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This essay evolved from a lecture I presented on numerous occasions from 1992-96. It has previously appeared in print in several forms and was the basis of a program produced for the Alaska Public Radio Network. - JLA
"Landscape is the culture that contains all
human cultures." The places we live in resonate within us. The sounds around us - the songs of birds, the cries of animals, the rhythms of the seasons and the reverberations of the elements - all echo in the music of a place. The rich diversity of music around the world is a result of people living for centuries in harmony with their own physical and cultural geographies. Today even in urban areas where musicians have little or no intimate experience of the natural world there are still qualities of music unique to specific places. In large measure these qualities arise from the vitality and persistence of ethnic traditions. But how did the sounds and rhythms of the earth influence the birth and growth of those traditions? How does where we live influence the music we make? And how might closer listening to the music of place contribute to a renewal of human music and cultures? My place is Alaska. For almost twenty-five years now I've lived and worked in the northern interior. Not surprisingly I've given some thought to these questions and to the question of what it means at the dawn of the millennium to make a life as a composer so far from the capitals of global commerce and culture. The natural landscape and a strong sense of place are enduring sources for my work. Like many of my generation of middle class North Americans I grew up in several different places, amid relatively homogenous suburban surroundings. In my twenties I sought and found my spiritual home in Alaska and I made a deep commitment to pursue my life's work here. Through sustained listening to the unique resonances of this place I've aspired to make music that belongs here, somewhat like the plants and the birds - music informed by worldwide traditions but music that can best, perhaps only be made here. As a composer in the far north I've come to feel increasingly removed from cosmopolitan musical fashions. After all the only human music which has been here for long is that grew here - the chants and dance songs of the Yup'ik, Iñupiat, Aleut, Athabascan, Tlingit, Haida and other Native peoples. There's a sense (an illusion, perhaps, but exciting nonetheless) that one might discover a new kind of music here - music that somehow resonates with all this space and silence, cold and stone, wind, fire and ice. A Reservoir of SilenceThere are silences so deep you can hear the journeys of the soul, The keynote of the northern Interior is silence. The rivers are frozen much of the year. Snow mutes the land. And the wind is calm more often than not. With human and animal life spread sparsely over sprawling distances, sound is the exception. This pervasive stillness can attune the ear in extraordinary ways. As Schafer observes: "In the special darkness of the northern winter...the ear is super-sensitized and the air stands poised to beat with the subtle vibrations of a strange tale or ethereal music." 2. I listen for that music: in the growl of boot steps on fresh snow at 40 below zero, in the haunted cry of a boreal owl, in the luminous dance of the aurora borealis across a moonless sky. Listening carefully we realize (as John Cage reminded us) that silence doesn't literally exist. Still silence is a powerful and mysterious sound image. And in a world going deaf amid a technological din, silence is a profound metaphor of the spirit. 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. To be immersed in this silence is to be near the heart of this place. As each sound passes the silence returns - a vast and ancient silence that envelops the landscape like a frozen ocean of Time. Straining, you can almost hear the reverberations of the earth stirring in sleep, the movements of mountains, the passing of a cosmic storm - sounds so profound that you hear them not with your ears but in the oldest, darkest core of your being. And other sounds, faint and distant, suspended in air like the remembered sunlight of a summer afternoon ten thousand years past. The First Musicians
"...birds become ideas... For me it began with birds. Olivier Messiaen called them "the first musicians." As a young composer the songs of birds stirred memories and longings deep within me. The extended cycle songbirdsongs (1974-79) was my attempt to bring something of the magic of the music of birds into my own. I spent many days and hours in the field - listening, sketching and (as Annie Dillard says) "learning the strange syllables, one by one." In these miniatures for piccolos and percussion I was not so much concerned with precise transcription of the pitches and rhythms of bird songs. Instead I tried to make my own free translations of those marvelous languages that we humans may never really understand. Gradually my settings of bird songs began to grow. The songs of the hermit thrush, varied thrush and Swainson's thrush found their way into A Northern Suite (1979-81) - a set five tone-paintings for chamber orchestra. In this music I placed fragments of bird songs amid broad, slowly changing textures of sustained tones that I hoped would echo something of the expansive Alaskan landscapes. In time landscape became the primary metaphor for my music. Landscapes were my touchstones for works such as Night Peace (1977) and The Far Country of Sleep (1988) which I composed in memory of Morton Feldman, a composer whose music has had a profound influence on my own. Although he was an unrepentant urbanite, Feldman's music is for me haunted by the ideal of the sublime landscape. The title of The Far Country of Sleep is borrowed from a poem by John Haines which evokes not only the unbroken spaces and silences of the Arctic but that ultimate wilderness - Death - through which we all must pass. Dream In White On White (1992) began as a paean to the treeless, windswept expanses of western Alaska, painted in the seven "white" tones and acoustically-perfect intervals of Pythagorean diatonic tuning. The tuning, the monochromatic orchestration and the allover textures of this piece suggest vast white country. But in White On White I wanted to move away from music about place toward music that in a real sense is place. I wanted not just to evoke a natural landscape in music, but to create a musical landscape with an essential coherence in some way equivalent to the wholeness of a real place; music that conveys its own inherent sense of place. Words of the Earth
This earth written over with words. In collaboration with poet John Haines I composed the choral/orchestral cantata Forest Without Leaves (1982-84). The primary source for this music was the text itself. I approached the words of John Haines as I had previously approached my work with the songs of birds: listening carefully for the inherent music of another's language then translating what I've heard in that language into my own. I pursued an ideal of the relationship between music and text that has been the aim composers from Monteverdi to Partch. Partch called this "corporeality" and he described it as a commitment "to disclose a manner of impressing the intangible beauty of tone into the vital power of the spoken word, without impairing either." This demands a serious obligation of fidelity to the words, in which the common conventions of "setting words to music" - forcing them into rigid meters, harmonic formulas and essentially instrumental melodies - are inappropriate. Instead the composer must search for the essential music of the words. Although their words are firmly rooted in the earth, Haines's poems encompass far more than simple nature images. Forest Without Leaves surveys the interrelationships between the natural world and human societies, from pre-history to post-apocalypse. As Haines puts it: In "a world spiritually blighted and physically threatened with destruction," art "becomes, of necessity, revolutionary as it relates to the social organism within which the art must function and from which it obtains much of its material and impulse. ...Art at its fullest becomes representative of a harmony at rest somewhere between nature and society." In working on Forest Without Leaves I came to understand that in order to become more complete my music must somehow encompass not only an idyllic vision of the natural world but the complexity and chaos of contemporary life as well. World Musics and Internationalism"Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible." In the past fifty years with the advent of widespread sound recordings, our awareness of the world's music has expanded dramatically. Western composers of "art" music have begun to integrate sounds, forms and instruments from all over the world into their music to an unprecedented extent. We in the post-World War II generation are the first people to have grown up with an awareness of most of the world's musics, both living and historical. In this new context, as composer Peter Garland observes: "'World music' ceases to be exotic or peripheral: it becomes the heart of a search for a re-casting of values." 6. While the extent of music available to us is unprecedented, we certainly arenšt the first to borrow from other cultures. That practice is as old as humanity. Earlier generations of American composers - among them Henry Cowell, Harry Partch, John Cage and Lou Harrison - have been pioneers in bringing the music of the whole world into Western music. The influence of non-Western musics has been remarkably healthy in many ways. Western music has been infused with a new vitality and some lovely new hybrids have been born. But ironically our recent passion for the musical traditions of other cultures has coincided with and perhaps unwittingly contributed to the decline of many of those same traditions. Mass communications and marketing can quickly transform authentic voices into trivialized fashions and commodities. Globalism contains within it the seeds of cultural colonialism. With the noblest of intentions the superficial qualities of ancient traditions can be casually appropriated and popularized. Uprooted from place, history and experience, unique local idioms are quickly homogenized and devoured as fodder for the so-called "music industry." Whether the product is cars or computers, hamburgers or compact discs, the voracious arrogance of commerce is the same. Like our precious remnants of physical wilderness, the cultures of the "developing world" are viewed as storehouses of raw materials for exploitation and consumption. Diversity is an essential characteristic of healthy biological systems. Like the first photographs of the Earth taken from space, recordings of music from other cultures have given us in the West a radically new perspective on the world of music. But as Wendell Berry observes: "Look at those photographs of half the earth, taken from outer space, and see if you recognize your neighborhood. If you want to see where you are, you will have to get out of your space vehicle, out of your car, off your horse, and walk over the ground." The same may be said for truly hearing where we are. The Indigenous ContextThe longer I walk the ground of my home, Alaska, the more I admire and respect the music of its indigenous peoples, music that resonates with the experience of living and listening in this place for thousands of years. The rest of us have much to learn from the First Peoples of the North. And the survival of Alaska Native cultures in the face of the incredible social upheavals confronting them is a continuing source of hope and inspiration. In 1986 I was invited to compose a score for the public television series Make Prayers to the Raven. Adapted from Richard Nelson's book of the same title, these films offer an intimate view of the lifeways and spiritual beliefs of the Koyukon Athabascans of interior Alaska. Most of the music for this series came from my own experience listening to the natural sounds of the Interior, which is also my home. But for two brief sequences I adapted and arranged two songs composed and sung by Joe Beetus, a Koyukon elder. At first I was reluctant to work with these songs, out of respect for their completeness and integrity. But Joe agreed to "loan" them to me, and in the context of the films this seemed appropriate. Learning and working with these melodies, I was delighted and fascinated by their free-floating tonalities and their subtle, shifting meters and rhythms. A few years later I was asked to compose music for a film about the geese that nest on the deltas of the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers and their importance to the lives of the Yup'ik Eskimo people of that country. Again I incorporated indigenous music into my score, "borrowing" songs from Yup'ik dancer, singer and drummer Chuna McIntyre and others. This music eventually became the Five Yup'ik Dances, for solo harp. More recently my friend Ari Vahan asked me to compose two songs on poems she had written in her native Gwich'in dialect. Ari used these songs at a summer camp to teach young Athabascan children a little of the language of their ancestors.Together with a short Dena'ina (Kenai Peninsula Athabascan) song remembered by the late Peter Kalifornsky, and with my settings of Joe Beetus' songs from Make Prayers to the Raven, these became my Five Athabascan Dances, for harp and percussion. Traditionally the melodies on which these pieces are based would be sung in unison, with no harmony or counterpoint. As a Western composer I've added variations, countermelodies, ostinati, introductions, interludes and codas - transforming them into a different kind of music, somewhat far removed from their original sounds and cultural contexts. In doing so, I hope I've done no harm. I've been drawn to work with these songs out of long admiration for Native musics and cultures, and I hope my treatment of them conveys my profound respect for their origins. Native American stories were the primary sources for Giving Birth to Thunder, Sleeping With His Daughter: Coyote Builds North America (1986-90), my first theatrical collaboration with writer Barry Lopez. The protagonist of these stories is Old Man Coyote - the Trickster/Creator/Seducer/Fool of oral traditions from the Southwest to the Great Plains to the Northwest Coast. I began my musical life as a rock and roll drummer. And I've long admired Native American drumming traditions from the Great Plains to the Arctic, as well as the percussion music of John Cage, Lou Harrison, Henry Cowell and other American composers. Not surprisingly the music for Coyote Builds North America began with percussion. I wanted to combine the energy of rock with the rhythmic complexity of "art" music. But although some of the percussion instruments (drums, rattles, log drum and the like) occur in Native American music, I chose not to borrow directly from Native musical traditions. The Coyote stories are rich with the wisdom and humor of the Native peoples of North America. At the same time Coyote is an archetypal figure who appears in different incarnations throughout the world. In China, he's Monkey. In Africa, he's Spider. Elsewhere he's Fox, Harlequin or Hare. In my home country of Interior Alaska, hešs Raven. Like all great expressions of the human spirit, Coyote transcends culture. These stories are every bit as universal as a novel by Tolstoy or a symphony by Beethoven. Ultimately - like the earth, the water and the air - Coyote belongs to no one and to everyone. In the words of a Pawnee song: a tribe - anybody.7 From Musical Landscapes...Deep within the human imagination we sense that nature itself is our deepest source of creative forms and energy. And most of us tend to think of landscape as the ultimate ground of nature. To be sure, the ideal of the sublime landscape has inspired many great works of music, art and literature. Yet there's another sense in which the notion of landscape limits our understanding and experience of place. Reflecting on the evolution of his own thought, human ecologist, Paul Shepard writes of his realization that: "...the world-as-picture was on one hand geared to the superficiality of taste and on the other an outcome of a Renaissance mathematical perspective that tended to separate rather than join the human and the nonhuman. The landscape was an inadequate nexus."7 Shepard's dissatisfaction with landscape is more than splitting semantic hairs. It speaks to the very core of our relationship with the world in which we live. When Barry Lopez speaks of landscape as the culture that contains all human cultures, the word is full of rich connotations derived from a lifetime of intimate personal experience in the landscape. But for many of us landscape is something we view from a distance: within the frame of a painting or a photograph, on the screen of a television set or through the window of a speeding automobile. Such encounters with place can be thought provoking and inspiring. All too often they're sadly superficial. In whatever sense we understand the concept, landscape alone is no substitute for the authentic personal experience of fully being, in a place. As with any true intimacy, this takes time. We can view a landscape in a matter of seconds. But it can take a lifetime to truly know a place. Toward Sonic Geography
The great sea Over the years my music has led me beyond landscape painting with tones into the larger territory of "sonic geography" - a region that lies somewhere between place and culture, between human imagination and the world around us. My first exploration of this territory was Earth and the Great Weather: A Sonic Geography of the Arctic. In 1989 I was commissioned to create a half-hour work for public radio. I began by returning to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a country through which Išve traveled over the past three decades. The result was sound-piece that combined the sounds of an aeolian harp with Iñupiat drums and the music of the natural elements - wind across tundra, ice melting, migratory birds calling, thunder rolling on mountaintops. Floating through this geography were voices, intoning and whispering litanies of names - the names of place, plants, birds and other animals - in English, Latin and Iñupiaq. I imagined the Iñupiaq place names and their English translations as sonic landmarks for the listener traveling through this country of the mind. Even before completing the radio piece, I realized I'd begun something much larger than I'd first understood. From that beginning Earth and the Great Weather grew and along with it my understanding of that notion of sonic geography. The shorter radio piece became a full-length performance work. The wind harps were replaced by a quartet of strings, electronically expanded to produce textures of orchestral dimensions. The scale of the drumming grew. And the geography encompassed by the work expanded, crossing the Arctic Divide into the boreal forest: the physical, cultural and spiritual homeland of the Gwich'in Athabascan people. The earth speaks to us and we speak to it through names - the names we give to places, plants and animals, to the weather, the seasons, the directions and the elements. The text of Earth and the Great Weather is a series of Arctic Litanies, composed entirely of names. In fact the entire work grew from the images inspired by a single name: Naalagiagvik - "The Place Where You Go To Listen" - the Iñupiat name for a place on the coast of the Arctic Ocean. The Iñupiat and the Gwich'in Athabascan people have lived in the Arctic for centuries. And the names with which they speak to the world around them constitute an authentic poetry of place. Alaska's Native peoples have long known that there are places on this earth that are especially powerful and sacred. I believe the place we now call the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is among the most sacred of places and that no amount of material wealth can justify violating or desecrating it. Still Earth and the Great Weather is not an intentionally political work. I composed it to celebrate a sacred place, and to invite the listener on an aural journey through strange and beautiful landscapes, both imaginary and real. New Indigenous Musics
"I will build a new culture, fresh as a young animal. Composers and sound artists all over the world are turning their ears to the music of the earth. These artists have steeped themselves in the natural and cultural landscapes of the places they call home, embracing them as fundamental elements of their life's work. In doing so they are practicing a new kind of artistic regionalism. This new regionalism is anything but provincial in character. Conversant with the broadest range of music from other times and places, these artists consciously choose to listen and work with the sources most closely at hand. In doing so they are helping create genuine alternatives to a dominant global monoculture. A constant reality of life for those of us who choose to live and work in the hinterlands is isolation. We have few peers close at hand with whom to talk shop and compare notes. Skilled musicians eager to perform new music are scarce and there are fewer performance opportunities than in the major urban centers. Still, because the history and institutions of the dominant culture are somewhat less deeply entrenched, it may be that composers, writers and other artists who live and work closer to the land have a special contribution to make toward revitalizing Western culture. This is not self-conscious primitivism or simplistic isolationism. It is a vital current in the flow of human culture and consciousness. The explorations and discoveries of recent past have given us a wealth of new artistic and technical tools to work with. But in order to fulfill that most basic creative need - to rediscover and re-create order between ourselves and the world around us - we must also continually renew our connections with older, deeper sources. There may be a certain naivete in this attitude. But a little naivete can be a very healthy thing. Much of the work we produce from these beginnings will be tentative, especially when compared with the facile gloss and technical brilliance of more cosmopolitan styles and genres. But in time more complete and mature statements will follow. Writing about a festival of indigenous Hispanic music in New Mexico, Peter Garland expresses his amazement at: "...the integrity and survival of this music...its authenticity in the overall fabric of culture and life-ways; and its authentic geographical place - qualities which are sadly disappearing from regional musics in the face of national and international media." Garland goes on to observe that "This kind of regionalism is now no longer an isolated one, but one that embraces its own values - in the face of everything else in the world." 10 As we confront the mass media, commercial culture and "everything else in the world" music like this reminds us that we can and must rediscover and reclaim our own. As we come to understand better where we are, we come to understand more fully who we are. Respecting and cherishing music from all other times and places, we can begin to make new indigenous musics - here and now.
Sources1. John Haines, The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer - Collected Poems of John HainesGraywolf Press, St. Paul, MN, 1993. 2. R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1980. 3. Paul Shepard, Thinking Animals - Animals in the Evolution of Human Intelligence Random House, New York, 1978. 4. John Haines - The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer - Collected Poems of John Haines Graywolf Press, St. Paul, MN, 1993. 5. Wendell Berry, The Work of Local Culture Iowa Humanities Board, Iowa City, 1988. 6. Peter Garland, Americas: Essays on American Music and Culture 1973-80 Soundings Press, Santa Fe 1983. 7. Paul Shepard, "If You Care About Nature, You Can't Go On Hating the Germans Like This" in Deep Ecology edited by Michael Tobias Avant Books, San Marcos, CA, 1988. 8. Knud Rasmussen, The Intellectual History of the Iglulik Eskimo. Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition. Vol. VII Gyldendalske Boghandel, Copenhagen, 1929. 9. R. Murray Schafer, Music in the Cold Radio Canada International, 1979. 10. Peter Garland, In Search of Silvestre Revueltas - Essays 1978-1990 Soundings Press, Santa Fe 1991. More writings of John Luther Adams
John Luther Adams's email: jla@alaska.net Bio
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