CD 82 How the subarctic winter light inspired new music of elemental harmony and colour From Winter Music A Composer’s Journal by John Luther Adams For the past twenty-five years composer John Luther Adams has made his home in the boreal forest near Fairbanks, Alaska. From there he has created a unique musical world, grounded in the elemental landscapes and indigenous cultures of the North. Each winter— which, he says, “is the season when I burrow most deeply into my music”—he keeps a daily journal as he tries to understand where the music is leading him. The winter of 1998–99 was a time of change, as he com- posed a major new piece entitled The Immeasurable Space of Tones. The present article comprises journal selections from that period and is excerpted from Winter Music: Selected Writings 1974–2000—a book in progress that includes journals, essays, and other writ- pho tos by Gayle Young ings by John Luther Adams. 32 MUSICWORKS 82 WINTER 2002 Winter Solstice, 1998 January 20, 1999 For much of the year, the world in which I live is a vast, For me, composing is not about finding the notes. It’s white canvas. In the deep stillness of the solstice, I’m pro- about losing them. Although I’m still involved in writing foundly moved by the exquisite colours of the subarctic scores, the most difficult thing is not to know what to write winter light on snow. Reading art critic John Gage’s essay down; it’s to know what not to write down. “Color As Subject,” I’m struck by a parallel between the I hope to discover music that sounds and feels ele- view out my window and Mark Rothko’s use of white under- mental and inevitable. And before beginning to write, I want neath the colours in his paintings. Like Rothko’s translu- to hear as much of the new piece as I can, as it begins to cent fields, the colours on the snow suggest to me broad take shape in my mind’s ear. This is a slow, sometimes dif- diatonic washes suffused with gradually changing chro- ficult process, but over the years I’ve learned to trust it— matic harmonies. even to savour it. I spend a lot of time thinking, reading, Slowly, faintly, I begin to hear it: music stripped to its looking at art, walking, listening, sketching, trying to under- most essential elements—harmony and colour floating in stand the essence of the new piece. space, suspended in what Morton Feldman called “time After six weeks in this mode, I now have several pages undisturbed.” of notes for the new piece. But, I’ve yet to start writing out the score. Christmas, 1998 A life in music is a spiritual practice. As in many disci- January 22, 1999 plines, my practice sometimes involves “fasting.” From Over the years, I’ve moved away from working with audible time to time there are periods in which I listen to no music compositional processes—an inheritance of minimalism— at all. I feel this as a physical need. and toward an increasing focus on the fundamental mate- During busy periods of performance and teaching I rials of music: sound and time. My work is less and less a hear a great deal of music. And just as I might feel the process of performing operations on notes, imposing com- need to fast following a period of feasting on rich foods, positional processes on sounds, or working within a syntax after several months of intensive listening my ears tell me of musical “ideas.” I now concentrate primarily on asking they need a time of rest from music. As I begin new work, questions about the essential nature of the music—what my hope is that fasting may help me to hear sounds I it wants from me, and what it wants to be. haven’t heard before, and to hear familiar sounds with new ears. January 23, 1999 In her life and work, Pauline Oliveros practices an Today I’m forty-six years old. By this time in his life, Ives extremely difficult discipline: “Always to listen.” I admire had lost his physical health and had virtually stopped com- this very much. And though fasting from music might seem posing. But Feldman was leaving the dry-cleaning business to be a retreat from listening, I experience it as a time for and moving into his more expansive “middle” period. listening to silence. These days, most of us are inundated Pollock was gone. But Rothko was poised on the verge of with music and other sounds. I feel very fortunate to live his major breakthough into his signature style. That hap- in a place where silence endures as a pervasive, envelop- pened in 1950, when he was 47. ing presence. Among my gifts today: the new score is underway. New Year’s Day, 1999 January 24, 1999 While beginning to sketch a large new orchestral piece, I’m What is line in music? This is a question I’ve pondered for studying the paintings of Mark Rothko and Jackson many years. Pollock. Like Cage in music, Pollock made a radical new In Pollock’s poured paintings, long, fluid lines are mul- beginning in the middle of the twentieth century. Both he tiplied into layered fields of perpetually moving stasis and and Cage opened territories they could only begin to perpetually frozen motion. explore during their lives. The questions posed by their Much of my composition In the White Silence is com- work will continue to occupy others for a long time to come. posed of continuously rising and falling lines, layered and By contrast, Rothko and Feldman were endings. They diffused into an all-over texture of frozen counterpoint. In both explored intensely private, self-contained worlds. And that piece it feels as though I may at last have discovered what Brian O’Doherty said of the one could apply just as a sense of line that is my own. Now, in a new piece, I’m well to the other: “Rothko was the last Romantic. But the trying to take a leap I’ve contemplated for years: to let go last of something is usually the first of something else.” of line and figuration altogether. But what will be left? Which makes me wonder: is it somehow possible to live and work in that timeless intersection between end- ings and beginnings? MUSICWORKS 82 WINTER 2002 33 January 25, 1999 The temperature during my afternoon walk is forty In the new piece, individual sounds are diffused in a con- below. The only sound not made by me is the brief whoosh tinuous texture, always changing but always with a mini- of wings as a lone raven flies past, in a straight line to the mum of what the art critics call “incident.” This won’t be south. On the hillside, I encounter a young moose brows- easy to sustain. James Tenney, Pauline Oliveros, and ing on brittle alder branches. I stop. Speaking softly to her, LaMonte Young have all found it. So has Glenn Branca in I bow from the waist and move on, giving her a wide berth. his recent music for orchestra. And Morton Feldman She has enough to contend with just staying warm and fed. achieved it most fully in his late orchestral works, Coptic They’re predicting fifty below or colder tonight. Light and For Samuel Beckett. Back in the studio at the writing table, I’m startled by Listening to all-over textures, it’s difficult to concen- a bright, metallic ringing— like a small bell. I look up to see trate for long on a single sound. The music moves us a boreal chickadee at the feeder outside my window. In beyond syntactical meaning, even beyond images, into the such deep cold and silence, the smallest sounds speak experience of listening within a larger, indivisible presence. with singular clarity. After all these years, I’m still deeply obsessed with January 26, 1999 landscape. But the resonance of my musical landscape Monet’s haystacks and waterlillies, Cezanne’s Mont Ste- now is more interior, a little less obviously connected with Victoire, Rothko’s floating rectangles, Diebenkorn’s the external world. “Ocean Park” landscapes … In the twentieth century, In art and music, landscape is usually portrayed as an painters discovered (or rediscovered) working in series. By objective presence, a setting within which subjective freezing a particular motive the artist is free to concentrate human emotions are experienced and expressed. But can on deeper nuances in other dimensions of the work. we find other ways of listening in which the landscape As Robert Hughes observes, “One sees how absolute- itself—rather than our feelings about it—becomes the sub- ly Cezanne despised repetition, and how working en serie ject? Better yet: Can the listener and the landscape was his strategy for avoiding it.” become one? It occurs to me that the new piece is part of a series If in the past the more melodic elements of my music of extended orchestral works, along with In the White have somehow spoken of the subjective presence, the Silence and Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing. human figure in the landscape, in the new piece there’s no Some of the sounds are similar, even identical to ones in one present … only slowly changing light and colour on a those earlier works. But this is very different music. timeless white field. Even within itself, the new piece embraces a series of I remember the Gwich’in name for a place in the sorts.