seeming presence of all relevant performance instructions has perhaps

72 In 2019 this term seems potentially problematic, as in some circles “non-literate” has come to imply a lack of culture or intelligence.

154 ironically led to many discussions about the “authenticity” of performance. The general gist of the discussion might be summarised by a quote from James Webster, as quoted in Taruskin (1992, 317): “The score contains the truth and nothing but the truth, but not the whole truth.” Most of John Luther Adams’ compositional output fall into this category of literate, specifically notated pieces.

Installation

An installation is a type of composition that is usually designed for a specific location (often one that may not typically be thought of as a common “performance” venue, such as an art gallery, museum, shopping mall, public park, restaurant, etc.). Because installations are sometimes created to provide sound or motion for an audience over an extended period of time (or for many hours of the day), installations often do not involve real-time human performers and instead rely on either mechanical or digitally-generated process, for example, a tape loop, digital video, computer-generated sound, a sound sculpture activated by an audience member or by natural phenomena. Installations are created and initially metaphorically “set in motion” by a composer and/or performer, but an active real-time performer is generally not needed to keep the resulting output going. Adams’ The Place Where You Go to Listen is his best-known installation. The Place is installed in a specially constructed room in the Museum of the North in Fairbanks, Alaska. The sounds heard and colours and patterns seen in the room are derived from computer processing of real-time weather and geological data from around the state of Alaska, with certain sounds (e.g. a low-frequency rumbling) mapped to certain geological phenomena--in this case, earthquakes or tremors: the higher the tremors measure on the U.S. Geological Survey instruments, the louder and more intense the rumbling becomes. Adams describes this process as “sonification”: the sounds are not imitating any actual sounds from the processes, but are instead (arbitrary) sonic representations of sets of data. This process, though initially conceived by Adams and set in motion by a group of scientists, mathematicians and computer programmers, now runs without any active human input.73

73 For a detailed overview of The Place from Adams’ perspective, including much of the technical data used in its development, see Adams, The Place Where You Go to Listen (2009). Acknowledgements of his collaborators are listed on pages xiii-xv. See also Feisst 2012, 42-44.

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Plate A-1: Composer’s note from The Place Where You Go to Listen, Museum of the North, University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Photo by the author

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Community

Community is a word that has come to mean a lot of things for a lot of people, particularly in the age of digital media: a significant amount of current product packaging and advertising invites people to join social media “communities” that revolve around a certain product, group or experience. The word community has traditionally signified those that occupy a shared space (perhaps a neighbourhood – “the community of South Etobicoke”) or a shared heritage (“Toronto’s Jewish community”). As global communication grew and connection with those in disparate physical places was possible, the definition of community expanded to include groups that may not physically be in the same place but nonetheless share attitudes, interests or collective goals (“the new music community”, “the online gaming community”). Becker explores this concept thoroughly with his idea of “art worlds”, which “consist of all the people whose activities are necessary to the production of the characteristic works which that world, and perhaps others as well, define as art.” (2008, 34) Fabian Pfortmüller (2017) provides a slighty more specific definition that I believe is well-suited to the goals of music performance: “A community is a group of people that care about each other and feel they belong together.” This definition emphasizes the idea that there is a relationship present (or at least the possibility of a relationship resulting), and the idea of a shared identify. Similarly, the term “communal” (or slightly more specifically, “communal experience”), implies a sense of sharing, and can (and perhaps should!) also imply a sense of investment in the experience that is shared. I submit that these ideas of community are ones that we should strive for as music presenters and performers: to build relationships between performer and audience and between audience members through a shared experience (the performance) and interest (the compositions/installations and, perhaps, the performers).

Tradition

As relating to musicking, “tradition” has two differentiated but related usages: it references both a codified way of doing things based often (but not always) on the passing on of a historical precedent (e.g. “the traditional way to play a jig”) and also a collective body of (historical) work from a certain group or community (e.g. “the Western classical tradition”). Tradition sometimes gets confused or equated with “musical authenticity”, which in itself is a loaded term of much debate: what makes a performance “authentic”? Is something that is “traditional” automatically (or necessarily) “authentic”? Richard Taruskin argues that both of the terms are misleading, and

157 that we put too much emphasis on the idea of a grand, unbreakable and historically rigid tradition when performing (1982, 1992). He notes that what is considered “traditional” is often at some point “invented”: someone, at some point, had to decide to do things a certain way, because that is how a culture develops. He quotes Allan Hanson: “The fact that culture is an invention, and anthropology one of the inventing agents, should not engender suspicion or despair.” Further, Hanson suggests that tradition is now understood “quite literally to be an invention designed to serve contemporary purposes.” (Taruskin 1992, 313) Taruskin suggests that “We like what is authentic because authentic is what we like. To seek any higher or more objective criterion is to confuse the goals of performance with those of research; that there is a difference I continue to insist.” (323)74 For a definition of tradition that doesn’t include insistence about its rigidity or historical accuracy, I turn to Charles Seeger: it is “handing on of acquired characteristics”, “the principle survival mechanisms [of] human culture communities”, and how “the younger members of a group can begin where the older leave off” (as quoted in Taruskin 1992, 317). Finally, traditions are “messy” – “cumulative, multiply-authored, open, accommodating” (317) – and that makes them challenging at times, but also open to interpretation, and therefore encourages creative inspiration and experimentation.

74 As a performer and listener, I could not agree more strongly with this sentiment; I have often found that those who insist on authenticity as rigid historical accuracy are also those who tend to be most suspicious of a performer’s musical instinct and emotional reaction to the music which they are performing. And while I find music that is solely intellectually rooted interesting to study, I don’t find it a wholly engaging listening or playing experience. It seems that, for many people, performing a piece as scholarship takes away the sense of musicking and the emotions and connections that go with it, and returns the performance to a museum artifact, a thing that we can look curiously upon – interesting to contemplate but devoid of any real impact of feeling.

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Appendix B: John Luther Adams prospective interview questions

Interview Guide: John Luther Adams (February 2019) 1. What was your motivation for writing non-pitched (or mostly non-pitched) extended-length percussion works? Did that motivation change between works? 2. Can you discuss the influence that observing the drumming styles of various North American indigenous cultures has had on your work? a. How have you approached various groups to listen/participate? What has been your relationship with some of these groups? b. Is there any particular culture/style that has had an especially profound influence on your work? If so what? c. How has this influence changed from piece to piece, or throughout your compositional life? d. Is there any particular musical material that you find yourself especially drawn towards/influenced by? 3. Can you speak about the development process for these pieces? a. How much input did the performers/commissioners have? b. How long did the development take? 4. Can you elaborate on your use of the word “sacred” in title of Strange and Sacred Noise? a. What was your relationship to the idea of “sacred” both at the time of the piece, and subsequently? 5. Can you discuss your ideas of the definitions/similarities/differences of “noise” and “music”? How have these ideas shaped your compositional techniques and output? 6. These three pieces (SASN, The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies, Ilimaq) seem to have elements of ritual in them, or perhaps are/represent a ritual. Has the idea of ritual (of creating/performing it) been one that has had any place in your consciousness while writing these works? If so, can you elaborate? 7. Was it important for these works to be challenging for the performer, both physically and mentally (and perhaps emotionally)? If so, why? 8. Do you consider these works to be challenging for an audience? If so, was it important for these works to be challenging? If so, why? 9. Do you have a favourite performance of any/all of these works, or one that sticks out somehow? If so, what were the contributing factors? a. Conversely, is there a performance that you were not a fan of, or factors in certain performances that you don’t like? 10. What advice would you give to potential performers of these works? a. To potential audiences? b. To potential presenters? 11. Can you speak a bit about the differing impressions of the pieces (where applicable) between indoor and outdoor performances? 12. Is the idea of community important in your compositions, particularly these three? If so, what does the idea of “community” mean, and how/why is it important? 13. What are the hallmarks of a “favourite” concert experience for you as an audience member (of any genre/style of music)? a. What are experiences during concerts that leave you frustrated or otherwise unhappy in some aspect? 14. Do you have any plans for any additional extended-length concert works for percussion? If so, could you describe them?

Additional questions that follow up answers given to the above questions may be asked.

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Appendix C: Performer perspective interview questions

Interview Guide: Performers (March 2019) 1. Background: a. Name b. Instrument c. Number of years performing d. Brief educational/performance history 2. How did you become aware of John Luther Adams’ music, and this piece (Strange and Sacred Noise/The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies/Ilimaq) specifically? 3. Have you performed any other works by John Luther Adams? 4. Were you responsible for programming this piece of music? a. If yes, why did you choose to program/perform it? b. If no, did you personally agree with the idea of programming/performing it? Why or why not? 5. Did you hear the piece before you performed it? If yes, what was your initial reaction to it as a listener/audience member? 6. What was your initial reaction to the piece as a performer? 7. Describe the preparation/practice regimen to prepare this piece. Were there challenges that seemed unusual or different in terms of preparation, compared to other works you might typically perform? If so, how did you address these challenges? Was there anything that stood out about the amount/type of preparation/practice necessary for performance? a. Describe how and/or why you made performance decisions such as instrument choice, performance space, stage layout, etc. 8. Describe the circumstances of the performance (e.g. any other performer names, performance date/time, location/physical concert space, association with presenters/other performances, etc) 9. Were you satisfied with the initial performance? Why or why not? 10. Any other initial personal reactions/reflections after the performance? 11. Were you satisfied with the audience turn-out for the performance? Why or why not? 12. What was your impression of the audience’s reaction to the performance? What was their reaction to it? Were there any specific reactions immediately after that you remember? 13. Did anyone in the audience comment to you directly (either in person or subsequently through email, etc.) about the work and/or the performance? If yes, what did they say? 14. Would you perform/program this work again? Why or why not? 15. Would you perform/program another work by John Luther Adams again? Why or why not? 16. As a researching (and performer), I am interested in ideas of ritual in performance, and as it relates to these pieces specifically. Do you consider this piece (SASN/MRB/Ilimaq) “ritualistic” in any way, either in its conception or in performance? Why or why not? 17. Can you recall any marketing for the concert? If so, please describe.

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a. Do you think that the marketing was successful/helpful? 18. Can you recall the nature of any additional information (e.g. programme notes, pre- concert talk, etc) the audience was given either before/during/after the performance? a. What was the level of detail and focus of the information? 19. Do you think that this piece fosters as sense of community and/or a communal experience between everyone (performer/audience) involved in the performance? Why or why not? 20. If you would perform/program one of these works (or another JLA work) again, was there anything that you would do differently? If so, what? 21. Any other comments/thoughts/anecdotes?

Additional questions that follow up answers given to the above questions may be asked.

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Appendix D: MHRP Information Letter and Consent Form

Participant Name Affiliation (if applicable) Address, State/Province, Country, Postal Code Email Address Phone Number

Dear [prospective research participant]:

This letter will serve as an introduction to the research of James (Jamie) Drake, Doctoral of Musical Arts candidate at the University of Toronto. This research will examine the performance practice of the percussion music of composer John Luther Adams, with a particular focus on the extended-length concert works Strange and Sacred Noise, The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies and Ilimaq. Because you have commissioned and/or performed one of more of these pieces in its entirety, your participation of this study will be of great help to its overall veracity and authenticity.

Though my degree is currently funded through a graduate scholarship provided by the University of Toronto, this research in particular is not (at the current date) receiving any external funding, including funding from corporate, military, institutional or government sources. Any funding is provided from my private funds.

The time commitment for this study will be one initial 60-minute block, then a possible second interview for follow-up questions, to be arranged at a mutually agreeable time and date. For ease of scheduling and logistics, these interviews will likely take place via Skype or a similar video- conferencing equivalent technology. At the researcher’s and participant’s discretion, there may also be additional follow-up interviews, which could take place in person or over phone, email or Skype.

It is important to note that your participation in this study is strictly voluntary. You may refuse to participate, withdraw at any time, and may decline to answer any questions or participate in any part of the interview, without any negative consequences. In addition, should you initially consent, you may withdraw your consent to archival audio and/or video recording of the interviews at any time. These recordings will be used only for the purposes of the writing of the research project, and for public presentation of the research (in written and/or oral public presentation). They will not otherwise be shared or released to the public. As a participant you can request access to the archival recording at any time. Should you consent (via separate signature below), a transcript of the interview may be published as part of an appendix to the thesis. Like your participation, you may withdraw consent for the inclusion of a transcript.

I do not anticipate any real or notable risks to this research. As the subject of the research is musical performance, and further as you are a current practitioner of musical performance (and, as such, conversant with public recognition of your musical practices), it is my firm belief that this research will not include any risk that is additional to whatever risk you may incur on a regular basis as a performer. In other words, the risk factor of this study is extremely minimal. However,

162 should any risk factor become somehow apparent, any appropriate and necessary steps will be taken to eliminate or minimize the risk as much as possible, and/or you may be invited, if desired to withdraw. Though there may be no immediate tangible benefit for you to agreeing to participate in this study, the overall benefits of the study include a codifying of some performance practices, and a grouping-together of performance practices of various styles under a scholarly umbrella that will be useful not only for future scholars but for future performers.

Data gathered from this research will be accessible only to the researcher (and you as participant, should you wish it at any time). This data will be used only in this scholarly research project, and not in any separate for-profit enterprise. The data will be kept on file, at a minimum, until the Doctor of Musical Arts degree is conferred, and then will be destroyed or archived, at the participant’s request. All data will be kept on secure devices or servers, requiring both a general password for access to the device, and a specific password for access to each individual file.

Once completed, the main goal of this research is to be incorporated as part of the researcher’s thesis, in partial fulfillment of a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Toronto. In addition, the research may present portions of this research at conferences or in scholarly and educational publications. At this time there are no plans to further present this research in any sort of for-profit format. Should those plans change, appropriate consultation with research participants would be a necessary first step before any permission could be granted for publishing in a different format or for a different audience.

As an interviewee, you may (should you so desire) be sent a final draft copy of the research, so that you may ascertain that you have (if applicable) been quoted correctly and in context. You may (at your request) also be sent a final submitted copy of the research, in the form of a PDF file containing the entire thesis. In addition, you may be provided (should you so desire) a summary of this particular branch of research, in the form of a PDF file.

Thank you for your interest in this research. I look forward to our collaboration together.

Sincerely,

James (Jamie) Drake MMus (Performance), MusBac (Performance), ARCT Doctor of Musical Arts Candidate, Faculty of Music, University of Toronto

56 Seventh Street Toronto, Ontario Canada M8V 3B2

(647) 210-3786 [email protected]

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CONSENT FORM

With this document, I the undersigned, graciously authorize the researcher James (Jamie) Drake, University of Toronto student number 991007548, to use my interview to be propagated in the material contained in his work to fulfill the requirements of the program of Doctor of Musical Arts at the University of Toronto.

This authorization includes the use of all the material contained in the interview granted on this day ______/______/______by the researcher Jamie Drake, with the objective of developing an understanding of the extended-length concert percussion music of John Luther Adams, and of its performance practice, particularly as that practice relates to ideas of ritual and community. The focus of the dissertation is to organize and classify both research material information gleaned from personal interviews, and to interpret this information in a format that is accessible to educators and musical practitioners, particularly percussionists. Follow-up interviews may also be granted authorization for usage at the discretion of the individual.

The interview will be realized in the form of informal conversations of various lengths between the researcher and the individual. The individual was chosen for his or her understanding of and/or experience with John Luther Adams’ compositions. These conversations may, with the permission of the individual, be recorded (audio and/or video) as an archival record. These recordings will not be shared or released to the public, and will be used only for the purpose of further the researcher’s work on this particular thesis topic. (Separate archival recording consent signatures below.) These conversations may also be transcribed as published as an appendix to the main body of the research. (Separate transcription inclusion consent signatures below.)

The participant may grant consent in one of the following ways: (1) by printing, signing and mailing the form back to the researcher at the street address listed above in the consent letter; (2) by filling out the form and sending a digital copy (with signature or digital equivalent) to the researcher at [email protected] and [email protected]; (3) by acknowledging permission through a written email or text message reply; (4) by acknowledging permission orally.

It is understood that the participation of the individual is voluntary and that he/she can refuse to participate or withdraw from the interview without any consequences, and that he/she may refuse to respond to any question. The interviewer will agree to make a draft copy of the research available on request so that the interviewee may ascertain the veracity and contextual accuracy of any direct

164 quotes. Should the participant decide to withdraw after the submission and publication of the thesis, every effort within reason will be made to remove the participants’ contribution, but cannot be guaranteed.

If the interviewee has any questions concerning his or her rights as a participant in this research he may contact the Office of Research Ethics at the University of Toronto at [email protected] or call 416-946-3273 or the researcher at [email protected] or call 647-210-3786.

CONSENT FOR INTERVIEW:

Individual Name (Print)

Individual Signature

Researcher Signature

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CONSENT FOR AUDIO/VIDEO ARCHIVAL RECORDING:

I, the undersigned, acknowledge that I graciously authorize the researcher James Drake to record our interview and all the material therein on this day ______/ ______/ ______, and to keep this material for archival purposes. It is understood that participation in making this archival recording is voluntary, and that I may refuse to participate in this recording or withdraw permission for it at any time, with no consequences.

Individual Name (Print)

Individual Signature

Researcher Signature

CONSENT FOR TRANSCRIPTION INCLUSION:

I, the undersigned, acknowledge that I graciously authorize the researcher James Drake to include a transcription of this interview and all the material therein on this day ______/ ______/ ______, and to publish said transcription as an appendix to his doctoral thesis. It is understood that participation is voluntary, and I may withdraw permission at any time, with no consequences.

Individual Name (Print)

Individual Signature

Researcher Signature

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Copyright Acknowledgements

Ilimaq by John Luther Adams Copyright 2012 Taiga Press Chester Music Limited Part of The Music Sales Group 14/15 Berners Street, London W1T3LJ

The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies by John Luther Adams Copyright 2003 Taiga Press Chester Music Limited Part of The Music Sales Group 14/15 Berners Street, London W1T3LJ

Strange and Sacred Noise by John Luther Adams Copyright 1997 Taiga Press Chester Music Limited Part of The Music Sales Group 14/15 Berners Street, London W1T3LJ