Practical Aesthetics by Bernd Herzogenrath;

Author:Bernd Herzogenrath;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350116122
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Chapter 11

In Search of Sacred Space

John Luther Adams

A young composer and I were sitting on a bench in Central Park, talking about music. He asked me about form.

“I want my music to be intensely sensuous,” I said. “But I also want it to be rigorously formal.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Form gives the music a deeper coherence. It also protects the music against the bad taste of the composer!”

He laughed.

I added: “But recently I’ve begun to relax a little in my obsession with form . . .”

“Then what will take the place of form?” Without hesitating I replied: “Space.”

It was a prescient question, and my answer surprised me a bit. I wasn’t entirely sure what I meant, but it had the ring of truth. And it got me thinking.

When I was twenty-one, I became captivated by the songs of birds. In the woods and fields of rural Georgia, I began trying to write down what I heard. Before long I had a collection of miniature portraits, a bit like pages in a musical field guide to the birds. But that wasn’t enough. I wanted to evoke something of the magic that I felt listening to the birds in the places where they sang. So to my first settings of birdsongs, scored for piccolos, I added parts for percussion—rattles, sizzle cymbals, woodblocks, bells, and the like—that I imagined as the wind, the rain, the light, and the weather. This was the beginning of a lifelong exploration of place and space in music.

The following year, in Alaska, I experienced landscape on a scale I’d never known. Enthralled, I began to sketch out broad harmonic fields that I hoped would echo those sprawling expanses of mountains and glaciers, forest, and tundra. Eventually, those sketches became an orchestral work titled A Northern Suite. From the subtitle—“Tone Paintings of Alaska”—it was clear that I was thinking of this music in a pictorial way. And for more than a decade, in works such as Night Peace and The Far Country of Sleep, I continued this kind of landscape painting in music.

There was a profoundly romantic dimension to this early passion for place, fueled by my reading of Thoreau and Muir, and by contemporary writers like Annie Dillard and Barry Lopez. I found special inspiration in the poetry of John Haines. And when I was not yet thirty, I had the extraordinarily good fortune to begin a long, close friendship with John, working with him on Forest Without Leaves (1984)—a choral work grounded in his cycle of poems about humanity’s inextricable roots in the earth.

Several years later, I ventured to combine the poetic and the pictorial in Earth and the Great Weather (1991). This “sonic geography of the Arctic” mixes instrumental music for strings and percussion with sounds recorded in the landscapes of the North. But the real conceptual ground of this work was a series of “Arctic Litanies”—found poems composed from indigenous names for places, plants, birds, and the seasons. Spoken and sung in the Gwich’in and Iñupiat languages,

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