John Luther Adams In Interior Alaska

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: Listening is the most powerful tool for understanding the world. The microphone may well have been the most important musical instrument of the 20th century, because it extended the reach of our ears across distance and across time. It has taken us to new places and new spaces of the imagination, equivalent to the microscope.

I came here to explore the sonic geography of Alaska through its birdsongs, Alaska native drumming and dancing, and the geophysical forces of this place. I followed these deep, rich, and powerful sources…the resonance of experience that echoes through the language and traditions of people who lived here for centuries. It’s far more interesting to me to receive a message from the birds here in the woods or from the magnetosphere, than it is for me to express myself and deliver some intensely personal or high-minded esoteric message that I might think I have. That’s not very interesting to me.

But ultimately they’ve led me to something else, my own music, which is its own little world. As I’m coming to understand, music stands or fails as music, on its own terms, not as an illustration of anything else. Not as politics or science. What makes an ecosystem an ecosystem is the ability to sustain itself on its own terms. Wholeness is integrity. And that’s what I want in my music, for it to be itself. To function like its own little ecosystem.

Steve Elkins, John Luther Adams, and Aurora Researcher Dirk Lummerzheim

A lot of what I’m trying to do in my work is to saturate and overload our perceptions. That happens every time you take a walk out in the woods. There’s more going on in nature — all the time — than we can possibly take in. It may be very difficult for us to describe the patterns in the forest, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there, and that we don’t at some level perceive them and sense the wholeness that they create. I mean, we look at the mountains and think of them as permanent. But they’re not. They’re moving. In a sense they’re alive. It’s just a matter of what time scale you want to sample.

That idea of multiple dimensions of time is something that’s haunted my music for years. I’m continually putting layer upon layer upon layer of musical time — four, five, six or more different tempos moving at different speeds simultaneously, like five different currents in a river or a sea. To me, that brings to the music a sense of depth that is more like the world.

Production Photos (Alaska, 2009)

I think John Cage was one of the great ecological composers. In the last years of his life, his definition of music was elegantly, radically simple: “sounds heard.” And the surprising part of that definition is the second word. Whenever we listen, we begin to hear those larger patterns that connect us to the world. That larger ecology of music. Cage’s definition of harmony was: “sounds heard together.” And that’s where the ecology comes in.

The two most radically influential ideas of the 21st century were the science of ecology and quantum physics. But they’re kind of both the same idea. The inescapable reality that everything in this world is connected to everything else. This music all around us that has no ending.

Most of what we hear in the world is noise. By noise, I don’t mean the cliche of “unwanted sound.” I mean mathematical complexity: the sound of chaos. The ultimate reality that chaos theory points to is pretty much the same as ecology: wholeness is better than perfection. And that’s a cause for celebration. Chaos theory and ecology both celebrate the richness of complexity, just as music can be a celebration of noise.

Kaluli People (Papua New Guinea)

The Kaluli people in Papua New Guinea have a tradition of song making. When a song maker is searching for — listening for — a new song, he’ll go out into the forest and camp by a waterfall. And may stay there for days, just listening to the noise, the roar, the voices of the waterfall. Steeping himself in that noise. Because within the sound of the waterfall are contained all the songs of the world. So I’ve come to regard noise not as unwanted sound, but as the breath of the world.

In the last decade or so, I’ve become fascinated with noise as the source of music. Sculpting away, trying to hear the voices, the tones, hidden within the complex sounds of the world around us. Often when we make music, we start with individual tones and we add them up. But working with noise, I feel as though I’m working the other way around: starting with every sound that might be heard and sculpting away everything that’s not the music.

I want to hear as much, and see as much, and experience as much as I possibly can. We live in a society in which we are swimming in counterfeit experiences. Mediated second-hand, third-hand experiences. Everything is in a frame and being interpreted for you: here’s what you’re going to see, here’s what it means, now let’s talk about it…how do you feel about it? It’s so rare that we have primary experiences anymore, whether in the form of music, or places, or people. But those are the things that make us more alive, and change us.

I’m interested in the promiscuity of the senses, and the profusion of perceptions that we swim in all the time. That’s one of the things I love about walking in the woods, or baseball, or single malt whiskey. It’s always different, and the whiskey that I love most is the whiskey that I haven’t tasted yet. The same is true for my own work. My favorite piece is always the piece that I’m working on right now — whenever that may be — because I don’t quite understand it yet. And right now, that’s a piece is called “Inuksuit.”

Inuksuit

The controlling metaphor behind the piece are those stone figures — the Inuksuit — which stand as silent sentinels all across the circumpolar Arctic and reach their highest flowering in Canada. There's a common misconception about them. People think that they are representations of human figures. And to be sure, some of them are. There’s a special category of Inuksuit that do actually try to represent a human being. But Inuksuit are something that somehow marks the passing of the human. So there are Inuksuit that show you the best route to traverse across a particular landscape. Or there are Inuksuit that show you where there's good fishing, or good caribou hunting, or good camping. And there are aggregations of Inuksuit that are so old and so mysterious that no one — not even the wisest oldest elders — know exactly what they mean. But they know that they're powerful and represent something sacred.

So I decided that I wanted to make my own Inuksuit and translate them into sound. Turning visual forms into sonic forms is something that I did in "Strange and Sacred Noise." In that piece, I first explored what I called “sonic geometry” by taking these very primitive 19th century fractal forms, not the fancy curlicue Mandelbrot set or Julia set fractals that were made popular a number of years ago, but earlier versions of these geometric forms that are created by iterative mathematical processes.

Mandelbrot Fractals (Left) + "Strange And Sacred Noise" Score Excerpts (Right)

Each of the pieces in "Strange and Sacred Noise" is based on a different classical fractal form. One is modeled on the Sierpinski gasket: an Eiffel Tower of reiterated nesting triangles. Another is a sonic sculpture of the Menger Sponge: an enigmatic quadrilateral with an infinite surface area and a volume of zero.

The first that I worked with is called the Cantor Dust, named after the mathematician who discovered it, Georg Cantor. At one time, it was a mathematical curiosity that later turned out to be a phenomenal model of the self-similar nature of intermittent noise in electrical transmissions. All electrical signals contain bursts of noise accompanied by minute periods of silence, that repeat in constant rhythmic cycles, no matter how long or brief a period of time is sampled. To represent Cantor Dust graphically, you might have a line segment, and then you just cut out the middle third. Then you knock out the middle thirds of the two segments it created. And you just keep removing the middle thirds of your resulting segments. And what you get is this kind of particle dust that gradually disintegrates toward nothingness, but of course never gets there. There's always something there. And I got the idea of trying to sound that form using noise, rather than tone. I began with the quintessential noise instrument in western music, the snare drum, and called that work Dust Into Dust, a riff on the Cantor Dust. Each fractal creates a unique sound world.

Drafts Of Inuksuit Score From John's Notebook

I don't necessarily need the listener to know this about the music. I hope that it gives the music a kind of coherence and solidity, like a mountain where even if you don't understand the geology that made the mountain, you sense that it’s there, and it's whole, and it has a presence.

As these Inuksuit forms took shape on my graph pad, I began translating them as literally as I could into musical notation into time. So you see the forms of the stacked stones in the musical notation, and they get pretty complex. But the essential motivation behind Inuksuit is that you hike through the piece. Just as the stone figures that inspired the piece are strewn across the landscape, so are the musicians performing it. The audience can migrate through the landscape however they wish to listen. It can be performed in the Anza Borrego desert of California, the autumn woods of New Hampshire, Cuyahoga National Park in Ohio, remote sites in the Canadian Rockies, underneath the approach patterns at LAX, or even in the parking lot of a shopping mall. It can be performed anywhere except indoors.

The freedom of the listener to move around in this new musical space is just another manifestation of what has become a primary concern in my music: the centrality of the listener. The music isn't complete until a listener is present, fully concentrated and listening, expanding their attention outward, rather than inward. Through listening, we transform empty space into inhabited, experienced place. When we pay attention that way, then we're part of the world, we're not apart from the world. We belong to it. And that springs from my deep belief that music has the power to change us. It is an incredible time to be a musician. This is how we become more fully human.

A healthy ecosystem requires a balance of stability and change. Diversity and integrity. The world of classical music, generally speaking, does not foster change. Often creativity arises from within conflict. The moments of greatest change and uncertainty often define who we are, and what we believe, and what we do...those moments when we're navigating that razor’s edge between creation and destruction. Fire is a part of the health and continuing life of the forest. Without the fire, there’s no regeneration. Periodically the forest has to burn in order to be reborn.

In the roar of a violent thunderstorm, or a glacier calving into the sea, these huge noises remind us of how small we are…and how powerful, and at times frightening and miraculous and beautiful the world is. And it’s in those moments that we may experience noise as the voice of God, the howl of the universe, or as a form of prayer.

John Luther Adams and Aurora Researcher Dirk Lummerzheim In "The Place Where You Go To Listen" (Fairbanks, Alaska)

John's Legendary Fresh Mint Tea

At John's Home In Interior Alaska

John's Studio In The Woods

Working With John Luther Adams, Aurora Researcher Dirk Lummerzheim, And Filmmaker Len Kamerling