Crossing Open Ground
Tanglewood and the Berkshires are a marvelously sympathetic environment in which to hear the music of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Luther Adams. Much of his large catalog of works has been directly inspired by nature, even to the point of modeling the music on time-spans observed in the earth’s changes, and more concretely, the explicit use of prerecorded natural sounds.
Among his purest expressions of his fascination with the earth itself is continuously running sound and light environment The Place Where You Go to Listen (2004-06), installed in the University of Alaska Fairbanks Museum of the North, which translates the energies of such phenomena as tectonic movement, the sunrise, and the aurora borealis into audible sound. The composer set up the correspondences between energies and the sonic output but relinquished control over the work’s continually changing structure. Although unique in its details, his work can be seen as continuing a lineage of progressive, thought-provoking, and above all pioneering music-making stretching back to Henry Cowell, Harry Partch, and John Cage, a lineage into which he first tapped directly in his studies with the brilliant American experimentalist James Tenney at CalArts. (He also studied with Leonard Stein, who had worked closely with Schoenberg.) His work resonates with such contemporary composers as Raven Chacon and Annea Lockwood, as well as with earthworks and conceptual artists including Robert Smithson, James Turrell, Nancy Holt, and Andy Goldsworthy.
Adams was into rock music as a kid, and it was through learning of Frank Zappa’s broad interests that he discovered the classical avant-garde. A recording of Morton Feldman’s work, he has said, “convinced me…that this is what I wanted to do with my life.” Feldman’s reconsideration of the role of time in music resonated deeply with Adams, who heard echoes of that same sense of expansion of time and space in the Alaskan landscape years later. In addition to taking root in the place of his deepest inspiration, he has worked to maintain a connection with music’s physical, tactile dimension. He was a percussionist with the Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra and its touring offshoot, the Arctic Chamber Orchestra, in the 1980s, and still likes to keep in touch with a piano. He has also worked extensively with technology, producing a number of works with electronic components.
Adams’s catalog of music for conventional forces is also substantial. In 2014 won the Pulitzer Prize for his orchestra work Become Ocean. The Boston Symphony Orchestra performed his The Light That Fills the World in the Koussevitzky Music Shed at Tanglewood under Ludovic Morlot’s direction in summer 2015.
Crossing Open Ground
“Each place on Earth goes deep.
Some vestige of the old, now seemingly eclipsed place
is always there to be had.”
— Barry Lopez
Composer's Note
Today we pass much of our lives in relatively homogenous physical environments, and in the non-places of the internet. Searching for real experiences in real places, we travel to far-flung destinations, where we make photographs of ourselves to prove that we were there. Yet it’s increasingly rare that we are fully present anywhere, and the knowledge that we truly belong to any place eludes many of us.
Crossing Open Ground is an invitation to listen to the older, deeper resonances beneath our feet, a ceremony of rediscovery and re-consecration of place—wherever we may be— and an invitation to practice walking as a form of resistance and hope.
From religious pilgrims to refugees seeking asylum around the world, from the freedom marchers of the civil rights movement to present-day marchers against autocracy, walking is an expression of devotion and an assertion of freedom —a transgression of the borders we construct to separate ourselves from one another and from our shared status as citizens of the earth.
In a performance of Crossing Open Ground, each musician and each listener are free to follow their own individual path through the physical and musical landscape of the work. Out of the experience of walking and listening together, a renewed sense of community and place emerges.
The title is borrowed from a book by my dear friend the late Barry Lopez, to whom the work is dedicated.
— John Luther Adams