The Place Where You Go to Listen: In Search of an Ecology of Sound and Light (review)

This book can perhaps best be described as an extensive project diary, in which Adams allows an insight into the questions, thoughts and experiences that led to his work The Place, an installation of sound and light at the Museum of the North in Fairbanks, Alaska. Ninety-one pages of this work are his journal entries, logging everything from weather to philosophical thought. This substantive diary brings something of the drama and history of the piece to the forefront, but one must question the value of this from a public and academic perspective. Adams's approach makes us question both our own experience of nature and the integrity of the artist in creating work that draws from natural sound.

The first ten pages entitled 'In Search of an Ecology of Music' outline the philosophy behind Adams's work. He highlights how he has moved from a method of composition that imagined the sound then aimed to reproduce it, to a method that listened to the sound and highlighted it. This shift to a listening-based methodology is founded upon his belief that 'art and science can teach us to transcend ourselves, guiding us beyond our anthropocentric obsessions to a more complete and integrated relationship with the earth' (10). For Adams this calls attention to the need to create a greater ecological awareness in our own lives.

Questions of ecological awareness and the place of its relationship to listening and nature form points of contention, and recent debate by Andra McCartney (2010) and past assertions by Redström (2007) have given prominence to this issue within the disciplines of soundscape and composition. However, these discussions pass unmentioned by Adams as he forms his own relationships with the terms, and sees music as a contributor to 'the awakening of our ecological understanding'(1). It is this doctrine that provoked his search for an ecology of music and subsequently led to the creation of 'an ecosystem of sound and light' (110) otherwise known as his piece The Place.

At first Adams's doctrine appears to draw, although unmentioned, upon the early work and convictions of Murray Schafer (1977), and the ideology of Westerkamp (2007) in her sound-walks; yet his perception of music awakening our understanding is not as literal as listening to or recording the audible environment. Perhaps it is more appropriate to see Adams's dogma and work as reflecting something of Emerson, Fuller and Thoreau.

Despite the overtly introspective nature of the book Adams lacks academic rigour when discussing his own philosophies. The absence of contextualisation surrounding his convictions and the scarcity of engagement with contemporary debate is disappointing; particularly in a work that is unified by such a core understanding of the relationship between ourselves and our environment.

Pages 11–100 are the central journal chapters. This part introduces every aspect of the piece and how it grew from an experience to an inspiration and then became incorporated into the final work. At times this section can appear frivolous and excessively introspective, as, for example, in his diary entry for 23 January:

Cindy and I are on retreat. We've come to this quiet lodge in the Alaska Range to mark my birthday, to reflect on the past year and to plan for the future.

I'm profoundly grateful for the blessings of my life and work. I want to live ever closer to the earth, with deeper awareness of the sentience all around us. And I want to follow the work wherever it may lead me for as long as I can.

(87)

In an academic context it is appropriate to question the relevance of Adams's birthday retreat to the project and book; however, when we view these comments in the light of his earlier doctrinal basis that music evokes a 'greater ecological understanding' (1) and that a 'transcendence of self' (10) can occur, we can see...