The Music of John Luther Adams / Edited by Bernd Herzogenrath
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The Farthest Place * * * * * * * * * The Farthest Place The Music of John Luther �dams Edited by Bernd Herzogenrath � Northeastern University Press Boston northeastern university press An imprint of University Press of New England www.upne.com © 2012 Northeastern University All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Designed by Eric M. Brooks Typeset in Arnhem and Aeonis by Passumpsic Publishing University Press of New England is a member of the Green Press Initiative. The paper used in this book meets their minimum requirement for recycled paper. For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766; or visit www.upne.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The farthest place: the music of John Luther Adams / edited by Bernd Herzogenrath. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-55553-762-3 (cloth: alk. paper)— isbn 978-1-55553-763-0 (pbk.: alk. paper)— isbn 978-1-55553-764-7 1. Adams, John Luther, 1953– —Analysis, appreciation. I. Herzogenrath, Bernd, 1964–. ml410.a2333f37 2011 780.92—dc23 2011040642 5 4 3 2 1 * For Frank and Janna Contents Acknowledgments * ix Introduction * 1 bernd herzogenrath 1 Song of the Earth * 13 alex ross 2 Music as Place, Place as Music The Sonic Geography of John Luther Adams * 23 sabine feisst 3 Time at the End of the World The Orchestral Tetralogy of John Luther Adams * 48 kyle gann 4 for Lou Harrison * 70 peter garland 5 Strange Noise, Sacred Places * 77 steven schick 6 Go There to Listen How Music Based on Nature Might Not Need Natural Sounds * 107 david rothenberg 7 The Thunder That Smokes * 116 glenn kotche 8 How Do You Play with an Aura? The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies * 131 robert esler 9 Qilyaun * 143 scott deal 10 The Color Field Music of John Luther Adams * 157 todd tarantino 11 The Light Within * 180 molly sheridan 12 Timbral Listening in Dark Waves * 188 dave herr 13 Place and Space The Vision of John Luther Adams in the Ultramodernist Tradition * 206 robert carl 14 The Weather of Music Sounding Nature in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries * 219 bernd herzogenrath 15 songbirdsongs and Inuksuit Creating an Ecocentric Music * 235 david shimoni A Catalogue of Works By and About John Luther Adams * 269 noah pollaczek List of Contributors * 301 Index * 305 Acknowledgments I would like to thank upne (in particular Richard Pult) for giving me and us the opportunity to work on this labor of love for John Luther Adams, and all those wonderful people who contributed to this volume—it has been a pleasure! Most of all I would like to thank John himself for support, encouragement, and practical help—highly appreciated! While working on this book project, two important and life-changing things happened to me: in the summer, our little daughter Janna was born . she’s our cute little clinamen, the tiny little thing that makes life swerve into unfore- seen directions. And in the early morning hours of Christmas Eve, my beloved little brother Frank died, after more than four years of living under the shadow of an incurable, malignant brain tumor. I can only now, in retrospect, see how brave he had been all those years. Frank now has gone farther than the farthest place, and my only hope is that this turns out to be the closest place as well. It is to Janna and Frank that I dedicate this book. Some of the essays in this book already had a previous life: Alex Ross’s “Song of the Earth” was published in The New Yorker, May 12, 2008. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_ ross, reprinted with kind permission of the author. Peter Garland’s “For Lou Harrison” is reprinted from the liner notes for John Luther Adams—For Lou Harrison (New World Records 80669-2). © 2007 Anthology of Recorded Music, Inc. Used by permission. Part of Bernd Herzogenrath’s “Introduction” and “The ‘Weather of Music’: From Ives to Adams” was already published as “The ‘Weather of Music’: Sounding Nature in the 20th and 21st Centuries.” Deleuze|Guattari & Ecology. ed. Bernd Herzogenrath. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 216–32. Reprinted with kind permission. All illustrations are reprinted with kind permission of John Luther Adams, and Taiga Press, with the exception of figure 5.2, which is copyright 2008 Lisa Tolentino Esler and is reprinted with kind permission. * * * * * Bernd Herzogenrath * * * *Introduction ohn Luther Adams is a singular voice in contemporary music. This book is J the first critical anthology about the work of a composer the critic Alex Ross has called “one of the most original musical thinkers of the new century.” Like Henry David Thoreau, Charles Ives, and John Cage, Adams inhabits both the periphery and the center of his times. Adams lives and works in Alaska, and his music echoes the open spaces of the far North. He is anything but a regionalist, however. He aspires to integrate his art into the larger fabric of life, believing that “music can provide a sounding model for the renewal of human consciousness and culture” (The Place 1). Adams does not represent nature through music. He creates tonal territories that resonate with nature—immersive listening experiences that evoke limit- less distance, suspended time, deep longing and even transcendence. As the composer writes about the northern landscape, “the feeling of endless space is exhilarating. This is what I want to find in music!” (Winter Music 69). Adams’s explorations began some thirty-five years ago, with a cycle called songbirdsongs, setting his “translations” of bird songs within open-ended musical landscapes. In his opera Earth and the Great Weather, Adams weaves recordings of wind across the tundra, ice melting, thunder and glaciers boom- ing, with ritual drumming, ethereal music for strings, and the chanting of Alaska Native people into “a journey through the physical, cultural and spiri- tual landscapes of the Arctic” (Young 40). During recent years, Adams has added a scientific perspective to his fascina- tion with nature, which also reflects his stance toward the relationship between the “two cultures”: Science examines the way things are. Art imagines how things might be. Both begin with perception and aspire to achieve understanding. Both science and art search for truth. Whether we regard truth as objective and demonstrable or subjective and provisional, both science and art can lead us toward a broader and deeper understanding of reality. Even as they augment our understanding, science and art heighten our sense of wonder at the strange beauty, astonishing complexity, and miraculous unity of creation. (The Place 10) Thus Strange and Sacred Noise, for example, an extended ritual for percus- sion, is inspired by elemental noise in nature and by chaos theory, blending the composer’s ideal of “sonic geography” with “sonic geometry”—mathematical forms (fractal geometry, the Cantor set) made palpable in sound. Adams—much like the philosopher Gilles Deleuze—is interested in “the re- lations between the arts, science, and philosophy. There is no order of priority among those disciplines” (Negotiations 123) for either Deleuze or Adams. The relationship is not a simple one-sided affair—as Adams has recently stated in a video clip, “Art and science have lots to say to one another. What is music but audible physics?” (“A Sonic Geography”). Whereas science involves the creation of functions, of a propositional mapping of the world, and art involves the creation of blocs of sensation (or affects and percepts), philosophy involves the invention of concepts. According to Deleuze / Guattari, philosophy, art, and science are defined by their relation to chaos. Whereas science “relinquishes the infinite in order to gain reference” (What Is Philosophy? 197), by creating definitions, functions, and propositions, art “wants to create the finite that re- stores the infinite” (197)—and it was exactly this creation of finite objects that bothered Cage (e.g. in “4:33”), a problem that Adams ingeniously “fixed” in his installation The Place Where You Go to Listen. In contrast, “philosophy wants to save the infinite by giving it consistency” (197). Yet, since “sciences, arts, and philosophies are equally creative” (5), it might be fruitful, as Deleuze proposes, “to pose the question of echoes and resonances between them” (Negotiations 123)—to pose the question of their ecology, which is what much of Adams’s work does. As Deleuze specified in one of his seminars, “between a philosophical con- cept, a painted line and a musical sonorous bloc, resonances emerge, very, very strange correspondences that one shouldn’t even theorize, I think, and which I would prefer to call ‘affective’ . these are privileged moments” (“Image Mouve ment Image Temps”).1 These moments privilege an affect where thought and sensation merge into a very specific way of “doing thinking” beyond repre- sentation and categorization, a moment that might be called “contemplation,” which also fittingly describes the “audience’s” approach to Adams’s The Place Where You Go To Listen, which transforms the rhythms of night and day, the phases of the moon, the weather, earthquake data, and disturbances in the earth’s magnetic field into an ever-changing ecosystem of sound and light. As Deleuze / Guattari argue in What Is Philosophy?, “Philosophy needs a non- philosophy that comprehends it; it needs a nonphilosophical comprehension just as art needs nonart and science needs nonscience” (218). Friedrich Nietzsche, in his unpublished early notebooks dating from the period of his Unfashionable Observations [1872–73], relates the true philoso- 2 * herzogenrath pher to the scientist and the artist as listener (it is as if Cage is present in these lines): “The concept of the philosopher .