For the past twenty-five years, composer John Luther Adams has made his home in the boreal forest near Fairbanks, Alaska. From there, he has created a unique musical world, grounded in the elemental landscapes and indigenous cultures of the North. His music embraces a wide range of media including works for orchestra, chamber ensembles, electronics, radio, film, television and theater. Adams has served as composer-in-residence with the Anchorage Symphony, Fairbanks Symphony, Arctic Chamber Orchestra, Anchorage Opera and the Alaska Public Radio Network and he has taught at the University of Alaska, Bennington College, and the Oberlin Conservatory. He has also served as executive director of the Northern Alaska Environmental Center and as president of the American Music Center. In the White Silence There are silences so deep you can hear the journeys of the soul, enormous footsteps downward a freezing earth. (Poetry by John Haines) White is not the absence of color. It is the fullness of light. Silence is not the absence of sound. It is the presence of stillness. As the Inuit have known for centuries, and as painters have shown us more recently, whiteness embraces many hues, textures and nuances. As John Cage reminded us, silence does not literally exist. Still, in a world going deaf with human noise, silence endures as a deep and resonant metaphor. I aspire to music that is both rigorous in thought and sensuous in sound. For many years now, I´ve been obsessed with the notion of music as place, and place as music. The treeless, windswept expanses of the Arctic are enduring creative touchstones for my work, and In the White Silence is an attempt to evoke an enveloping musical presence equivalent to that of a vast tundra landscape. (John Luther Adams ) Here is an excerpt from In the White Silence – a work for harp, celesta, two vibraphones, string quartet, and string orchestra. This recording is taken from the premiere performance given at Oberlin College in 1998. John Luther Adams |
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