Composer teaches magic

John Luther Adams, an ardent environmentalist, traveled from his home in the boreal forest of Alaska to teach at Oberlin for the fall semester. The change of scene has been good for Adams. "Up there we have only a few species of trees: primarily birch, aspen, black and white spruce. So I'm thoroughly intrigued and a little overwhelmed by the lushness and diversity of this eastern hardwood forest."

Don't be misled. Although he might sound like an Environmental Studies faculty member, Adams is in fact a new face in the Composition Department of the Conservatory.

Adams brings to campus his recent ideas in composition as well as a very unorthodox style of teaching. Distributed on the first day of Adams' composition seminar was an essay by Morton Feldman, containing this exerpt:

"What it all boils down to is this. If a man teaches composition in a university, how can he not be a composer? He has worked hard, learned his craft. Ergo, he is a composer. A professional. Like a doctor. But there is that doctor who opens you up, does exactly the right thing, closes you up and you die. He failed to take the chance that might have saved you. Art is a crucial, dangerous operation we perform on ourselves. Unless we take a chance, we die in art."

Adams' most influential teachers treated him with the respect and courtesy of a colleague, an attitude he extends to his students at Oberlin. "I think I learned as much from [my mentor's] attitudes and lives as I did from any technical devices and ideas that they may have given me. I think that is really important for creative artists. I'm not convinced that you can teach composition, maybe only learn composition.

"Composing music is not about finding notes, and so often it is taught as such a technical process, of manipulating devices and getting notes. What's that about? I don't think that that's about magic. Of course there must be intellectual rigor, but I want it all. And first and foremost has to be the sound."

"The sounding image" is a metaphor resounding in all of Adams' classrooms. "It is a music not about place, but a music that is place. Music that somehow resonates with a wholeness, a presence." "Music, Language and the Sounding Image," is a course co-taught by Adams and Amy Kurlander of the Allen Memorial Art Museum exploring these ideas in visual arts as well.

There is a healthy dialogue in both the classroom and private lessons with Adams. "I've never felt this comfortable talking about composition with anyone," says Junior composition major Corey Gardel. Adams grills his students with questions about their work, often bringing their pieces back to the most embryotic substance. This is a method he uses in his own work, as well.

As a young composer, Adams was self-taught for a time. He listened to recordings of jazz legends John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Barry Sanders, and played in a garage rock and roll band. "My generation-the baby boom-was the first to have the whole history of world music at our fingertips. That, I think, was an essential, invaluable part of my education."

The real threshold of new music for Adams was his discovery of Frank Zappa. "Zappa led to Cage, led to Morton Feldman, led to all sorts of strange and wonderful things. I dropped rock and roll like a hot potato and was off and running."

Adams' interests brought him to the California Institute of the Arts in 1970, where he met the composer James Tenney. As one of the three strong professional influences in his life, Tenney gave "a certain sense of rigor-intellectual rigor, conceptual rigor, a sense of music as a vivid presence, rather than music as a discursive language."

Another of Adams' life-long mentors was the composer / musical philosopher, Morton Feldman. "[He] showed me the importance of touch and sensuality of sound, the allure of these places that music can take us. He speaks to a certain contemplative relationship with music and the materials of music-and certainly the primary materials of music are the sounds. Feldman's whole gospel was letting the sounds be themselves, letting time be itself."

Lou Harrison was another musical and compositional role model for Adams. In Adams' eyes there is an inquisitive sparkle much like Harrison's, in his face the same comfortable grin. Whether on the grass of Tappan Square or in the halls of Robertson, he walks with a very Feldman sense of the ground which receives him. On many levels these spirits live through him.

"Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing," and the opera, "Earth and the Great Weather," are Adams' recordings on the New World label, and hailed by critics across the continent as masterpieces of sonic geography. Oberlin will be honored in hosting two of his most recent works later this semester.

On Nov. 11: Tim Weiss and the Contemporary Music Ensemble will give the premiere performance of "In the White Silence," a major new work of Adams' which he describes as "excruciatingly beautiful, unrelentingly diatonic, not a single accidental in 1200 measures and scored for a very odd, monochromatic ensemble."

On November 21: The Percussion Group of Cincinnati will perform "Strange and Sacred Noise," which Adams has dubbed "White Silence's evil twin." The evening will be "a celebration of noise as gateway to ecstatic experience," with movements for air-raid sirens and other percussion instruments. Earplugs were handed out at the premiere, a sure sign that this natural-disaster-inspired music will be undoubtedly loud.