Page 51 - PDF Flip TR Program Demo

John Luther Adams and his wife Cindy walk around in the purple sunset under Calder’s Two Discs while the drums from Strange and Sacred Noise fill the coulees around us.
Even photos of the land reveal the strange northern clarity of the light, the absolute emptiness of the waves of grain, the stillness of the sky. Music is itself a connotation: a series of metaphors produced by hieroglyphic scratches on a piece of paper which creates twilight in the Prater in fin de siècle Vienna, or the Sunday light on the Île de la Grande Jatte in Paris, or a Mahler Symphony on the shores of Lake Attersee, or Grieg’s cabin at Troldhaugen on the lake at Bergen. Music comes from these places,
from the offing just around the corner from what
you can see, or just below the surface of the horizon. Music is a metaphor that doesn’t come from notes or instruments or concert halls, but from calving glaciers and Brocken spectres and the shadows of séracs on the ice. It’s an intangible cloud that strange hermits bring down to earth on certain occasions—not dependably, not daily—that colors our minds, washes out the normal angles of the afternoon, replaces the video feed with augmented reality hallucinations, plays dinosaurs on the brain’s blue screen.
We build concert halls to keep the world out so we can concentrate on music. But maybe we should let the world back in, so music can compose it.
2018 Summer Season 51