John Luther ADAMS (b. 1953)
The Farthest Place (2001) [10:53]
The Light That Fills the World (1998/2001) [12:58]
The Immeasurable Space of Tones (1999/2001) [27:01]
Marty Walker (bass clarinet) Amy Knowles (vibraphone and marimba) Bryan
Pezzone (piano) Nathaniel Reichman (electronic keyboard and sound design)
Robin Lorentz (violin) Barry Newton (double bass)
rec. August 2002, Architecture, Los Angeles
Reviewed as a digital download
COLD BLUE MUSIC CB 0010
[50:57]
I hope to live long enough to see the composer John Luther Adams become
well enough known not to be described as “not that John Adams”.
Personally, I think that John Luther Adams is far and away the more
interesting of the two.
As I am sure is the case with many listeners, I first came across JLA
through his Pulitzer Prize-winning work, Become Ocean, in 2014. Wonderful
though that piece is, I tend to think it gives the wrong impression of his
work as a whole. Frustratingly, what I regard as his masterpiece, Sila: The
Breath of the World remains unrecorded commercially though it can be viewed
here
under the tab Watch.
What unites Sila, Become Ocean and the works on this disc is a set of
simple compositional principles that might seem a trifle contrived but for
the wonder of the musical results. Adams is a man who spent 40 years in a
remote cabin in Alaska and this has given him plenty of opportunity to
contemplate and refine and simplify his music down to essentials. Nothing
in his music is frivolous. If he uses a technique then it is because it
reveals some core truth of music. Sila, for example, explores the rising
overtone series of a single low note over its one-hour duration. The idea
seems arbitrary, banal even, yet the effect in performance is ecstatic.
This disc was released in 2002 but we seem to have missed it here on
MusicWeb. The works on it represent a crucial phase in the development of
his work which leads in time to bigger works like Become Ocean.
The initial impression, I’m sure, on the novice listener will be one of
minimalism. This is not stridently dissonant music. What is different from
minimalism is its largely static character. In his writings – he is an
inspirational writer as well as a great composer – JLA likens his music to
a landscape in which, rather than representing a journey into the
landscape, the listener sits still while the landscape shifts around them.
Elsewhere, he uses the word transpersonal to evoke music that is not about
the subjective individual emotional response as we would find in
autobiographical Romantic music. This is not to say that his music is
impersonal or cold. Aside from its awe-inspiring vistas, this is music
intended to connect us to the natural world and, as a consequence, feel
more human and more alive.
It can also have a surprisingly emotional effect. There is no human culture
without music, which suggests that music is of the greatest importance to
human beings. In tuning in to his remote landscape in extreme isolation and
trying patiently over decades to find ways of responding to it musically,
Adams has developed a music that in the best sense gets back to basics.
Music’s origins lie in rituals which for millennia performed crucial
psychological and spiritual services for humankind. If this seems a little
far fetched, think of what Wagner was up to at Bayreuth! In his very
different, largely egoless way, Adams returns music back to that
ritualistic function. It is unsurprising that he namechecks Rothko and
Morton Feldman as inspirations. Yet in returning us to the healing roots of
music, and I personally do believe passionately in the potential for music
to heal the wounded human spirit, Adams also collides with the damage that
wounded alienated humanity has done and continue to do to the natural
world. Adams’ music is grounded in the most fundamental and, as a result,
most natural musical elements for very good reasons.
In the case of the three works included here the underlying musical
procedure is characteristically simple: the higher the note the more motion
there in the music. In practice, this means slow-moving bass notes and
glittering, twinkling ones on high percussion. The combined effect of this
is like looking at a grand, mountainous landscape with the slow bass
registers acting as the larger geographical features and the higher more
mobile elements acting like elemental features such as wind, weather and
fauna. Everything unfolds at an unhurried pace that feels organic, yet is
never dull in the same way that encountering nature is never dull.
More than this, what Adams has written is a musical process equivalent to
the natural processes of the world, not an aesthetic response to some
beautiful scenery. If his music is beautiful, and it is, it is not because
he has striven to make it so. The beauty emerges out of the slow, organic
process. So rooted is Adams’ approach in the very nature of sound and music
that it starts to become an issue of the composer hearing and recording
rather making and inventing. This is going a little far because Adams is
still very much a musician trying to solve musical problems, but there is a
different kind of relationship between artist and landscape here than in
the traditional one of artist and source of inspiration. If nothing else,
listening to this music I feel that the composer is part of the landscape
rather than outside it looking on. It has the same effect on me as a
listener. I am not listening to a piece of music about the Arctic but I am
immersed in a piece of music which feels made up of the musical aspects of
the Arctic as filtered through JLA’s remarkable, patient listening.
Enjoyable though the two shorter works are on this recording, I feel the
longest work here, The Immeasurable Space of Tones, best exemplifies what
Adams’ music is all about. The larger canvas allows the musical ideas to
unfold with a greater sense of inevitability.
Another preoccupation of these works is a definite shift to foregrounding
aspects of the music – tone colour and harmony – that normally stay in the
background. Adams likens this to Rothko’s decision to dispense with the
figurative elements of his painting in favour of colour. There is nothing
in these scores that could reasonably be likened to melody. The slowness of
the harmonic progression means that we are equally far from harmony as from
drama that we might find in Beethoven.
So far so technical, but what does all this mean for the listener? Rather
like a Rothko painting, it robs the listener of a lot of the points of
reference that might normally used for orientation. On the other hand, the
building blocks of this music are very familiar and diatonic. The listener
listens to the familiar in a different way. In the absence of drama or
narrative to follow, we eventually come to experience the music in the way
we might experience weather or ritual. This might make this music sound
like a test of patience, but it is anything but. Adams has spoken of
prizing openness and this is one of the most characteristic features of his
music. The simplicity of the music means that it is very far from esoteric.
The listener can respond without knowing a thing about the background of
the music. In his development as a composer, Adams has isolated what is
universal in music. All that is needed is that the listener meets his
openness with their own.
Above all else, in a world of relentless frenetic activity, the pieces on
this CD offer a stillness not born of gimmicks but of devotion to the
silence of the Arctic terrain. To enter Adams’ world is to enter a place to
recover a sense of oneness with the world around us, whether that world is
Alaska or London where I live.
In many ways, these are JLA’s most pure evocations of the Alaska in which
he dwelt for so long. His music has developed in ways that match the manner
of many of his pieces – that is slowly and organically and without
revolutions. Each of his pieces solves a very specific environmental,
spiritual but above all musical challenge and this recording captures not
just the specific moments that prompted these particular compositions but a
watershed moment in the composer’s career.
But what it all comes down to is a simple but deep sense of wonder that is
evoked by listening to these moments.
David McDade
