The 35th Annual San Francisco Jazz Festival recently devoted week three of its "Summer Sessions" to the music of Pulitzer Prize and Grammy-winning composer John Luther Adams. The series was performed in various locations around the city, including an outdoor event at Sutro Baths, but the most intimate encounters took place within the warm and sociable confines of the SFJAZZ Center in Hayes Valley.
Beginning with "Listening Party w/John Luther Adams" last Wednesday, the celebration of the profoundly original composer's work offered a comprehensive opportunity to experience the astonishing range of his inspiration.
Awards for the big orchestral score "Become Ocean" and percussion piece "Inuksuit" have already alerted audiences to his extraordinary vision. Public performances in unusual settings have further revealed his ability for creating uniquely immersive soundscapes.
"Veils and Vespers" sound installation was part of the recent Festival, presented in the vast acoustic of Grace Cathedral. The four-part electronic work evolves organically over six hours and allows listeners to explore on their own, coming and going at will, to create an individual encounter.
"Inuksuit" also embodies the composer's main concept of "sonic geography," fully deserving its career-making recognition as his definitive composition. Last Sunday, Adams' ultimate immersive musical experience was performed in the ruins of the Sutro Baths in the Lands End area of western San Francisco.
As many as 99 percussionists are placed alone or in groups in open-air sites ranging from city parks to meadows �" and in SF, perhaps most wonderfully of all, at a haunted spot near the ocean. Named for human-shaped stones built by natives of the Arctic to mark significant places, JLA's "Inuksuit" also lets audiences create a personal experience. Like "Veils and Vespers," listeners move at their own pace throughout the area. Signposts in both works may act as guides, but each listener will derive their own meaning.
That Zen-like spirit informs Adams' string quartets most intensely. The composer said he never thought he would be interested in the genre until, of course, he was. His interest was better self-described as "curiosity," and before he knew it, he had written three!
In a boldly adventurous move, SFJAZZ brought the JACK Quartet, famed for their devotion to contemporary works by living composers, to Robert N. Miner Auditorium, to play all of the quartets and give the U.S. premiere of a fourth, "Everything That Rises," a new work composed by Adams specifically for them.
All of JLA's artistic influences, from Thoreau to artist Richard Serra and composers from Debussy to Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison, are distilled in the quartets. The precisely articulate Adams paraphrased another's words in concluding that the work eventually becomes the sum of its influences.
As so many composers have discovered, the string quartet can be the most useful vehicle for profound personal utterance, but again, Adams leaves a lot to the listener's imagination. He also has a poet's gift for giving his works evocative and perfectly appropriate titles. "The Wind in High Places" is the first in the cycle, and despite the technique and compositional craft involved, it really does take you there.
Without an essential need to understand his ways and means, Adams still added greatly to our appreciation with his characteristically concise opening explanations. As in sitting meditation (there's that spiritual feeling again), one can simply mind walk through the rarefied atmosphere. The focus and concentration of the musicians creates an exquisite and seemingly timeless soundscape, and we are transfixed.
Other works played by the JACK Quartet included "The Dream of the Canyon Wren," "Canticles of the Sky" and "Untouched." The youthful musicians were persuasive advocates and virtuosic interpreters. Once more the titles said it all, though "Canticles" and "Dream" are more programmatic in nature. In "Untouched" (Second String Quartet), the fingers of the players do not touch the fingerboard. The music contains no normal stopped tones, producing sound "either as natural harmonics or on open strings" (JLA).
After 38 years in Alaska, you may take the man out of the wilderness, but you can't take the wilderness out of the man. Nature and spirit inform every magical page of Adams' music, and the premiere performance of "Everything That Rises" last Friday showed the powerful effect of all his formative influences.
For an hour, the rapt audience was immersed in strands of sound rising at intervals growing progressively smaller. It could be the sound of paint drying to a detractor, but composers like John Cage and Morton Feldman also knew the almost painful beauty of slow musical evolution and the silence between the notes.
Adams brings to mind, with transcendent concentration, the atmosphere of Feldman's own "Rothko Chapel" and even the dying strands of Mahler's Ninth. "Everything That Rises" takes us to a very still place within. Mere words cannot describe it, but music can conjure it. Something tells me John Luther Adams' "sounds in the air" may well be an answer to a famous koan.