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The Place Where You Go to Listen is a mixture of diary-entries, mini-essays, and
graphic representations documenting the composition of John Luther Adams'
site-specific music installation of the same name. The subtitle 'In Search of
an Ecology of Music' is somewhat misleading in that the book, for the most
part, documents a personal search for the means to express particular
large-scale natural events as music, rather than seeks to theorise a general
methodology for musical ecology (or ecological music). In terms of genre, the
book is somewhere between an extended programme note and an exhibition catalogue,
which is not surprising given that the installation piece it describes
appears to blur the boundaries between musical performance and site-specific
performance art.
As for the composition itself, the harnessing of natural forces to make music
is not a new thing (the Aeolian Harp being the obvious example); neither is
the use of site-specific spatial manipulation (take Vaughan Williams'
positioning of string-groups in Gloucester Cathedral for his Fantasia
on a Theme of Thomas Tallis); and nor is
technology or chance-mediated semi-random composition (such as Percy
Grainger's Free Music). This is without even mentioning John Cage,
Stockhausen etc.
So what makes The Place Where You Go to Listen different? For me it's the sense of an evocation
of a particular place of significance to the composer, mediated by technology
to restore a sense of interaction with that place that the audience is
invited to inhabit - the piece is less a reaction to a place than a synthetic
realisation or collaborative re-imagining of it. The composer chooses the
sonic representation of various possibilities, but allows the place to
realise these possibilities in real time. It's a kind of displaced
psychogeography of music if you like - the influence of place is distilled
into the psychologically affective and emotive medium of music, then
transplanted to the controlled and enclosed space of an art gallery.
In order to create the piece Luther Adams teamed up with scientists and sonic
engineers to find ways to translate the meteorological, seismic and ambient
events of Alaska into sound. As Luther Adams puts it:
The
Place Where You Go to Listen is a virtual
world that resonates
sympathetically with the real world... Streams of data tracing
natural
phenomena... are transformed into sound through a
process that
is sometimes called sonification.
Sonification is not to
be confused
with audification, which is the
direct rendering of
digital data
with inaudible frequencies into the audible range,
using resampling... Sonification is the process of
mapping data
with some
other meaning into sound.
[p.113]
If the whole book were written like this it could be heavy going. But Luther
Adams is interested in charting the creative genesis of the piece in
discursive prose as well as documenting the technical means of realising it.
The diary sections dealing with the day to day process of composition,
tangential influences and chance discoveries, offer a fascinating glimpse of
Luther Adams' creative process, and an insight into his motivations for
creating the piece:
In Inuit
tradition the force that maintains everything is sila, the
breath of the
world. Sila is wind and weather, the forces of nature.
But it's
something more. Sila is intelligence. It's awareness: our
own awareness
of the world, and the world's awareness of us. If
we listen
carefully to the breath of the world, perhaps our music
can become
filled with this awareness.Ó
[p.38]
Luther Adams' prose style is relaxed and readable when he's not in technical
mode, and even when the subject matter is both serious and emotive he is
seldom preachy. (Given the potential for sermonising inherent in this kind of
subject matter, that the book manages, on the whole, to avoid descending into
what Rupert Loydell has elsewhere termed 'hippy dipshit' is pretty impressive
in itself). Having said that it is clear that Luther Adams is ecologically
aware, as who couldn't be in Alaska (potential Republican presidential
candidates aside), and that The Place Where You Go to Listen offers itself up for potential polemical
interpretations insofar as it is charting the changing climate of a
threatened environment.
The piece is also ecological in the sense that it is engaging with real-world
processes as a compositional technique, using the forces that go into
constructing a sense of space and synthesising them creatively without
marshalling them or compelling them. Luther Adams' methodology, creating a
musical environment in which climatic and seismic processes interact and
shape performance, is in itself an act of collaborative ecological creation.
The means of creating the piece resonate with the final art-work/composition,
and with its potential message - that art, technology and nature can
collaborate to achieve a beautiful, sustainable balance.
The Place Where You Go to Listen
is well worth reading even if, like me, you are unlikely ever to get the
opportunity to experience the composition it describes. It provides an
insight into the working methods of a fascinating composer capable of
original, and topical, creative thinking on a large-scale It's the kind of book that gets you
wondering about how such methods might be applied creatively in other fields,
and encourages a creative engagement with difficult and pressing issues that
often seem near-impossible to tackle, simply because they are on such a large
scale. That said, music, being essentially abstract while operating in real
time, is perhaps the best-suited of the arts to engage with such
imaginatively abstract processes as climate change and ambient space (which
is not to argue that the effects of climate change are not concrete - simply
that the process itself is difficult to articulate, or chart creatively,
without reference to its end results).
The book itself is beautifully produced and laid out. The illustrations,
detailing some of the specifics of the piece's composition, illuminate the
text and provide points of musical reference that help to create a sense of
how the composition itself might sound. The structure of the book is well
thought out too - it opens with a preliminary essay that contextualises the
composition as ecology, moves on to journal entries charting the creation of
the piece, and finishes with illustrated essays on the work, its aesthetic,
and the compositional and technological methods used to create it. The only
thing missing is the opportunity to experience the piece in the flesh. Anyone
fancy flying me out there? Hmmm, that wasn't very ecologically sensitive was
it?
©
Nathan Thompson 2011
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