John Luther Adams – …Theresa Kishkan

“the future had slipped into the present” (Jessie Greengrass)

April 18, 2022April 18, 2022 theresakishkan7 Comments

thompson

As I write this on a rainy Monday morning, I am listening to “Become River” by the extraordinary composer John Luther Adams. I’ve written about him before. His composition “Become Ocean” is one of my favourite pieces of music, holding within it both the beauty and power of the world’s oceans but also the dark presence of the climate emergency. Alex Ross, who writes about music for the New Yorker, says this about “Become Ocean”:

The title comes from lines that John Cage wrote in tribute to the music of his colleague Lou Harrison: “Listening to it we become ocean.” There are also environmental implications, as Adams indicates in a brief, bleak note in the score: “Life on this earth first emerged from the sea. As the polar ice melts and sea level rises, we humans find ourselves facing the prospect that once again we may quite literally become ocean.” A onetime conservation activist who moved to Alaska in the nineteen-seventies, Adams has witnessed the effects of climate change at close range, and his music often reflects what he has seen. The 2007 orchestral work “Dark Waves,” among others, evokes mighty, natural processes through the accumulation of gradually shifting patterns. “Become Ocean” is his most ambitious effort in this vein: its three huge crescendos, evenly spaced over the three-quarter-hour span, suggest a tidal surge washing over all barriers.

These days I am flooded with fear about the future, what it holds for us as a species but more importantly (because we are only one of the estimated 8.7 million species that call the earth home), for our planet. It might go on. Will we? Do we deserve to? These are things I think about in the night when I can’t sleep. Yesterday I did what I always do this time of year: I planted seeds and transplanted hardy seedlings (begun a month ago, or two) into the garden. Purple sprouting broccoli, volunteers of perennial arugula, some cauliflower. I planted the peas out earlier in the week. I tidied the greenhouse and wondered how on earth to prune the little olive trees, where to plant the hardy pomegranate. Twenty years ago I would not have been thinking about olives or pomegranates but our climate has changed. Who can forget the heat dome last year, the one that claimed the lives of 600 people in British Columbia? Or the weather system known as an atmospheric river that caused extreme flooding, landslides, entire highway systems collapsed, loss of prime agricultural land in the Fraser Valley (along with huge numbers of farm animals who drowned in barns or flooded fields). The king tides. Or the fires: 8,700 square kilometers burned, driving people from their homes. The town of Lytton, at the confluence of the Fraser and Thompson Rivers, was completely destroyed. Imagine that for a moment. A vital community, one with a long history, Indigenous, settler, Chinese, the setting of Ethel Wilson’s gorgeous Hetty Dorval (and my own novella, The Weight of the Heart), burned to ash.

Over the past few days I read a compelling novel, The High House, by Jessie Greengrass. A small group of people in an isolated house on the edge of England are learning how to survive the unthinkable: the loss of a nearby village due to extreme flooding, with the ripples of climate events moving out into the larger world. These people are resourceful, in part because someone has made preparations for them, and in part because one of them has memory of previous floods, knows how to grow food to supplement what’s been hoarded for them, and provides practical advice and durable wisdom. One of the characters muses that floods had always happened elsewhere, far away, and one could feel sympathy but a kind of illusory confidence that surely it couldn’t come to that on one’s own doorstep.

The whole complicated system of modernity that had held us up, away from the earth, was crumbling, and we were becoming again what we had used to be: cold, and frightened of the weather, and frightened of the dark. Somehow, while we had all been busy, while we had been doing those small things that added up to living, the future had slipped into the present—and despite the fact that we had known that it would come, the overwhelming feeling, now that it was here, was of surprise…

The glaciers are melting, the rivers rising, already a fire in northwestern B.C. has closed a major highway, and what can we do but plant seeds and hope for the best? Try our best? We are waiting for the installation of a heat pump here, in part for its energy efficiency and in part to cope with the high temperatures that we are told to expect again this summer. Reading and thinking into the small hours of the night does no one any good and I can’t recommend it but in daylight, I can recommend the transporting beauty of John Luther Adams, his oceans and rivers and deserts transposed to violins, percussion, harps. Sit in a quiet room and listen. Let your heart slow to the watery sonorities of oceans and rivers, the distant thunder and bells and the dry vibrations of heatwaves. These are stories we might need when the future slips into the present. Listening, I am remembering the Thompson River as it winds below Walhachin, the air redolent with sage and dry earth, a few low junipers, their bark peeling away. Listening in my own high house, rain on the roof, Steller’s jays churring for their breakfast.

If you hear the Mississippi in Become River, I wouldn’t disabuse you of that notion. I’ve been a lifelong river rat; And the river I know best is the great Tanana river in central Alaska that feeds into the mighty Yukon.
But from time to time, people will ask me, which ocean, which desert, which river, and my answer is always the same.
Your ocean, your river, your desert. What I hope the music does is invite you into this beautiful, enveloping place, and for you have to your own journey, your own experience, your own float down the river, rather than me telling you a story about mine. (from https://thegreatnorthernfestival.com/blog/winter-walk-with-john-luther-adams)

music at the edge of the earth

February 2, 2021February 2, 2021 theresakishkan2 Comments

a desk job

Some days I feel like I’m living on the very edge of the earth, and in some ways I am. On the edge of the earth, there is a fire to make in the mornings, a cat to feed, a bird-feeder to fill with black sunflower seeds. There’s a book to revise, meals to make, laundry piled up at the top of the stairs. At the edge of the earth, no one comes to the door.

We go down the Coast usually one day a week to do our grocery shopping, other errands, and I take back the previous week’s library books, check out some for the week ahead. On the New Books shelf yesterday, I was surprised to find a copy of a memoir by John Luther Adams–Silences So Deep: Music, Solitude, Alaska. If you read this blog regularly, you’ll know how much I love his music. Of course I brought the book home and I began to read it last night. I wondered how he’d felt compelled to write the book and there it is, in the Acknowledgements:

On a winter evening walk across frozen Lake Louise in the Alaska Range, the writer and critic Alex Ross asked me whether I’d ever considered writing a memoir. I hadn’t.
“You’ve lived an interesting life,” Alex said, quietly.

Alex Ross is one my favourite music writers. I found his wonderful The Rest is Noise on a trip to Europe in 2009 and it was the best of companions as we traveled on trains and walked to concerts in the evenings. His next book, Listen to This, led me to the music of John Luther Adams and I am grateful for the introduction. So many times I’ve sat at my desk, working on something, while Become Ocean resounds through my small room. (Like right now.) So I was intrigued to read about how he came to composition and how he listens to birdsong, ice, weather, bells, and explores how to bring them together in ways that take the listener to the locations of their origins. In an interview about his memoir in The Nation, Adams says this:

The construction of the music, the intellectual care, the mathematical rigor, the algorithmic detail—all that is essential, even if you don’t hear it or you choose not to listen to it. I’m not interested in showing you how much technique I have, how smart I am. The music is not about me, or even about my making it.

But I still think that if it’s well made, and if it has a formal coherence, like this mountain does or like the seasons do, it gives the music that elemental quality that I’m after. There are moments in Become Ocean or Become Desert when all these different tempos and sonic layers begin to converge, or diverge for that matter, and I believe when a listener hears that, even if she doesn’t hear it consciously, it creates a gravitational pull or a magnetic field in the music.

I read far longer into the night than I normally would and this morning I reached for the book first thing, with my coffee. In the fifth section, there’s a beautiful profile of Adams’ relationship with the late American poet, John Haines, in so many ways his kindred spirit. Mine, too. If you look at the photograph at the top of this post, you’ll see The Stars, The Snow, The Fire, a book I’ve treasured for decades. I keep it behind my computer so that I can easily reach for it and be taken away, to Alaska, in language so full of music, that it comes as no surprise to learn that John Luther Adams set a suite of John Haines’ poems to music, Forest Without Leaves:

A birch leaf held fast
in limestone ten million years
still quietly burns,
though claimed by the darkness.
Let earth be this windfall
swept to a handful of seeds—
one tree, one leaf, gives us plenty of light.

There’s music at the edge of the earth, sounding out as waves of ocean, as the anticipated song of the Swainson’s thrush which even a pandemic can’t take from me, as a croaky bell in the woods as ravens tumble and play, a ping on the roof as the rain begins. The sonic layers of a life, plenty of light.

redux: “…we may quite literally become ocean.”

December 14, 2020 theresakishkan3 Comments

From 2014, then reposted in 2019, and now, again, because this is music I need right now and maybe you do too.

____________________

Composer John Luther Adams has intrigued me for years. In Listen to This, my favourite music writer Alex Ross describes The Place Where You Go To Listen, a sound and light installation created by Adams in the Museum of the North in Fairbanks, Alaska: “…a kind of infinite musical work controlled by natural events occurring in real time. The title refers to Naalagiagvik, a place on the coast of the Arctic Ocean where, according to legend, a spiritually attuned Inupiaq woman went to hear the voices of unseen birds, whales, and unseen things around her. In keeping with that idea, the mechanism of The Place translates raw data into music: information from seismological, meteorological, and geomagnetic stations in various parts of Alaska is fed into a computer and transformed into a luminous field of electronic sound.”

As I write this, I’m listening to Become Ocean, the John Luther Adams orchestral composition commissioned by the Seattle Symphony, first performed in June 2013; it won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2014. The composer noted, “Life on this earth first emerged from the sea. As the polar ice melts and sea level rises, we humans find ourselves facing the prospect that once again we may quite literally become ocean.” What I’m hearing are the most ravishing harmonies, like wind, water, the swoosh of whales feeding. Dark chords ascend and everything is in them. A song of the universe in a time of crisis, it’s music for our time and I can’t help but think if enough of us listened to it, it might also serve as a call to us to fully address the huge issue of anthropogenic climate change.

Earlier this afternoon we walked over to Haskins Creek to see if the coho had entered this small swift stream from Sakinaw Lake where they’ve been waiting for some time now. And yes, there were fish undulating in the water, a dipper feeding on insects (and maybe eggs) near the creek’s mouth, and the low wintry light spangling everything dull gold. Everywhere huge trees, dense ferns, eagles on their way to feed on the spawned-out carcasses and then distribute them over the ground. The marine-originating isotope Nitrogen 15 is found in the big trees of our coastal rain forests as well as in the hair of bears, wolves, and other animals that feed upon salmon and distribute their remains on land. (I eat salmon weekly and imagine I have my own stores of marine nitrogen too!)

It’s the final movement now, the tidal crescendo of what Alex Ross suggests might “be the loveliest apocalypse in musical history”, and it makes me want to weep — for the beauty of our waters, the salmon cycle, the humpback whale and her calf we saw feeding in Davis Bay earlier this year, and the falling of the sun over the western horizon I am watching from my south-western window as I listen and write. Sometimes music takes us so utterly by the heart and the soul into mystery that we are unwilling to come back to a room, a chair, a wooden desk. In contemplating this beautiful piece of music, I am entirely willing to become ocean.

redux: “…we may quite literally become ocean.”

December 14, 2019December 14, 2019 theresakishkan2 Comments

From this day in 2014:

a little night music

August 21, 2019August 21, 2019 theresakishkanLeave a comment

drip

Last night I slept on the couch downstairs because John has a bad chest cold and I a)knew he would cough for a good portion of the night and b) I don’t want to catch the cold myself. The window above me was open wide and sometime after midnight I heard the rain begin. We have a metal roof and the sound amplifies. It’s lovely to listen to. I found the rhythm very regular and I tried to think how I would write it down. There is a pergola above the section of deck the window opens to and it’s covered densely with wisteria, grape vine, and clematis. When it had rained for a time, the water began to drip down from the green vines, irregular in tempo. There’s a capiz shell windchime hanging over the table (I think of it as our summer chandelier) and it periodically shook in the light wind. After a bit of fuss when the cat came in with some small creature, wanting to be praised while the catch ran away and hid (a shrew, either Sorex vagrans or S. monticolus, whom I believe has made an escape this morning through the door we left open for it after we watched it race across the kitchen floor), who could sleep? Not me. I turned on a light and picked up the book I was reading before bedtime: Listen to This, by Alex Ross. I read this collection of writing about music some years ago, not long after it was released in 2010. This past weekend, the young violist Evan Hesketh and his wife Farrah O’Shea were staying with us during the Pender Harbour Chamber Music Festival and we talked about how much we enjoyed Ross’s earlier book, The Rest is Noise. I left Listen to This out so they could sample its pleasures. Before bedtime, I re-read the essay on Bob Dylan and in the night I went to my favourite essay in the book, “Song of the Earth”, a piece about visiting John Luther Adams in Alaska and talking to him about music. I love JLA’s Dark Waves and so much more of his work, including the ravishing Become Ocean, an orchestral composition that won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music. Somehow it was exactly right to be reading about him, reading his sources for music:

When the ice breakup comes, it makes incredible sounds. It’s symphonic. There’s candle ice, which is crystals hanging down like chandeliers. They chime together in the wind. Or whirlpools open up along the shore or out in the middle of the river, and water goes swirling through them. Or sizzle ice, which makes a sound like the effervescent popping you hear when you pour water over ice cubes.

In a room with high ceilings, I was reading about ice and listening to water, the lush harmonies of leaf rustle, shell chimes, water pinging on metal, and finding its way through dense green vines.

single lantern on Schooner Cove trail

March 24, 2017March 24, 2017 theresakishkanLeave a comment

Yesterday it rained. When we woke, we watched surfers wait for the perfect wave in torrential rain. And then we drove to a favourite trail, the one to Schooner Cove. There was a single lantern of skunk cabbage, its leaves eaten to the quick by a bear.

skunk cabbage

Sometimes I think it’s hard to find the truly wild places on this earth. The ones we haven’t damaged. Looking out at Schooner Cove or here at Cox Bay or at Florencia Bay where I camped as a 19 year old, I know there’s plastic in the ocean between us and Japan, there’s contaminated flotsam from Fukashima, the detritus of populations who’ve taken this earth for granted. Were we always this way? So the heart is compromised, even in the beloved places.

At the foot of the Schooner Cove trail, long canes of rose off in the huckleberry. Not a native rose, not Nootka or bald-hipped, but something with curved thorns. Seeded by birds? Planted decades ago by one of the free spirits living at the high tide line in a driftwood shelter?

We ate a delicious lunch at Wolf in the Fog and came back to think our respective thoughts, make notes in our books, dry our jeans by the fire. And later, slept to the boom of the surf. What does it say to us? What it’s always said, its own music. I think of John Luther Adams’s extraordinary “Become Ocean“, and his words: “Life on this earth first emerged from the sea. As the polar ice melts and sea level rises, we humans find ourselves facing the prospect that once again we may quite literally become ocean.”

“…we may quite literally become ocean.”

December 14, 2014 theresakishkan3 Comments

As I write this, I’m listening to Become Ocean, the John Luther Adams orchestral composition commissioned by the Seattle Symphony, first performed in June 2013; it won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2014. The composer noted, “Life on this earth first emerged from the sea. As the polar ice melts and sea level rises, we humans find ourselves facing the prospect that once again we may quite literally become ocean.” What I’m hearing are the most ravishing harmonies, like wind, water, the swoosh of whales feeding. Dark chords ascend and everything is in them. A song of the universe in a time of crisic, it’s music for our time and I can’t help but think if enough of us listened to it, it might also serve as a call to us to fully address the huge issue of anthropogenic climate change.