Best Spiritual Writing 2002

Rebound by Sagebrush

John Luther Adams

Winter Music: A Composer's Journal

from MusicWorks

Winter Solstice 1998

For much of the year, the world in which I live is a vast, white canvas. In the deep stillness of the solstice, I'm profoundly moved by the exquisite colors of the sub-Arctic winter light on snow. Reading art critic John Gage's essay "Color As Subject," I'm struck by a parallel between the view out my window and Mark Rothko's use of white underneath the colors in his paintings. Like Rothko's translucent fields, the colors on the snow suggest to me broad diatonic washes suffused with gradually-changing chromatic harmonies.

Slowly, faintly, I begin to hear it: music stripped to its most essential elements -- harmony and color floating in space, suspended in what Morton Feldman called"time undisturbed."

Christmas 1998

A life in music is a spiritual practice. As in many disciplines, my practice sometimes involves fasting. From time to time there are periods in which I listen to no music at all. I feel this as a physical need.

During busy periods of performance and teaching I hear a great deal of music. And just as I might feel the need to fast following a period of feasting on rich foods, after several months of intensive listening my ears tell me they need a time of rest from music. As I begin new work, my hope is that fasting may help me to hear sounds I haven't heard before, and to hear familiar sounds with new ears.

In her life and work, Pauline Oliveros practices an extremely difficult discipline:"Always to listen." I admire this very much. And though fasting from music might seem to be a retreat from listening, I experience it as a time for listening to silence. Most of us are inundated with music and other sounds, these days. I feel very fortunate to live in a place where silence endures as a pervasive, enveloping presence.

New Year 1999

Beginning to sketch a large new orchestral piece, I'm studying the paintings of Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. Like Cage in music, Pollock made a radical new beginning in the middle of the twentieth century. Both artists opened territories they could only begin to explore during their lives. The questions posed by their work will continue to occupy others for a long time to come.

By contrast, Rothko and Feldman were endings. They both explored intensely private, self-contained worlds. And what Brian O'Doherty said of the one could apply just as well to the other: "Rothko was the last Romantic. But the last of something is usually the first of something else."

Which makes me wonder: Is it somehow possible to live and work in that timeless intersection between endings and beginnings?

January 20, 1999

For me, composing is not about finding the notes. It's about losing them. Although I'm still involved in writing scores, knowing what to write down is not the most difficult thing. It's knowing what not to write down.

I hope to discover music that sounds and feels elemental and inevitable. And before beginning to write, I want to hear as much of the new piece as I can, as it begins to take shape in my mind's ear. This is a slow, sometimes difficult process. But over the years I've learned to trust it -- even to savor it. I spend a lot of time thinking, reading, looking at art, walking, listening, sketching, trying to understand the essence of the new piece.

After six weeks in this mode, I now have several pages of notes for the new piece. But I've yet to start writing out the score.

January 22, 1999

Over the years, I've moved away from working with audible compositional processes -- an inheritance of minimalism -- toward an increasing focus on the fundamental materials of music: sound and time. My work is less and less a process of performing operations on notes, imposing compositional processes on sounds, or working within a syntax of musical ideas. I now concentrate primarily on asking questions about the essential nature of the music -- what it wants from me, and what it wants to be.

January 23, 1999

Today, I'm forty-six years old. By this time in his life, Ives had lost his physical health and had virtually stopped composing. But Feldman was leaving the dry cleaning business and moving into his more expansive "middle" period.

Pollock was gone. But Rothko was poised on the verge of his major breakthrough into his signature style. That happened in 1950, when he was forty-seven.

Among my gifts today: The new score is under-way.

January 24, 1999

What is line in music? This is a question I've pondered for many years.

In Pollock's poured paintings, long, fluid lines are multiplied into layered fields of perpetually-moving stasis and perpetually-frozen motion.

Much of my composition In the White Silence is composed of continuously rising and falling lines, layered and diffused into an allover texture of frozen counterpoint. In that piece it feels as though at last I may have discovered a sense of line that is my own. Now, in a new piece, I'm trying to take a leap I've contemplated for years: to let go of line and figuration altogether. But what will be left?

January 25, 1999

In the new piece, individual sounds are diffused in a continuous texture, always changing but always with a minimum of what the art critics call "incident." This won't be easy to sustain. James Tenney, Pauline Oliveros, and LaMonte Young have all found it. So has Glenn Branca in his recent music for orchestra. And Morton Feldman achieved it most fully in his late orchestral works, Coptic Light and For Samuel Beckett.

Listening to allover textures, it's difficult to concentrate for long on a single sound. The music moves us beyond syntactical meaning, even beyond images, into the experience of listening within a larger, indivisible presence.

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