An interview with composer John Luther Adams.
John Luther Adams • Website
“Classical music is a profound expression of the height of a society or a culture that is gone. So everything I do from here on, I want to somehow be part of the society that I imagine will follow this one.”
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Fil Corbitt: How is everything going, how are you doing?
John Luther Adams: Doing well, thanks. How about yourself?
Fil Corbitt: I'm doing good, too. It's a really beautiful day. Right now it's November, you know, in the Sierras. So all the all the leaves are turned and it's really nice out right now.
John Luther Adams: What are your, what are your temperatures like?
Fil Corbitt: You know, right now it's about 40 degrees, I think a high of like 46 today or something. And then, you know, we're getting down into the 20s at night, sometimes into the teens. But yeah, it's been pretty comfortable.
John Luther Adams: What's your what's your elevation, Fil?
Fil Corbitt: I'm at 7500 ft.
John Luther Adams: Yeah, that makes sense. We are much farther south and we're at about 6000. And it's, you know, last year at this time, we had snow. Right now I'm I'm sitting outside in the sunshine, you know, maybe it's got to be in the low 70s.
Fil Corbitt: Oh, wow. So pretty warm. Yeah.
John Luther Adams: Yeah, yeah. So tell me about what you're doing.
Fil Corbitt: Basically, I make this show called The Wind and it's a podcast and radio show. And I basically I just built a desk out in the woods a couple of miles from my house and come out here and do interviews and just try to kind of research, sound in new ways and try to think of music and music journalism kind of as an experience of listening deeper. And yeah, just kind of trying to get out of the studio, I guess.
John Luther Adams: Well, when Molly sent me your message. I thought.. Your inquiry, your invitation, I thought, Well, this was just offbeat enough to to be intriguing. I'm saying no to a lot of interviews these days, but there is just something about what you're doing that that appealed to me that caught my imagination. So here we are.
Fil Corbitt: Cool. That's really cool to hear. As far as this episode goes, it is kind of a dive into the Aeolian harp, and I was kind of thinking of it as a how and why to- build a harp. And I've been trying to to build them. I'm still definitely a novice, but yeah, I'm just trying to kind of, you know, tell other people kind of what they are, what they do and kind of figure out why I've been compelled to try to build these things. And you seemed like the perfect person to ask.
John Luther Adams: Well, I understand why you're compelled they're magical.
Fil Corbitt: I mean, why? What do you think the what is so magical about ‘em?
John Luther Adams: Well, it's it's an instrument that allows us to pull music directly out of the air. The music comes down out of the sky and across the strings of the instrument and into our ears and out through our bodies and into the Earth. I've never built an Aeolian harp, but much of my life's work has been shaped by my experiences listening to Aeolian harps and in particular one small harp that I carried all over the tundra, the forests, the mountains, the glaciers of Alaska, listening to the wind for years. And part of the magic, I think Fil, is that it opens up the harmonic series, which is all around us all the time, you might say it's the breath of the world, but we rarely hear the harmonic series alone. It's usually deeply embedded in the breath of the world, in the sounds all around us, most of which are noise. And when I say noise, you know, I'm speaking of noise not in the vernacular sense of unwanted sound, but I'm talking about complex aperiodic sound which, as John Cage observed many, many years ago, is most of what we hear around us all the time. So with these magical harps, we can filter the breath of the world, the wind and and hear the harmonic series revealed in all its miraculous glory. I think of it as almost like, you know, you put a harp on your head and stand into the wind and the the the pink noise you might say the white light of the world crosses the strings, and it's almost like a prism. And then the wind goes across the strings and it breaks into all these beautiful harmonic colors. This aural prism of sound.
Fil Corbitt: It's really interesting that you that you used the word filter because I think that's kind of what I've been trying to figure out is: what are these things? Are they translators? Are they, you know, is it something that is creating its own sonic world? And it seems like it's not... It's so dependent on the wind and the velocity of the wind that it is translating something and I like the idea of a filter that it's kind of filtering the sound that is passing through it into a type of sound that we can, you know, kind of understand better.
John Luther Adams: Well, I use that word filter almost as an acoustitian would use it, right? I mean, if you take wind as a kind of colored noise, you know, the hypothetical version of that the synthetic version of noise is... The most clinical version of of synthetic noises is, of course, white noise, in which theoretically, all the frequencies that we can hear are present in equal energy in a random fashion. So essentially, it's all the sounds that we can hear in the air all at once. And as you know, the wind obviously is already filtered by by trees and by rocks and by grasses and by water and by bird feathers and whatever else is passing through. By your hair, by your ears. But it is a kind of beautiful filter. Another way through which we can hear the inner life of the wind. Another way of describing it, I guess it would be an Aeolian Harp as transducer. Like a microphone or a loudspeaker is, I guess, a loudspeaker... I guess transducers can go either way. They can send or receive signals. But my relationship to the Aeolian harp has been as a way to extend the reach of my ears. To allow me to hear things that I couldn't otherwise hear, at least not so clearly. And so it's a receiving transducer. And then so am I. I become a receiver. And that music passes from the wind through the harp into my body, my ears, my imagination. And then eventually it comes back out as as The Wind in High Places or as Sila: The Breath of the World or so many other pieces of my music over the over the last four decades.
Fil Corbitt: I want to come back to a couple of those -- before I get carried away, I would like to ask you specifically about your Aeolian sound world.
John Luther Adams: It's funny because I'm working on two pieces right now, mixing two recordings, one of a piece that's now several years old and then another recording I'm working on of brand new pieces. And both of these grow out of my experiences of listening to wind harps, listening to Aeolian harps. The new piece actually goes back to the place it all began, which was standing on the tundra in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where my beloved Cynthia and I had our wedding ceremony in 1989. And making my very first recording of Aeolian Harps. And I remember I would I would put the harp on my head. This is the harp that that I still own. It's maybe two and a half three feet wide, about nine or ten inches tall and, you know, ten or eleven inches wide. It has two string choruses, they're nylon strings. It's a beautiful little instrument that was made by my friend Robert Cunningham, wonderful instrument builder. And, you know, small enough that I could throw it into a backpack and I hike off across the tundra. And it was small enough that I could stand out there, hold the thing on my head, and dance like a weather vane in the wind. So I could, you know, turn from side to side with the wind. They could tilt the harp slightly up or down to to catch as much of the wind as I could. And to add to the magic, Fil, was of course, this music coming out of the sky across the strings of the harp down through my skull and and through my body, right back into the Earth. So I became, in that sense, a kind of resonator for the music of the wind.
John Luther Adams: Anyway, I started making recordings. This would have been late June, early July, in 1989, and we had a stretch of unusually perfect weather there in the in the foothills of Brooks range and the Arctic Coastal Plain. And I had three or four days of just ideal conditions in which there was a light breeze, light and variable breeze from different directions. But never overwhelming, and the harp was just singing so sweetly so I made recordings with all the strings tuned to the same tone, tuned in unison. I can't remember how many strings there are in each of the string courses, but maybe a dozen or so on each side because, as you know it requires a certain critical mass of turbulent air of vortex shedding across the strings for a harp to be able to sing. It has to have enough disturbed air circulating for it to emit tone - to get the strings singing with the harmonic series. Anyway, I made recordings of the unisons and then I got the idea. Well, let me let me to one side to a different pitch, so I knelt down on the tundra and I tuned one side to G the other side to D. And I stood back up, put the harp on my head and a whole new world of harmonic, melodic musical colors opened up to me, and I've been exploring that world ever since.
Fil Corbitt: We'll be back in a few minutes after this excerpt of The Wind in High Places by John Luther Adams.
Fil Corbitt: What really touches me about your music is that it just always sounds like this unexpected dispatch from this world between human and non-human, like it just sounds so elemental and...
John Luther Adams: thank you.
Fil Corbitt: Sure! I mean, just big in ways that you don't hear people sound. And so I guess that's that's what I'm wondering is, do you see yourself as you know, a translator of these elemental forces? Is that your role?
John Luther Adams: That's a fair question. And maybe so. But really, the honest truth, Fil, is that this is what I need. You know, like all of us who live in this fragmented, crumbling, contemporary society. I long in my heart, my mind and my spirit to be in touch with something older, deeper or more mysterious than than than my own troubles and the travails and foibles of human society. This is what I need for myself. And I hope that out of that comes music that is somehow useful and meaningful to other people who are feeling something similar in this crazy world that we humans have created for ourselves. You know what keeps me going now, what am I am? So I'll be 69 before long. What keeps me going is my love for and my faith in the next generations. My generation has failed miserably as custodians of the Earth and custodians of humanity. I hope only to leave something that may be of use to younger people who will have to sort through the rubble that my generation is leaving to them and imagine, and to bring about new ways of living together with one another and with all other forms of life on this beautiful planet, which you know, is the only home that most of us will ever know.
Fil Corbitt: Your music so often deals with time in a really interesting way and deals with ideas of very sprawling time spaces, I guess, is the way I'd put it, is that a conscious decision?
John Luther Adams: Well, most of my music is, I guess, slow. But then there are pieces particularly in my percussion music; The Strange and Sacred Noise would be a piece I'd point you to... Some of that is very, very fast, and at a certain point, the lines kind of blur.
John Luther Adams: I just finished what I swear will be my final orchestral piece, and it's called An Atlas of Deep Time. I've been I've been reading the rocks. I've been reading a lot of of Earth history and geology and trying to learn to decipher geologic maps, to decipher the hundreds of millions of years of history beneath my feet on this mountain where I live. This new piece is 46 minutes long. So it's a sprawling orchestral piece on a scale similar to Become Ocean or Become Desert. But the tempo marking is 100 million years per minute. Because the piece is 46 minutes long. And of course, the Earth is as far as we can far as we can figure, mas o menos four billion six hundred million years old. This is really fast music, Fil!
Fil Corbitt: Hahaha I really like that. That's cool. And when that comes out, where is it going to be?
John Luther Adams: I will see you on April 30th in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
Fil Corbitt: OK, I'll be there.
John Luther Adams: Yeah, I'm excited about it. But you know, I swear this is it. I'm done. I'm done with orchestra music. You know, because Fil, I you know what I said earlier, right? I really want to fall in with the society that I want to live in, which I'll probably never live to inhabit. Classical music is a profound expression of the height of a society or a culture that is gone.
---
John Luther Adams: So everything I do from here on, I want to somehow be part of the society that I imagine will follow this one. Part of the new culture that younger people like you, and kids who are just coming of age now, will create.
Fil Corbitt: That's really exciting -- just the way you said that, that's something that, makes me want to be a part of it, too, whatever it is.
John Luther Adams: Well, it's clear that you are part of it. And...I think we're all struggling with...at least most of us are struggling these days with being discouraged. I mean, it seems like there are so many things wrong, and the way forward just seems unclear. And yet I need kids, you know, teenagers, 20 somethings who are determined that they're going to make things right, and that gives me the courage to keep doing whatever I can do to help.
Fil Corbitt: What are you listening to lately? I know you said you're working a lot and mixing, but are you listening to anything outside of that?
John Luther Adams: No. You know, the unvarnished truth is that I rarely listen to music because of course, my life's work is to hear something that hasn't been heard before or to imagine that and to try to hear it and bring it into the air so that it can be heard. When I was younger, I was a veracious listener. I would just listen to music all the time and and all kinds of music and, especially music that I thought I didn't like. I'd seek it out. The way you seek out a new flavor, you know something to this, that first makes you will crunch up your nose. Because I love that experience of discovery. But now...I was thinking the other day, I do want to listen to some music again. But what do I want to hear right now? I want to hear, maybe Tuvan throat singing. I want to hear Tibetan monks chanting and banging on drums and gongs and playing those long trumpets. I want to hear a peyote chant with the drumming that just goes on and on and on and on and on and the high keening voice that just goes higher and higher and higher. Yeah, I want to hear music that is somehow more deeply connected to the Earth and to what I call the real world, than most of the music that comes from our culture. And most of all, I just I just want to hear the birds. And I just want to listen to the wind on the mountain. And you used the word elemental, which is the word I use a lot. I have hundreds of hours of field recordings that I made mostly in the 1980s and 90s in Alaska, all over Alaska. And we have recently re-digitized those recordings, and I have them all now on a hard drive. And I don't know where this may lead me, but when I've been listening recently to recorded music, that's what I've been listening to. I've just been listening to glaciers calving into the seas, thunder rolling over mountaintops to candle ice tinkling in a whirlpool on the Yukon River, to the wind across the tundra. You know, it remains to be heard where this may lead me, but my thought is that it may result in something big in a form that I can't imagine yet -- something that I've never done before.
Fil Corbitt: Well, thank you so much for taking the time, it's really been very inspiring to just go listen deeper after talking to you. So thank you.
John Luther Adams: Well, the pleasure is all mine. I thank you for what you're doing and and for your for your energy, for your love. These days, we're all asking ourselves, What can I do? And you're doing something and more power to you for that. Thanks for doing it.
Fil Corbitt: Thank you. Thank you. All right, John, have a good night.
John Luther Adams: Take good care.
Fil Corbitt: You, too. Bye.
John Luther Adams: Bye.
Tags, Topics and Mentions: John Luther Adams, Aeolian Harp, How to build an Aeolian Harp, Alaska, Become Desert, Become Ocean, Become River, The Wind in high places, Arctic dreams, An atlas of deep time, composition, South Dakota Symphony Orchestra, Future of music, future music, wind harp