John Luther Adams: Ecological Listening, Sonification, Noise, and Transcendence

In one of our last sessions on American avantgarde music, the focus shifted back towards the beginning of this seminar, towards a Cagean understanding of music with American avantgarde composers who explicitly work with nature or let nature take the role of the composer. The first composer in search of an ecology of music, is Alaskan artist John Luther Adams, who explores the relationship between sound and natural environments. Although known as a composer, I think it would also be fitting to call him an environmental activist, as his music qualifies as environmentally driven work with a powerful potential to somatically impact listeners and raise awareness for our environment. This rings true, even for nature’s furthest reaches in the world, like the physical and aural landscapes of the North in Alaska, where the artist has lived and worked for most of his creative life, thus, serving as a main influence for his compositions.

Always with the aim of inciting ecological listening and making nature audible for the audience, in of his earlier tracks “Drums of Fire, Drums of Stone,” his emphasis is arguably still placed on the sole conveyance of sounds of specific natural phenomena, like weather in this case. The atmospheric piece starts off rather calm, more like pink noise from a sleep promoting machine with the sounds of rain drops falling and distant thunder, but quickly increases in intensity and sound as it merges with the rhythmic vibrations of deep and vigorous drumming. It is an astonishing, visceral piece, reminiscent of tribal music trough its drumming, although the categorization happens more in the background of the listening experience. As Adams is known to have been inspired by the Inuit concept of Sila, a sort of chaos theory of weather in the largest possible sense, “Drums of Fire, Drums of Stone” can be argued to bring together the sonification of weather of thunder with the concept of Sila.

Moving from one specific weather phenomenon to the weather of a whole season, it seemed to me as if Adams would explore the sonic of winter in the chill North in another track, “One That Stays All Winter.” A rather calm and serene piece, mixed with an icy chorus of different howls and the screeching of violins, the piece imitates the sounds of cold wind blows and sonically reflects the space and stillness of nature’s elemental forces.

In contrast to those two pieces or as a visual extension of these first nature compositions, Adams conveys the total resonance of a place in The Place Where You Go to Listen - a permanent audiovisual installation at the Museum of the North in Fairbanks, Alaska. Here, Adams goes a step further in not only making music through capturing nature sounds and transforming them, but my making even inaudible natural phenomena audible with the help of captured scientific data of geophysical events, like the sun and moon in relation to the earth, seismic activity, and weather patterns, and by rendering them into an audiovisual presentation. Through the measurement of natural phenomena’s amplitude and frequency, their geomagnetism and seismics, nature’s vibrations can be scaled along the outlooks of distance and time and thereby be made feasible. The transformation of sounds and sights of Alaska into a live musical discourse closely aligns with the concept coined by Adams, “Sonic Geography,” which translates to the understanding of a place as music and music as place.

Altogether, I found Adams’s approach to music and musicality deeply impressive and moving. Although never having been in the far North in a place like Alaska, I felt like Adams achieved to transport the listener to a different world not just through the means of imagination, but by making the Northern landscape tangible in his art. In addition, through his ecocentric approach, I believe that Adams makes a valuable contribution to the discussion around environmental crisis, and through authentically representing nature, achieves to increase environmental awareness among humans.