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Composing Utopia: the Case of John Luther Adams
Allen Gimbel

Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington 2/6/06

Composing Utopia: the Case of John Luther Adams Allen Gimbel Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington 2/6/06 "Nothing is more gentle than man in his primitive state, as he is placed by nature at an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes, and the fatal ingenuity of civilized man."
Rousseau

"What is he?... A writer of storybooks!... Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!"
Hawthorne

The first question that needs to be addressed is: who on earth is John Luther Adams? First of all, it's necessary to stress that this person is not to be confused with John Adams, another contemporary American musician who is actually considerably more famous than this John Adams. "John not-Luther Adams" is probably best known as the composer of two controversial non-pop music-theater pieces, "Nixon in China", which puts an alternately comic and compassionate face on the tricky sixties Republican, and "The Death of Klinghoffer", which got that composer (John Adams) into a heap of trouble for showing sympathy to another controversial underdog, namely the Palestinian terrorists that murdered wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer aboard the Achille Lauro in 1985. "John not-Luther Adams" won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2003 and is one of the most important voices in American contemporary music since, say, Aaron Copland. But that's the other John Adams.

Who is John Luther Adams? He was born in Mississippi in 1953, educated in California in the 60s (at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, a hotbed at that time for "advanced" artistic thought of all kinds), and then took his determinative trip to Alaska in 1975. He chose (chose) to set up residence there rather than in a bustling urban cultural center like New York City, and proceeded to build an "alternative" lifestyle, making his career as a "composer of art music", of all things, in the wilds of Alaska, well apart from the usual route which usually entails residency at a university or at least membership in some sort of active artistic community (such as those of NY City, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, and so forth). His journey and thoughts resulting from it may be found in his recently published essay collection "Winter Music: Composing the North", which you've had the opportunity to puzzle through in this interesting course, and I'm here to help you puzzle through it a little further.

First of all, What "kind" of music is this? How does this music differ fundamentally from pop music? Why did John Luther Adams choose to write this kind of music (and not pop music)? (John Luther Adams was a drummer as well as a "serious music composer", as you know from reading the book.) And why is he "quintessentially American", as I called him in my review of his book? These are some questions I'd like to address for starters.

"What kind of music is this?" Let's make things easy and call it "Not-Pop music". You won't hear it on your local pop station. You won't hear it on your local "classical" station either (although I played a piece of his called "The Farthest Place" on my belated Southern Florida NPR show-actually it was the first piece I played on it back in January of 2003.) As it turns out, there is nothing more alienating in this present culture than even talking about Not-Pop music (never mind listening to it-and I deal with Contemporary Not-Pop music, which is even more dangerous). It's probably the art form most violently shoveled into our cultural margins today. But, as you can see, it does indeed exist (and in a bewildering diversity of forms, I might add). In fact, I've spent most of my adult life dealing with this "kind" of music ("Not-Pop music") in one way or another. As a record reviewer, I've written on over 500 CDs of this kind of contemporary music since 1999; that translates into a staggering 2000- some- odd pieces (these are indexed on my website, if for no other reason than to prove that this stuff really exists). I want to spend most of this lecture posing questions, suggesting some answers and some problems, and then opening the floor for discussion.

One starting question:Why did John Luther Adams choose to move to the wilds of Alaska, rather than pursue his career in the relatively safe environment of a city or a university? Does Adams strive to become a "natural man" after Rousseau or Thoreau? How does one reconcile a return to a state of nature with talk of Sierpinski Carpets and structural polytemporality (that is, the layering of more than one strand of speed within a musical composition)? And how does Adams' environmental activism relate to his "arcane" musical activities?

How "American" is Adams' project? Certainly the quest for independence is as American as Apple Pie. Adams is definitely not the only American to follow such a colorful music-compositional path. Some of these names are dropped at various points throughout Adams' book. American musician Conlon Nancarrow, for example, couldn't find anybody to play his impossibly complicated music in the 1930s, so he punched the music into player piano rolls and moved to Mexico, of all places. (No computer technology was available to assist him in his work in those days.) Different climate than Adams' Alaska (definitely warmer), but the same general utopian outlook. Harry Partch couldn't find anyone to support his wild musical ideas either in the thirties, so he actually became a hobo (this was the period of the Great Depression); he journeyed through the "dust bowl", rode the rails, wrote a complicated treatise (called "Genesis of a Music"), invented his own elaborate instruments (often out of the junk that surrounded him), and eventually became a genuine cult figure, particularly during the 60s, when Columbia Records (before it was taken over by globalist giant Sony) released one of his theater pieces ("Delusion of the Fury") to what was at that time a curious and receptive young audience (I want you to consider those adjectives- "curious, receptive, young"-are these descriptors still valid?) [incidentally, that company will not release anything today not under the category of "crossover", a bow to both big business and musical illiteracy. But let's return to our present topic.]

Alaska, Mexico, the (mythologized) dust bowl. Walden Pond. Woodstock. Rousseau's "state of nature".These are all "places" of refuge. Here's another one: Evergreen State College. These are all "Places" to find refuge from an oppressive "real world" (Gr: Topos, = "a place". "Utopia": (Webster's:) "any idealized place, state, or situation of perfection.") "Places" for refuge in contemplation, refuge in ideas (it's interesting that Adams has such fascination with the Alaskan National Wildlife "Refuge"). Many humans find refuge, even solace, in some art form they're attracted to; many find it in a type of music of some sort. ("People who are receptive to the influence of art [NB] cannot set too high a value on it as a source of pleasure and consolation in life."-who said that? [Freud 31, in enumerating methods for the achievement of pleasure.]

"How does where we live influence the music we make?", Adams asks. What is "sonic geography"? "The places we live in resonate within us", Adams writes. John Cage, another American twentieth-century rebel musician, asked his audiences in 1952 to listen attentively to the environment (the "place") that surrounded them. In his famous work 4' 33", a pianist walks on stage, bows, sits down, and closes the piano lid, sitting there quietly for specified time periods that divide that 4 ½ minutes into predetermined segments. "Keep careful note of what you hear during those time periods", Cage asked. "But THAT'S not music!", somebody whines (always happens, very predictable). But to an attentive artist observing or experiencing, say, the Alaskan wilderness, there is music out there. "How does where we live influence the music we make?", Adams asks. Is the music you listen to exclusively urban? Exclusively consumer-driven? How "authentic" is it? Authentic of place? Does it actually determine place? Is commercial "country music" actually urban? Urban as in Madison Ave.? Is it exclusively a product of a "music industry" that seeks to homogenize all experience into an easily palatable and thus saleable model? What happens when Authentic foreign cultures, like the Balinese in Indonesia or remote African tribes, embrace American pop music? Exclusively loud American pop music? What is it drowning out?

"The keynote of the northern interior is silence", Adams writes. Why should silence be considered a positive esthetic value? In the Alaskan wilderness, "sound is the exception". What the musicians I've mentioned so far all have in common is an esthetic of escape [Freud explores this "contention… that what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions." 38.], but this escape is achieved by these musicians through what amounts to an extreme attentiveness to and intensive exploration of unfamiliar detail (this could possibly become describable as a psychosis in psycholoanalytical terms if this attentiveness becomes permanent rather than temporary, as occurs in the normal experience of art. Something to think about.) Adams, like Cage before him, asks us to "listen attentively to the music of the natural world", "leading us away from [traditional] notions of tempo and rhythm to a more direct experience of the larger flow of time and the more primal [NB] experience of 'the sounds themselves'" (that's one reason why his music doesn't sound like anything you've ever heard before). "Tune in, drop out", as the 60s mantra went (remember, Nancy?). This is a clue to approaching this music.

But it seems important to add here that 60s hippies were never anti-intellectual, a condition that became alarmingly prevalent in the youth culture of the Republican Reagan-era '80s, not the activist 60s (and so it's not surprising that Adams speaks of Sierpinski carpets and structural polytemporality). [It seems obvious that that anti-intellectualism continues today.] It's also no coincidence that Adams is not only an artist but an environmental activist as well. All of this may begin to explain why Adams takes the trouble to remind us that "Quantum physics has recently [1996] confirmed what shamans and mystics, poets and musicians have long known: the universe is more like music than like matter."

These are thoughts about, and this is a music of, "elevated consciousness." How should one experience this music? (when I was teaching this material in a course in contemporary music here in Florida in 2003, a student suggested that I might have been promoting drug use in experiencing music like this. But Freud, as you know, suggests there are similar psychological processes involved in both activities. see his Ch. 2.)

In any case, critic/composer Kyle Gann, in his preface to Adams' book, makes the following observation: "We're not meant to understand what we're hearing [in Adams' music]" (xvi). I'm not sure I agree with that. (I've disagreed with Mr. Gann before, in print, in fact, so this isn't the first time.) Savoring craft in art is one possible path toward understanding, or at least empathy. Once we choose to ignore an art object's intellectual aspect, we are left only with vague "feelings". And those are fine for starters. But if our experience ends there, the experience will turn out to be a pretty shallow one. And here is where we may begin to answer one of our initial questions. "How does this music differ fundamentally from pop music?" This music, first of all and probably most importantly, presupposes attentiveness. If pop required attentiveness, it would be distracting, and thus would never sell, or, even more importantly, fulfill one of its most important functions: as background to other activities. Furthermore, the creation of esthetic and intellectual discomfort (and "beauty" is a primary discomfort) is the province of art, not entertainment. It is required that one give undivided attention to an authentic artistic experience, not raise one's arms, jump up and down, and scream. The activity is perhaps closer to (thoughtful) prayer than to a distracted celebration of the joys of commerce (that's why the origin of Western art -- and Western art music -- comes from the Church.) In any case, for Adams' music, think of your reactions to an awesome natural display, like a rainbow, or the aurora borealis, or a hurricane (in my case).We are awed by these observations, but we as Westerners, for better or worse, try to comprehend them, or at least evaluate the experience in our emotional and intellectual catalogs. (Easterners are said not to do this.)

But one thing's for certain: These intense experiences, natural or authentically artistic, are never meant to serve as "background". Furthermore, if we're listening to one of Adams' pieces we are at least supposed to be aware when he, for example, "unleashes the whole chromatic scale on us," a requirement rightly posed by Gann in the sentence immediately following the one where he said that no understanding was required for communication with Adams' music.(Questionable editing there, yes?) You probably need to know what a "chromatic scale" is to successfully negotiate a crucial aspect of that music. Without it most people are likely to find experiencing this music a rather futile exercise. And why would a composer bother going to the trouble of doing what he does compositionally if his processes are not meant to be followed? All that being said, if most of us find this music opaque (as I sometimes do, due to lack of sufficient information, more than anything else), should we simply shove it into the cultural garbage heap because of its negligible commercial value (a condition I personally find at best highly problematic)?

Yet Adams will pursue his path regardless of whether or not he has company. In fact, he expresses a desire to eliminate human intervention altogether (like Freud's "hermit", or Nietzsche's Zarathustra). "Long live the cold and the dark!", Adams sings. Like the prophet Zarathustra, Adams has no problem going "underground".

Besides human intervention, which serves to destroy cultures and environments (particularly if that intervention comes from the West, as we're consistently told), Adams goes on to express a distrust of the very expression of "self". Why the desire to eliminate "self-expression"? ["Self-expression" is a basic goal, incidentally, of (the usually botched) American music/arts education pedagogy, for better or worse.] Instead of valorizing the individual, according to Adams, art should instead express the land, the animals, and "the spirits that inhabit this [Alaskan] place… The awesome and indifferent forces of nature are stark reminders of the insignificance of our personal dreams and passions." This, then, is a stance directly opposed to 19th-century romanticism, at least on the surface. (But how far removed is this, really, from 19th-century thought?)

What, then, is the ethical goal of art (music)? What is the point of careful "composition" in the art music sense (rather than, say, loosely designed, relatively simple improvisation)? How is art-music composition conceptually different than "songwriting"? (This was one of our initial questions.) Why would anyone be interested in this way of making and receiving music? (Adams suggests that for him his project is simply an "aspiration to live creatively in turbulent times"-xxi.)

And WHEN art music? Why does our culture not have space for it? We need "to consecrate a small time and space for extraordinary listening… voluntary surrender, purposeful immersion in the fullness of a presence far larger than we are." [see also Johnson] What exactly is "extraordinary listening"? What's it for? Is this activity a "threat to virtue" (as Prof. Koppelman might have it) because it necessarily excludes the community at large (at least at this time), while pop culture supposedly "celebrates" community? (or does it simply exploit it?).

Adams seeks a music of transcendent purity, "a music that lacks incident". What is a music that stresses incident? A music that emulates narrative? Western classical music emulates narration, which is one of the reasons modern audiences can't make head or tail of it. It organizes its musical characters in time, creates conflicts out of them, and (often) resolves them (but sometimes doesn't). There is a subfield of musical scholarship called "narratology" that seeks to give meaning to these abstract "stories" (sometimes not as abstract as they seem), stories that are told in musical "texts" (and I use that term purposefully). (I've contributed to this literature, and continue to do so-see bibliography.) How is pop music "non-narrative" (even though it's so dependent on lyrics)? What is the content of pop lyrics generally? What is the content of Adams' music? Whiteness? (as in snow, not skin color. ) How relatively simple it is to express "whiteness" in the visual arts. Paint something white. Or present a blank canvas (it's been done). Cage has demonstrated that there is no such thing as silence in music, but Adams has demonstrated that there is such a thing as musical "whiteness". In a piece called "Dream of White on White" he used only the white keys of the piano in various combinations-there he "excluded the chromatic field". There we go with that technical stuff again. Is it avoidable if we need to describe "musical process"? But Adams wants to deemphasize process in favor of "essential nature". But is that reachable without some sort of game plan (process)? We're talking "esthetics" now. What is Adams' esthetic goal? Nothing less than producing "sonic sculpture of transcendence." His music needs to be listened to with that goal in mind.

Transcendence is by no means new as an artistic goal (in music especially): in fact, it has been primarily a European project, at least until after the second world war. It should come as no surprise, then, that many of Adams' influences are not by any means American. He writes a day-to-day composer's journal, which is a project Beethoven might have been involved with (one can trace the day-to-day progress of a Beethoven piece through his famous notebooks, which are all published). Adams' discovery of Faith in the wilderness is right out of Wagner, and so is his epiphany of the unity of space and time (an event treated literally in Wagner's final opera, "Parsifal", end of Act 1.) Adams mentions that experience coming for him while listening (attentively, I imagine) to the slow movement of Bruckner's Eighth Symphony, not a bad choice and one not unfamiliar to me personally (in his case matching up the Bruckner with his experience in the Alaska landscape.) Bruckner's music developed out of an expression of his deep Catholicism, though there seems to be something universal in his best work (or can Bruckner, Wagner, or Beethoven-or Tolstoy, as Adams suggests- EVER be truly "universal"?). Where (or perhaps What) is God in the secularist Adams' world? Now, Bruckner and Adams both define themselves as seekers of transcendence, visionaries, as it were. So how can they "aspire to transcend SELF-expression", if they express themSELVES as visionaries? Their products are personal expressions of a visionary quest-that's why we can say a John Luther Adams piece "made me feel closer to nature's essence" (or not). He accuses Beethoven (and Mahler) of being "flawed" because they indulge (and express) "Self". (See Jonathan Caoette's recent film "Tarnation" and ask yourselves the same question.)

Music is the only art form that works with materials that in themselves are not immediately relatable to objects or things (which is why 19th century thinkers regarded it as the superior art form). So music is probably the best choice for realizing the project of expressing transcendence, if such a project is of immediate cultural value (is it?). At any rate, try listening to Adams' work keeping these thoughts in mind.

On a more immediately political level, I feel it necessary to continually point out that there seems to be a thread of anti-Westernism that winds its way through Adams' book. Are traditional Western values by definition corrupt? (All of them?) Those most critical of such values are, of course, educated Westerners (you've all read Freud and Rousseau recently, so you certainly know that). In our time, I would imagine it to be next to impossible not to be sensitive to the ruins caused, topographically, environmentally, culturally, to what Adams calls "Global monoculturalism". One world, peace on earth. Is the concept of Woodstock Nation too quaint for your generation? And I must add that that notion is also European in origin: Schiller and Beethoven got to it first.

Is Adams a "culture hero"? "Diversity is an essential characteristic of healthy biological systems", Adams writes. "Artistic pluralism is… a matter of cultural survival." (18) Does this include Western high culture (of which Adams' music is unquestionably a part)? And who cares? Does art matter? ("It's only music"-that was the same lady that screamed "but that's not music!" in the Cage episode described earlier.) "Is art an esoteric luxury? Do the dreams and visions of art still matter… in a world on the verge of melting?" Adams, like Monet before him (we are reminded), answer with a resounding Yes. Creating (and by crucial extension receiving) art "is our first obligation to ourselves and our children, to our communities and our world… to see new [preferably not commercially dictated] visions and to give voice to truths, both new and old." Are all authentic cultural artifacts necessarily universal? If not, where should they reside in our "Democratic" capitalist economy? (Or, as Tocqueville would have it, "pseudo-Democratic capitalist economy") Enlightened aristocracies always found a place for such artifacts. Our culture? We'll see. Thank you.

Adams, John Luther. 2004. Winter Music: Composing the North, Wesleyan University Press

Adams, John Luther. 2003. In the White Silence, New World Records 80600 (CD)
-- review: American Record Guide, September-October 2003 (Allen Gimbel)

Gann, Kyle. 1997. American Music in the 20th Century, Schirmer Books
-- review: Notes, September 1999 (Allen Gimbel)

Johnson, Julian. 2002. Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value, Oxford University Press

McCutchan, Ann. 1999. The Muse that Sings: Composers Speak about the Creative Process, Oxford University Press

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