Winter Music: Composing the North (review)

The relationship between music and landscape is a historically close and intimate one. Yet basic questions of how music actually articulates a sense of place, or of who controls or owns particular musical landscapes and why, have only recently begun to be posed in mainstream academic writing on music. Previously, such questions have often been taken for granted or asserted simply as natural laws governing musical behaviour. But questions of meaning and ownership run like a red thread through this collection of writings on music and nature by the Alaskan-based composer John Luther Adams. What makes the anthology particularly useful and refreshing is the directness with which Adams challenges and confronts the notion of landscape in music. His work asks whether there are any paradigmatic structures or forms which define landscape across a range of different media (equivalent to a basic 'grammar and syntax' of landscape). Is the musical representation of landscape only contextually defined, or can it be accorded a more abstract spiritual quality? Adams claims that 'I'm more interested in evoking the feeling of nature than the sound of nature' (p. 123). The creative results, as vividly revealed in the three new pieces recorded on the accompanying compact disc (titled 'roar', 'crossing in phase-space', and 'Red Arc/Blue Veil'), are never less than compelling, and surely succeed in promoting a deeper critical engagement with issues of nature, musical form, and representation. Yet the book is not simply an exercise in musical aesthetics; it can also be read as an eco-critical text. The re-election of President George W. Bush in November 2004 reawakened fears about the potential exploitation of natural oil and gas reserves in northern Alaska, and the possible impact of drilling activities on the fragile ecosystems of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (for more on the controversy, follow the links at http://www.defenders.org). Adams's book therefore appears at a politically vital time, and its implications extend far beyond the institutionalized realm of avant-garde music.

The book gathers together a series of articles of different kinds, from lectures and programme notes to more aphoristic anecdotes. The heart of the discussion, however, takes place in two substantial essays, 'Resonance of Place' (1992–6; pp. 7–30), and 'Winter Music: A Composer's Journal' (1998–9; pp. 57–77), from which the anthology takes its title, and two extended bush walker's diaries ('Land of Constant Light' (1977), pp. 41–56, and 'Farthest North Mountains' (1999), pp. 94–110), charting trips across the flanks of the Brooks Range in northern Alaska. Adams's musical and literary models, freely acknowledged in the chapter 'Roots and Influences' (2000–1; pp. 119–24), are a generation of American modernist figures from Ives and Cowell to Cage, Nancarrow, Feldman, and Harrison. Adams also mentions the painters Rothko and Pollock as important visual stimuli, though significantly there is no reference to the composers George Crumb or Elliott Carter, or to prominent literary figures such as Thomas Pynchon or Don DeLillo. The pioneer metaphor is one of the most significant images in the book. As Kyle Gann notes in his foreword, 'there's an advantage in being first, and, in a way, John is simply the first to compose the great expanses of white in the Alaskan wilderness' (p. xi). Such frontier imagery, with its echoes of Whitman and Thoreau, serves both as a specifically American trait and also as a more general stylistic gesture, an attempt to clear aesthetic space through an unconscious anxiety of historical influence. Elsewhere, in a subsection entitled 'The first musicians and the musical landscape' in 'Resonance of Place', Adams writes that 'in time landscape became the primary metaphor for my music' (p. 11). Later, the idea of wilderness offers a model for the creative process. In 'Winter Music: A Composer's Journal', Adams states 'I want this music to be a wilderness. And I want to get hopelessly lost in it' (p...