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In Tune With the Voices of the Midnight Sun
At the University of Alaska Museum of the North, the music-and-light installation by John Luther Adams, left, changes with the weather, the seasons and seismic activity.
(Photos By Nora Gruner -- Associated Press)
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Adams is used to causing such sensations. His compositions have been described as mesmerizing, abrasive or unsettling -- and, if nothing else, challenging. His album "The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies," a 70-minute piece for a percussion soloist, includes eight minutes of crashing cymbals and an entire movement written for an air raid siren.
As planning began for a $42 million museum expansion, director Aldona Jonaitis wanted something that appealed to the ear. She credits Adams with the concept. Adams said it was her idea. "She asked me for a quiet, contemplative space within this busy, vibrant museum," he says.
"I thought this was a great opportunity to have a sound experience that communicated the sense of place in Alaska, which is what the whole museum is about," Jonaitis says.
That part was easy for Adams, who has looked for inspiration from the landscape, birds, Yukon River and Native Alaskans.
He likes to say he's not interested in telling stories or painting pictures with music, but evoking the experience of visiting a special place.
"I want music to be a kind of wilderness, and I want to get hopelessly lost in it," he says. "Some of the moments when I've felt most alive, most aware, have been times when I've been out, miles and miles from roads, in the middle of all that expanse."
Just as the wilderness doesn't come with directions, Adams provides minimal explanation.
"I could have used natural sounds," he says. "I could have been much more illustrative and given the sounds much higher profiles and made the thing much more active than it is, but that isn't what I wanted to do. This is about extending our awareness."
Adams lets the elements control the music's pacing. The sound changes on real time. Many visitors walk out with the comment, "It doesn't change." The gallery has no way to let them hear how the room might sound on winter solstice with northern lights shimmering above. If you want to hear that, you have to come back in December.
"This piece requires, and I hope, seduces and invites, the listener to become a participant and to find her own way into this and have her own experience inside this work," Adams says.
Adams didn't so much compose the music as unleash it.
"Every time I walk in that door I'm as surprised as anyone," he says. "I can't predict the actual moment-to-moment atmosphere and texture and coloration of the moment."
The music is tied to natural phenomena, but there's little natural about the digital sound.
Jonaitis said the room will ring true to Alaskans who have experienced the aurora, the midnight sun or a storm sweeping in from the Alaska Range.
"There's nothing like it in the world," she says.
