John Luther Adams's 2011 Cold Blue Music release containing Four Thousand Holes (2010) and . . . and bells remembered (2005) presents a curious pairing of works. It is likely, however, that coupling any of Adams's better-known pieces with Four Thousand Holes would yield a similarly unexpected result for listeners accustomed to this composer's distinctive voice and vocabulary. Four Thousand Holes stands apart in Adams's oeuvre, or at least among those works that have been recorded in the past thirty-three years, and in perplexing ways. Its singularity raises questions about where the composer is headed, or if this is simply a temporary detour. The second piece on the disc, . . . and bells remembered, is more in line with earlier works of this sonic cosmographer.
Starting with the 1979 Opus One Records LP of Adams's now canonical songbirdsongs, and through recordings including A Northern Suite (1981); Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing (1996); and The Light That Fills the World (2002) among a couple dozen others, the composer has been positioned by critics, scholars, and an ever-growing group of followers as nature's twenty-first-century musician-collaborator in excelsis. Adams, who in his twenties adopted Alaska's boreal forests as his home, is regularly compared to Walden's Concord woodsman. His 2004 book, Winter Music: Composing the North, reinforced this image with its reflective journal entries and multiple photographs of the bearded composer, one showing him trudging through the woods to his studio.Footnote 1 He is talked of as a logical heir to Olivier Messiaen, the twentieth-century musician-theologian-ornithologist.
Adams's oeuvre enacts, heretofore, a decades-long and oft-repeated commitment to “an ecology of music,” which grew out his earlier environmental activism. It was, in fact, work for environmental groups in the 1970s that brought Adams to the Alaskan wilderness in the first place. In the intervening years, he has burrowed deep through the hard Arctic ground to plant roots in one of the most challenging places on earth. Silent, white space as far as the eye can see floats above a trembling, quaking earth and glistens beneath skies alive with the phantasmagoric lights of the aurora borealis. We often hear the wonder in Adams's music and become similarly awestruck. It is difficult not to recognize one's role within nature's larger enterprise when surrounded by such dramatis personae. Adams's pieces In the White Silence, Dark Wind, The Immeasurable Space of Tones, Roar, and Red Arc/Blue Veil invite listeners to match their mindfulness with the composer's and to pay attention to the natural environment in ways they might never have considered prior to hearing his thoroughly captivating sound creations.
Insights into Adams's thinking about Four Thousand Holes are limited to what has been written in numerous published discussions of the piece since the recording came out, and the minimal remarks that accompany the CD. The latter consist of two statements: A quote explaining the origins of the title as coming from John Lennon's “A Day in the Life”: “And though the holes were rather small / They had to count them all”; and the briefest of explanations by Adams about the composition of the piece itself: “In Four Thousand Holes I limited myself to the most basic elements of Western music—major and minor triads and four-bar phrases—sculpting these found objects into lush harmonies and rhythmically complex fields of sound.” There are no other notes, and nothing at all to illuminate . . . and bells remember. The absence of liner notes for this CD contrasts with the polyphony of voices present in the liner notes of his earlier recordings. I'm thinking especially of the extremely thoughtful commentary provided by Steven Schick and the composer in notes for the 2005 Mode recording of Strange and Sacred Noise that also includes brief quotes from works by Jacques Attali and Barnett Newman. Music shouldn't require explanation to be meaningful, but it wouldn't hurt to have some input from enlightened others, particularly when a work is so different from what has come before.
Consideration of . . . and bells remembered establishes a base line from which to measure the distance Adams has traversed on the way to Four Thousand Holes. The ringing sounds of chimes, vibraphone, orchestra bells, bowed vibraphone, and bowed crotales emerge and dissolve in a gentle parade of sonorities that slowly rises in pitch over the course of the ten-minute piece. The deliberate pace of their appearance and disappearance allows us to hear in, around, and through the sounds, to feel their kinship with one another, and to follow them to their dissolution. The resonances pull us into their world and we follow them. . . . and bells remembered is all about listening, and perhaps about following a sound beyond audibility where all we have is the memory of the sound. This is a shimmering, redolent sound environment: a listener's paradise.
Four Thousand Holes explores a different place. Although it uses vibraphone and orchestral bells, and thus shares some basic sound material with . . . and bells remembered, the work seems to be more a display vehicle for pianist Stephen Drury, who commissioned the piece with funding from the Meet the Composer organization. Vibraphone, bells, and piano are all subjected to Adams's electronic “aura,” but the piano takes center stage. Heavy, assertive, insistent major and minor triadic chords are struck and buried across the range of the keyboard; they insist upon rather than invite attention. The Lennon quote is not without meaning. We hear the Adams of his Beatles-loving days, and in fact the composer has been quoted as acknowledging the inspiration of “a couple of Beatles songs” in conjunction with Four Thousand Holes.Footnote 2 But although the simple harmonies of the Fab Four might have inspired Adams, the self-conscious showiness of the pop group is present as well. One can imagine the pianist ricocheting off the piano bench in the best virtuoso style as he sinks all his weight into the keyboard and rebounds.
The comparison of bells to Holes is like that of ballet to modern dance. Where the former is about lift and weightlessness and transcendence, the latter is a study in the forces of gravity and control. This piece is about speaking and being heard, about making an impression on the sonic environment, but perhaps the materials are too limited to sustain such an elongated oration. Although there are many moments of rhythmic and sonic interest, the piece, for all its resonance, doesn't ring true for this listener. Adams's locus seems to have changed and perhaps he's not quite comfortable in this new place.
This is no criticism of the playing of pianist Stephen Drury, who brilliantly metes out his energies and attention over the course of the work. As with his recordings of works by John Cage, Charles Ives, Frederic Rzewski, and John Zorn, Drury proves himself worthy of inclusion among an elite corps of contemporary pianists who are technically and temperamentally up to the most demanding literature. Nor do I have anything less than accolades for the quality of the recorded sound. Recordists Jeremy Sarna and Patrick Keating, and Nathaniel Reichman who was in charge of the final edits, mixing and mastering, have done a stunning job of bringing both large and small sounds to life. My dilemma is with the eponymous piece: after six months of trying, I still haven't found my way into it. Whether this is a shortcoming of the composer or of the listener, I don't know. Perhaps we both have to get comfortable with John Luther Adams's move.
