John Luther Adams

by Alex Ross

The New Yorker, May 12, 2008.

On a recent trip to the Alaskan interior, I didn’t get to see the aurora borealis, but I did, in a way, hear it. At the Museum of the North, on the grounds of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, the composer John Luther Adams has created a sound-and-light installation called “The Place Where You Go to Listen”—a kind of infinite musical work that is controlled by natural events occurring in real time. The title refers to Naalagiagvik, a place on the coast of the Arctic Ocean where, according to legend, a spiritually attuned Inupiaq woman went to hear the voices of birds, whales, and unseen things around her. In keeping with that magical idea, the mechanism of “The Place” translates raw data into music: information from seismological, meteorological, and geomagnetic stations in various parts of Alaska is fed into a computer and transformed into an intricate, vibrantly colored field of electronic sound.

“The Place” occupies a small white-walled room on the museum’s second floor. You sit on a bench before five glass panels, which change color according to the time of day and the season. What you notice first is a dense, organlike sonority, which Adams has named the Day Choir. Its notes follow the contour of the natural harmonic series—the rainbow of overtones that emanate from a vibrating string—and have the brightness of music in a major key. In overcast weather, the harmonies are relatively narrow in range; when the sun comes out, they stretch across four octaves. After the sun goes down, a darker, moodier set of chords, the Night Choir, moves to the forefront. The moon is audible as a narrow sliver of noise. Pulsating patterns in the bass, which Adams calls Earth Drums, are activated by small earthquakes and other seismic events around Alaska. And shimmering sounds in the extreme registers—the Aurora Bells—are tied to the fluctuations in the magnetic field that cause the Northern Lights.

The first day I was there, “The Place” was subdued, though it cast a hypnotic spell. Checking the Alaskan data stations on my laptop, I saw that geomagnetic activity was negligible. Some minor seismic activity in the region had set off the bass frequencies, but it was a rather opaque ripple of beats, suggestive of a dance party in an underground crypt. Clouds covered the sky, so the Day Choir was muted. After a few minutes, there was a noticeable change: the solar harmonies acquired extra radiance, with upper intervals oscillating in an almost melodic fashion. Certain that the sun had come out, I left “The Place,” and looked out the windows of the lobby. The Alaska Range was glistening on the far side of the Tanana Valley.

When I arrived the next day, just before noon, “The Place” was jumping. A mild earthquake in the Alaska Range, measuring 2.99 on the Richter scale, was causing the Earth Drums to pound more loudly and go deeper in register. (If a major earthquake were to hit Fairbanks, “The Place,” if it survived, would throb to the frequency 24.27Hz, an abyssal tone that Adams associates with the rotation of the earth.) Even more spectacular were the high sounds showering down from speakers on the ceiling. On the Web site of the University of Alaska’s Geophysical Institute, aurora activity was rated 5 on a scale from 0 to 9, or “active.” This was sufficient to make the Aurora Bells come alive. The Day and Night Choirs follow the equal-tempered tuning used by most Western instruments, but the Bells are filtered through a different harmonic prism, one determined by various series of prime numbers. I had the impression of a carillon ringing miles above the earth.

On the two days I visited “The Place,” various tourists came and went. Some, armed with cameras and guidebooks, stood against the back wall, looking alarmed, and left quickly. Others were entranced. One young woman assumed a yoga position and meditated; she took “The Place” to be a specimen of ambient music, the kind of thing you can bliss out to, and she wasn’t entirely mistaken. At the same time, it is a forbiddingly complex creation that contains a probably unresolvable philosophical contradiction. On the one hand, it lacks a will of its own; it is at the mercy of its data streams, the humors of the earth. On the other hand, it is a deeply personal work, whose material reflects Adams’s long-standing preoccupation with multiple systems of tuning, his fascination with slow-motion formal processes, his love of foggy masses of sound in which many events are unfolding at independent tempos.

“The Place,” which opened on the spring equinox in 2006, confirms Adams’s status as one of the most original musical thinkers of the new century. At the age of fifty-five, he is perhaps the chief standard-bearer of American experimental music, of the tradition of solitary sonic tinkering that began on the West Coast almost a century ago and gained new strength after the Second World War, when John Cage and Morton Feldman created supreme abstractions in musical form. Talking about his work, Adams admits that it can sound strange, that it lacks familiar reference points, that it’s not exactly popular—by a twist of fate, he is sometimes confused with John Coolidge Adams, the creator of the opera “Nixon in China” and the most widely performed of living American composers—and yet he’ll also say that it’s got something, or, at least, “It’s not nothing.”

Above all, Adams strives to create musical counterparts to the geography, ecology, and native culture of his home state, where he has lived since 1978. He does this not merely by giving his compositions evocative titles—his catalogue includes “Earth and the Great Weather,” “In the White Silence,” “Strange and Sacred Noise,” “Dark Waves”—but by literally anchoring the work in the landscapes that have inspired it.

“My music is going inexorably from being about place to becoming place,” Adams said of his installation. “I have a vivid memory of flying out of Alaska early one morning on my way to Oberlin, where I taught for a couple of fall semesters. It was a glorious early-fall day. Winter was coming in. I love winter, and I didn’t want to go. As we crested the central peaks of the Alaska Range, I looked down at Mt. Hayes, and all at once I was overcome by the intense love that I have for this place—an almost erotic feeling about those mountains. Over the next fifteen minutes, I found myself furiously sketching, and when I came up for air I realized, There it is. I knew that I wanted to hear the unheard, that I wanted to somehow transpose the music that is just beyond the reach of our ears into audible vibrations. I knew that it had to be its own space. And I knew that it had to be real—that I couldn’t fake this, that nothing could be recorded. It had to have the ring of truth.

“Actually, my original conception for ‘The Place’ was truly grandiose. I thought that it might be a piece that could be realized at any location on the earth, and that each location would have its unique sonic signature. That idea—tuning the whole world—stayed with me for a long time. But at some point I realized that I was tuning it so that this place, this room, on this hill, looking out over the Alaska Range, was the sweetest-sounding spot on earth."

Adams blends in well with the proudly scruffy characters who populate the diners and bars of Fairbanks. Tall and rail-thin, his handsomely weathered face framed by a short beard, he bears a certain resemblance to Clint Eastwood, and speaks in a similarly soft, husky voice. He’s not unworldly—he travels frequently to New York, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, and other cultural capitals—but he is happiest when he goes on extended camping trips into the wilderness, especially to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He exudes a regular-guy coolness that is somewhat unusual in contemporary composers.

He lives on a hill outside Fairbanks, in a sparsely furnished, light-filled split-level house, much of which he designed and built himself. He shares it with his second wife, Cynthia Adams, who has been the mainstay of his occasionally precarious existence since the late nineteen-seventies. Cindy, as spirited as her husband is soft-spoken, runs GrantStation, an Internet business that advises nonprofit organizations across the country. To many locals, the Adamses are best known for serving on the board of the Alaska Goldpanners, Fairbanks’s amateur baseball team. When they go shopping at Fred Meyer, the all-purpose store in town, they are peppered with questions about the state of the team.

Like many Alaskans, Adams migrated to the state from a very different world. He was born in Meridian, Mississippi; his father worked for A. T. & T., first as an accountant and later in upper management, and the family moved often when he was a child. Much of his adolescence was spent in Millburn, New Jersey, where he developed a passion for rock and roll. He was the drummer in several bands, one of which, Pocket Fuzz, had the honor of opening for the Beach Boys in a local New Jersey show.

Frank Zappa caused a violent change of perspective. In the liner notes to Zappa’s 1966 album “Freak Out!,” Adams noticed a quotation: “ ‘The present-day composer refuses to die!’—Edgard Varèse.” Adams went hunting for information about this mystery figure, whose name he pronounced “Var-EE-zee.” A friend, the composer Richard Einhorn, discovered a Varèse disk in a Greenwich Village record shop, and the two braved the sonic hailstorms of “Poème Électronique.” Adams was soon devouring the music of the postwar European and American avant-garde: Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, György Ligeti, and, most important, John Cage.

“Once I discovered that stuff, I rapidly lost interest in the backbeat and the three chords,” Adams said. “I was still in bands, but they kept getting weirder and weirder. In the last band, a trio called Sloth, we were trying to work with open-form scores and graphic notation.”

In 1969, the family moved again, to Macon, Georgia. Adams enrolled in Westminster Academy, an élite boarding school, from which he failed to graduate. “I was your classic problem kid,” he said. “My grades were O.K.; it was my behavior that was the problem.” At the age of sixteen, he fell in love with a young woman named Margrit von Braun—the younger daughter of Wernher von Braun, the godfather of the American space program. Not surprisingly, the German émigré and the American teen-ager didn’t get along. In 1969, Adams says, he was impressed more by the Miracle Mets than by the first moon landing. Nonetheless, he and Margrit married, and for several years he coexisted uneasily with her powerful father.

In 1971, Adams moved to Los Angeles to study music at CalArts. One teacher there, the composer James Tenney, became a significant mentor, his wild imagination balanced by the mathematical rigor of his methods. Likewise, beneath the dreamlike surfaces of Adams’s work are mathematical schemes controlling the interrelationship of rhythms and the unfolding of melodic patterns. At CalArts, the novice composer also familiarized himself with the oddball heroes of the American avant-garde: Harry Partch, who adopted a hobo life style during the Great Depression; Conlon Nancarrow, who spent the better part of his career writing pieces for player piano in Mexico City; and Lou Harrison, who sought musical truth in the Indonesian gamelan tradition. Adams calls them “composers who burned down the house and started over.”

Perhaps Adams’s most crucial encounter was with Morton Feldman, the loquacious New Yorker whose music has an otherworldly quietude and breadth. On a Columbia LP he heard Feldman’s “Piece for Four Pianos,” in which four pianists play through the same music at different rates, floating around each other like the arms of a Calder mobile. That work galvanized Adams, teaching him that music could break free of European tradition while retaining a sensuous allure. One of his first characteristic pieces, for three percussion players, bears the Feldmanesque title “Always Very Soft,” although the seamlessness of the construction—accelerating and decelerating patterns overlap to create a single, ever-evolving sonority—hints at a distinct sensibility.

Southern California also brought Adams in contact with the environmental movement. He became obsessed with the plight of the California condor, which was facing extinction. Several expeditions into the Los Padres National Forest, where the last wild condors lived, led him to make his first attempt at “nature music”—a cycle of pieces entitled “songbirdsongs.” Olivier Messiaen had been taking inspiration from birdsong for decades. With “the self-consciousness of the self-styled young iconoclast,” Adams says, he went out of his way to avoid Messiaen’s influence, and his own personality emerged in the unhurried pacing of events and the wide-open sense of space.

By the mid-seventies, Adams was working with the Wilderness Society and other conservation groups. At the time, one of their major projects was lobbying for the Alaska Lands Act, whose purpose was to protect large tracts of the state from oil drilling and industrial development. Adams first went to Alaska in 1975, and returned in 1977 to spend a summer in the Arctic. His marriage to Margrit von Braun unravelled that year. Around that time, he met Cindy, who was also an environmental activist. They fell in love during the long battle for passage of the Alaska Lands Act, which President Carter signed into law in 1980.

What Adams needed most, after a turbulent decade, was solitude. During the first decade of his relationship with Cindy, he lived in a rudimentary cabin in the woods outside Fairbanks, a mile from the nearest road. “It was my Thoreau fantasy—cutting wood and carrying water,” he told me. The fantasy subsided when Cindy suggested in a non-roundabout way that he should either join her full time—by now the couple had a son, Sage—or go his own way. In 1989, he moved out of the woods, and has never returned to his old cabin.

Adams embraced his new life in Fairbanks, but he still struggled to find his way as a composer. The eighties were, he now says, “lost years”: he made various attempts to write orchestral pieces that would reach a wider audience, and, though he was pleased with the work, he didn’t feel that it was entirely his. At times, he wondered whether he would make more headway in New York or Los Angeles. In this same period, not incidentally, John Adams, of Berkeley, California, found fame with “Nixon in China.” The two composers had known each other since 1976; they moved in the same circles, and one week they stayed together at Lou Harrison’s house. Nevertheless, the phenomenal success of the Californian Adams pushed the Alaskan Adams to differentiate himself, not only by using his middle name but by finding territory he could call his own.

“In a way, that experience challenged me to reëvaluate my whole relationship to the idea of success,” he says. “Maybe it confirmed my outsider resolve—‘No, I’m not moving from Alaska; this is who I am, this is where I belong, this is what I’m supposed to be doing’—but most of all it helped my sense of humor. For me, finally, it’s kind of worked out. John is always very gracious. We occasionally exchange e-mails about the latest incidents of mistaken identity. Recently, someone thought he was me. Very sweet.”

By the nineteen-nineties, Adams had begun to carve out a singular body of work, which can be sampled on recordings on the New World, New Albion, Cold Blue, Mode, and Cantaloupe labels. First came a conceptual Alaskan opera entitled “Earth and the Great Weather,” much of which is given over to the chanting of place-names and descriptive phrases from the native Inupiaq and Gwich’in languages, both in the original and in translation. One mesmerizing section describes various stages of the seasons: “The time of new sunshine,” “The time when polar bears bring out their young,” “ The time of the small wind,” “The time of eagles.” The music runs from pure, ethereal sonorities for strings—tuned in a scheme similar to that of the Aurora Bells in “The Place”—to viscerally pummelling movements for quartets of drums.

In the next decade, Adams further explored the sonic extremes that he had mapped out in his opera. “In the White Silence,” a seventy-five-minute piece for harp, celesta, vibraphones, and strings, is derived from the seven notes of the C-major scale; in a striking feat of metaphor, the composer equates the consuming whiteness of midwinter Alaska with the white keys of the piano. “Strange and Sacred Noise,” another seventy-five-minute cycle, evokes the violence of changing seasons: four percussionists deploy drums, gongs, bells, sirens, and mallet percussion to summon up an alternately bewitching and frightening tableau of musical noises, most of which were inspired by a trip that Adams took up the Yukon River in spring, when the ice was collapsing. Whether unabashedly sweet or unremittingly harsh—“Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing,” a memorial to the composer’s father, manages to be both at once—Adams’s major works have the appearance of being beyond style; they transcend the squabbles of contemporary classical music, the unending arguments over the relative value of Romantic and modernist languages.

The sense of vastness, separateness, and solitude is even more pronounced in Adams’s recent electronic compositions. A 2005 installation entitled “Veils,” which has appeared in several venues in America and Europe, uses a “virtual choir” of ninety polyphonic voices, and unfolds over a span of six hours. “The Place,” meanwhile, has now been playing at the Museum of the North for more than two years. Both Cage and Feldman talked about making music that you can live with, much as you can live with visual art; “Veils” and “The Place” execute that idea with uncommon vigor. Adams is an avid art-viewer, and is particularly keen on the second generation of American abstract painters: Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Jasper Johns, and Joan Mitchell. There are more art books than music books on the shelves of his studio, a neat one-room cabin that faces south, toward the Alaska Range.

Adams says, “I remember thinking, To hell with classical music. I’m going into the art world; I’m going to do installations. But I was really just interested in working with new media. And it doesn’t matter what I think I’m doing. The work has a life of its own, and I’m just along for the ride. Richard Serra talks about the point at which all your influences are assimilated and then your work can come out of the work.”

Although Adams is content to write for electronics, small ensembles, and percussion groups, he still longs to write for larger forces, and, above all, for orchestra. For most of the eighties, he was the timpanist for the Fairbanks Symphony, which, at the time, was led by the conductor, composer, and environmental activist Gordon Wright. During Adams’s cabin-in-the-forest period, Wright was living nearby, and the two became close friends, often trekking into the wilderness together. Once, they drove into the Alaska Range while listening to Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, music that has the weight of mountains. “This may be where our musical worlds meet,” Adams said to him.

Wright died last year, near Anchorage, at the age of seventy-two; he was found one night on the deck of his cabin. A few days later, the Anchorage Symphony played the première of Adams’s “Dark Waves,” an extraordinary piece for orchestra and electronics, which the composer dedicated to Wright. One of the most arresting American orchestral works of recent years, it suggests a huge entity, of indeterminate shape, that approaches slowly, exerts apocalyptic force, and then recedes. Every instrument is, in one way or another, playing with the simple interval of the perfect fifth—the basic building block of harmony—but at the climax the lines coalesce into roaring dissonances, with all twelve notes of the chromatic scale sounding together.

Adams is now contemplating a large-scale work in the vein of “Dark Waves.” It might bring him into a Brucknerian or even Wagnerian realm. Wagner’s “Parsifal” is one of three opera scores in Adams’s library; the others are Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov” and Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande.” He speaks with awe—and a little envy—of the resources Wagner had at his command. A few years ago, Adams went to see “Die Walküre” at the Metropolitan Opera, and departed with his mind full of fresh longings.

“I thought, This couldn’t be repeated,” Adams told me. “Wagner kind of caught the perfect wave. But I did wonder what kind of opportunities exist for us, right now.” He sat still for a moment, his blue-gray eyes drifting. I sensed some wordless, high-tech, back-to-the-earth “Parsifal” waiting to be born.

Knowing of Adams’s love for Alaska’s remotest places, I asked him to take me to one of them. His favorite place on earth is the Brooks Range, the northernmost extension of the Rocky Mountains, but that area was inaccessible when I visited. Instead, we went south, to Lake Louise. Snowy weather blocked most of the mountains as we drove, although looming white shapes occasionally pierced the flurries. “Aw, that’s nothing,” Adams would say, slipping into the role of the hardened Alaskan lifer. “Foothills. The big guys aren’t coming out.”

Lake Louise is framed by several of North America’s grandest mountain ranges: the Alaska, the Chugach, the Wrangell-St. Elias, and the Talkeetna. The native word for this kind of place is chiiviteenlii, or “pointed mountains scattered all around.” The lake was covered with ice four feet thick, and, after spending the night at a local lodge, we went for a walk. The sun was burning faintly through the mist above. Periodically, a curtain of snow descended and the shores and islands of the lake disappeared from view. I noticed that Adams was listening closely to this seemingly featureless expanse, and kept pulling information from it: the fluttering of a flock of snow buntings, the low whistle of wind through a stand of gaunt spruce, the sinister whine of a pair of snowmobiles. He also noted the curiously musical noises that our feet were making. Tapping the crust of snow atop the ice, under which the wind had carved little tunnels, he compared the sounds to those of xylophones or marimbas. Meanwhile, a dog had wandered out on the ice and was howling to itself. “He has some fantasy he’s a wolf,” Adams said. He yelled at the dog to go home.

Adams recalled the Yukon River trip that led him to write “Strange and Sacred Noise” and other tone poems of natural chaos. “When the ice breakup comes, it makes incredible sounds,” he said. “It’s symphonic. There’s candle ice, which is crystals hanging down like chandeliers. They chime together in the wind. Or whirlpools open up along the shore or out in the middle of the river, and water goes swirling through them. Or sizzle ice, which makes a sound like the effervescent popping you hear when you pour water over ice cubes. I have literally hundreds of hours of field recordings that I made back in the ‘Earth and the Great Weather’ period, in the early nineties. I keep thinking that maybe one day I could work with some of that material—maybe try to transcribe it, completely remove it from the original reality, extract the music in it.”

We were standing on a tiny island, where cormorants had built a network of nests. Adams had discovered these nests on a trip to the lake a few weeks earlier. One of the nests had slid off the ridge onto the lake, and we carried it back to land.

“All along, I’ve had this obsessive, delusional idea that I could somehow be outside culture, which is, of course, patently absurd,” he said. “But I could at least hold the illusion of being outside culture, where culture is put in proper perspective. That’s why I am so concerned with the landscape. Barry Lopez”—the author of the epic travelogue “Arctic Dreams”—“says that landscape is the culture that contains all human cultures, all forms and artifacts and culture and language. Maybe it’s just a hippy-dippy sixties-seventies thing, but, to tell the truth, I was never such a good hippie.”

Adams is well aware of the naïveté, sentimentality, and outright foolishness that can attach to fantasies of dropping out of society in search of “the real.” But that same naïveté can lead to work of intimidating power, especially when it is wedded to artistic craft. In this regard, Adams cites another of his heroes, the poet John Haines, who, after the Second World War, took up residence in a one-room cabin he built off the Richardson Highway, south of Fairbanks, and stayed there for some twenty years, living off the land in time-honored fashion. Not long before Adams moved to Alaska, he read Haines’s first book, “Winter News,” falling under the spell of poems such as “Listening in October”:

      There are silences so deep 
       you can hear 
       the journeys of the soul, 
       enormous footsteps 
       downward in a freezing earth.

In a collection of writings entitled “Winter Music,” Adams cites, among other reasons for moving to the state, the richness of its silences. He writes, “Much of Alaska is still filled with silence, and one of the most persuasive arguments for the preservation of the original landscape here may be its spiritual value as a great reservoir of silence.”

Haines is now eighty-three years old and recently endured a near-fatal bout of pneumonia, but he welcomes visitors, especially those who bring a good bottle of whiskey. On our visit, Adams asked Haines to recite one or two of his poems. Haines proceeded to chant several of them in a courtly, melancholy voice, somewhat in the manner of William Butler Yeats delivering “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” He ended with “Return to Richardson, Spring 1981,” which looks back fondly and sadly on the homestead period, when “our life like a boat set loose,” and evenings were spent reading books since forgotten:

      In this restless air I know  
     On this ground I can never forget
     Where will I set my foot
     With so much passion again. 

After a pause, Adams said, “That hurts.” We talked for a few more minutes, Adams gave Haines the whiskey, and we said goodbye.

On the way to Lake Louise, we passed Haines’s old homestead. The highway now cuts close to the house, ruining its magnificent isolation. Alaska’s “great reservoir of silence” is disappearing; even in the farthest reaches of the Brooks Range, Adams commented, you will sooner or later hear the drone of a snow machine or the hum of a small plane. Adams spoke also of the scary pace of climate change, of how the thaw now comes as much as a month earlier than it did when he moved to the state. He talked about various future projects—an outdoor percussion piece for the Banff Centre, in Alberta, Canada, an installation in Venice—and explained why his work was becoming more global in focus.

“I tried to run away,” Adams said. “I hid for quite a while. I had a rich life; I had incredible experiences, a very slow development of a certain musical world. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. But I can’t live there anymore. Because, in a sense, it doesn’t exist anymore. A piece like ‘In the White Silence’ is almost—I didn’t realize this at the time—almost an elegy for a place that has disappeared.”