The Place Where You Go to Listen
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.
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Person
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).
Content
List of Illustrations Foreword ? Alex Ross Preface IN SEARCH OF AN ECOLOGY OF MUSIC The Breath of the World Locus ex Machina Real Time Working in Place Two Minds A COMPOSER'S JOURNAL: PART I ? ALWAYS GETTING READY December 21, 2003, to August 18, 2004 COMPOSER'S JOURNAL: PART II ? STUDIO NOTES September 1, 2004, to May 18, 2005 COMPOSER'S JOURNAL: PART III ? IN THE PLACE May 27, 2005, to March 30, 2006 HEARING WHERE WE ARE The Romance of the Real The World is Listening Resonant Space Things We Haven't Heard Before AN ECOSYSTEM OF SOUND AND LIGHT Mapping the Terrain The Colors of Noise and Tone "An Orchestration of Untouched Material" The Light That Fills the World The Choirs of Day and Night The Voices Within The Voice of the Moon Aurora Bells Earth Drums The Sonic Space The One Who Listens Afterword Acknowledgments Author Biography Bibliography and Discography Compiled by Noah Pollaczek Selected Works Selected Discography Selected Writings by John Luther Adams Selected Interviews and Writings About John Luther Adams
