Some Waves of John Luther Adams

 Some Waves of John Luther Adams

 

John Luther Adams’s life-work revolves around a profound awareness of the earth and its atmospheres through musical and sound compositions. It is not surprising that this baby boomer dedicated most of his time to environmental activism in the 1970s and 1980s, living in Alaska, one of the planet’s most extreme biosystems and through its location, home to the extraordinary light waves of the Aurora borealis. Much of Luther’s exhilarating musical scores and recordings are inspired from scientific and electronic data of the natural geophysical phenomena. The soul of his music lies too in that we as humans need to reconnect our own sense of responsibility to our place in the world.

 

With titles like The Place Where You Must Go, Become Ocean or Summer Solstice there is an undoubted lure, to leave your four walls behind and fall into a natural setting, open your eyes, move, swim, explore, relax. One could associate the words with advertising of a club med Scandinavian adventure but honestly hearing Adams’s compositions opens an experience of a place’s sensitivity that ensues from the elemental.

 

The work Become Ocean (2013) calls the listener like a dream changer. In its beginning, there is a light precise metronome tick, a low grounded piano, a harp that adds a ripple onto the watt, a cello, the a compressed  vibration of the tympanum, and then the high horns seem to take the water back from where you stood. For me it traversed into a distance swelling quickly from the stepping and wading slowly into an ocean:  There listening to shifting increments of the power of embedded sound that allows for intertwinement to the earth’s gravity, floatability, in this case the performative caress of the water and the sensibility of being together: its natural movements all while you are in your home, a car, in a tram, at your desk or couch, or exercise machine through your earphones.

 

In Become Ocean a masterpiece for a small but very specific orchestra, one can reflect upon other scientific aspects of listening to sound which Adams developed and brought to light in a work like The Place Where You Must Go.  Way far away (thanks to covid we can say this again) in Fairbanks, Alaska, at the University of Alaska there exists a Museum of the North. And it is here that Adams has installed an ever evolving sound and light installation which translates the sounds of the earth, the seasons and the atmosphere, and surrounding cosmos, including earthquakes and the northern lights into audible vibrations and codes of light. The science of sound has long designated noise by colors.  For example, the high frequent bell like sound of the northern lights is sonically a single band of filtered pink, but has no visuals and is noticeable only during a full moon; During the day the sun brings also a filtered pink, harmonic twelve tone and is visible in red-yellow during the day.*  When one views a sped-up version of the quotidian synchronisty of sound and lights, it appears like a color-field painting of Mark Rothko.

As Adams listens and becomes inspired from the earth, even winged birds, fire, solstices or oceans we are reminded that the earth is made up of infinite unique compositions performing and not waiting to be heard…but just creating.

Celina Lunsford, Feb. 2022

 * Kinnear, Tyler. Voicing nature in John Luther Adams’s The Place Where You Go to Listen. P. 232. First published online 11 January 2012. E-mail: tkinnear@gmail.com