Book description
Did Alaska create the music of John Luther Adams, or did the music
create his Alaska? For the past thirty years, the vastness of Alaska has
swept through the distant reaches of the composer's imagination and
every corner of his compositions. In this new book Adams proposes an
ideal of musical ecology, the philosophical foundation on which his
largest, most complex musical work is based. This installation, also
called The Place Where You Go to Listen, is a sound and light
environment that gives voice to the cycles of sunlight and darkness, the
phases of the moon, the seismic rhythms of the earth, and the dance of
the aurora borealis. Adams describes this work as "a place for
hearing the unheard music of the world around us." The book
includes two seminal essays, the composer's journal telling the story of
the day-to-day emergence of The Place, as well as musical notations,
graphs and illustrations of geophysical phenomena. "This is an
excellent read for anyone interested in art and nature, the increasingly
detailed and sophisticated integration of the 'Cageian' aesthetic into
visionary new music, and the creative uses of technology for grandly
ambitious purposes."--Robert Carl, Fanfare JOHN LUTHER ADAMS is
one of the most distinctive voices in the American musical landscape,
and is the author of Winter Music (2004). He lives outside Fairbanks.
ALEX ROSS is the music critic for the New Yorker, and author of The Rest
Is Noise (2007).
