John Luther Adams first endeavors into bringing natural sounds into his compositions date back to 1974
when he started a series of pieces based on bird calls.
"The songs birds first awakened in me a profound longing to feel at home. From that longing grew the
vision of a music grounded in a deep attention to the world around us. A vision that’s been at the heart
of my work ever since."
He eschewed the use of taped field recordings of the birds. "I was determined to learn this music
first hand directly from the buds listening in the fields."
Once in the field, Adams said, "I found myself listening not just to the birds, but to the field
itself."
Even as his music grew more "abstract," the composer said Thursday at Bowling Green State
University’s New Music Festival, "it continued to be haunted by landscape."
His compositions became less "pictorial" and more concerned "with evoking the feeling of a
place."
Adams found something more than beauty in the wilderness he explored. "Sometime where we’re out in a
wild place we can find ourselves on that razor’s edge between beauty and terror. Just as we can find a
kind of transcendent peace in the beauty of nature we can also discover a different kind of
transcendence in the presence of elemental violence."
To express this he drew on percussion, and working with percussion, "the quintessential noise
instruments," he discovered inner musical voices.
This led to his exploration of electronics, including expansive sound installations. "The Places You
Go To Listen" has been running continuously for six years at the Museum of the North in Fairbanks,
Alaska, where he makes his home.
He also took his music outdoors, where he found it overwhelmed. What was so brash and loud in the concert
hall, dissipated in the open spaces.
So Adams started writing pieces specifically to be played outdoors. Today at 4:30 p.m. his 2009
composition "Inuksuit" will be performed by an ensemble of 34 percussionists either outside or
inside depending on the weather at the College of Musical Arts on campus. Tonight he and writer Barry
Lopez will speak at 8 in Kobacker Hall. Three pieces for piano and percussion by Adams will be
performed.
