What Adams needed most, after a turbulent decade, was solitude. During the first decade of his relationship with Cindy, he lived in a rudimentary cabin in the woods outside Fairbanks, a mile from the nearest
road. “It was my Thoreau fantasy—cutting wood and carrying water,” he told me. The fantasy subsided when Cindy suggested in a non-roundabout way that he should either join her full-time—by now the couple had a son, Sage—or go his own way. In 1989, he moved out of the woods, and has never returned to his old cabin.
Adams embraced his new life in Fairbanks, but he still struggled to find his way as a composer. The eighties were, he now says, “lost years”: he made various attempts to write orchestral pieces that would reach a wider audience, and, though he was pleased with the work, he didn’t feel that it was entirely his. At times, he wondered whether he would make more
headway
in New York or Los Angeles. In this same period, not incidentally, John Adams, of Berkeley, California, found fame with
Nixon in China.
The two composers had known each other since 1976; they moved in the same circles, and one week they stayed together at Lou Harrison’s house. All the same, the phenomenal success of the Californian Adams pushed the Alaskan Adams to differentiate himself, not only by using his middle name but by finding territory he could call his own.
“In a way, that experience challenged me to reevaluate my whole relationship to the idea of success,” he says. “Maybe it confirmed my outsider resolve—‘No, I’m not moving from Alaska; this is who I am, this is where I belong, this is what I’m supposed to be doing’—but most of all it helped my sense of humor. For me, finally, it’s kind of worked out. John is always very gracious. We occasionally exchange e-mails about the latest incidents of mistaken identity. Recently, someone thought he was me. Very sweet.”
By the 1990s, Adams had begun to carve out a singular body of work, which can be sampled on recordings on the New World, New Albion, Cold Blue, Mode, and Cantaloupe labels. First came a conceptual Alaskan opera titled
Earth and the Great Weather,
much of which is given over to the chanting of place-names and descriptive phrases from the native Inupiaq and Gwich’in languages, both in the original and in translation. One section describes various stages of the seasons: “The time of new sunshine,” “The time when polar bears bring out their young,” “The time of the small wind,” “The time of eagles.” The music runs from pure, ethereal sonorities for strings—tuned in a scheme similar to that of the Aurora Bells in
The Place
—to viscerally pummeling movements for quartets of drums.
In the next decade, Adams further explored the new sonic terrain that he had mapped out in his opera.
In the White Silence,
a seventy-five-minute piece for harp, celesta, vibraphones, and strings, is derived from the seven notes of the C-major scale; in a striking feat of metaphor, the composer equates the consuming whiteness of midwinter Alaska with the white keys of the piano.
Strange and Sacred Noise,
another seventy-five-minute cycle, evokes the violence of changing seasons: four percussionists deploy drums, gongs, bells, sirens, and mallet percussion to summon up an alternately beguiling and frightening tableau of musical noises, most of which were inspired by a trip that Adams took up the Yukon River in spring, when the ice was collapsing. Whether unabashedly sweet or unremittingly harsh
—Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing,
a memorial to the composer’s father, manages to be both at once—Adams’s major works have the appearance of being beyond style; they transcend the squabbles of contemporary classical music, the unending arguments over the relative value of tonal and atonal languages.
The sense of vastness, separateness, and solitude is even more pronounced in Adams’s recent electronic compositions. The 2005 installation
Veils,
which has appeared in several venues in America and Europe, uses a “virtual choir” of ninety polyphonic voices and goes on for six hours.
The Place Where You Go to Listen
could last decades. Both Cage and Feldman talked about making music that you can live with, much as you can live with visual art;
Veils
and
The Place
execute that idea with uncommon vigor. Adams is an avid art-viewer, and is particularly keen on the second generation of American abstract painters: Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Jasper Johns, and Joan Mitchell. There are more art books than music books on the shelves of his studio, a neat one-room cabin that faces south, toward the Alaska Range.
Adams says, “I remember thinking, To hell with classical music. I’m going into the art world; I’m going to do installations. But I was really just interested in working with new media. And it doesn’t matter what I think I’m doing. The work has a life of its own, and I’m just along for the ride. Richard Serra talks about the point at which all your influences are assimilated and then your work can come out of the work.”
Although Adams is content to write for electronics, small ensembles, and percussion groups, he still longs to write for larger forces, and, above all, for orchestra. For most of the eighties, he was the timpanist for the Fairbanks Symphony, which, at the time, was led by the conductor, composer,
and environmental activist Gordon Wright. During Adams’s cabin-in-the-forest period, Wright was living nearby, and the two became close friends, often trekking into the wilderness together. Once, they drove into the Alaska Range while listening to Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, music that has the weight of mountains. “This may be where our musical worlds meet,” Adams said to him.
Wright died in 2007, near Anchorage, at the age of seventy-two; he was found one night on the deck of his cabin. A few days later, the Anchorage Symphony played the premiere of Adams’s
Dark Waves,
a thirteen-minute work for orchestra and electronics, which the composer dedicated to Wright. One of the most arresting American orchestral compositions of recent years, it suggests a huge entity, of indeterminate shape, that approaches slowly, exerts apocalyptic force, and then recedes. Every instrument is, in one way or another, playing with the simple interval of the perfect fifth—the basic building block of harmony—but at the climax the lines coalesce into roaring dissonances, with all twelve notes of the chromatic scale sounding together.
Adams has been contemplating a large-scale piece in the vein of
Dark Waves.
It might bring him into a Brucknerian or even Wagnerian realm. Wagner’s
Parsifal
is one of three opera scores in Adams’s library; the others are Mussorgsky’s
Boris Godunov
and Debussy’s
Pelléas
et
Mélisande.
He speaks with awe—and a little envy—of the resources Wagner had at his command. A few years ago, Adams went to see
Die Walküre
at the Metropolitan Opera, and departed with his mind full of fresh longings.
“I thought, This couldn’t be repeated,” Adams told me. “Wagner kind of caught the perfect wave. But I did wonder what kind of opportunities exist for us, right now.” He sat still for a moment, his blue-gray eyes drifting. I sensed some wordless, high-tech, back-to-the-earth
Parsifal
waiting to be born.
Knowing of Adams’s love for Alaska’s remotest places, I asked him to take me to one of them. His favorite place on earth is the Brooks Range, the northernmost extension of the Rocky Mountains, but that area was inaccessible when I visited. Instead, we went south, to Lake Louise. Snowy weather blocked most of the mountains as we drove, although looming white shapes occasionally pierced the flurries. “Aw, that’s nothing,” Adams
would say, slipping into the role of the hardened Alaskan lifer. “Foothills. The big guys aren’t coming out.”
Lake Louise is framed by several of North America’s grandest mountain ranges: the Alaska, the Chugach, the Wrangell—St. Elias, and the Talkeetna. The native word for this kind of place is
chiiviteenlii,
or “pointed mountains scattered all around.” The lake was covered with ice four feet thick, and, after spending the night at a local lodge, we went for a walk on it. The sun was burning faintly through the mist above. Periodically, a curtain of snow descended and the shores and islands of the lake disappeared from view. I noticed that Adams was listening closely to this seemingly featureless expanse, and kept pulling information from it: the fluttering of a flock of snow buntings, the low whistle of wind through a stand of gaunt spruce, the sinister whine of a pair of snowmobiles. He also noted the curiously musical noises that our feet were making. Tapping the crust of snow atop the ice, under which the wind had carved little tunnels, he compared the sounds to those of xylophones or marimbas. Meanwhile, a dog had wandered out on the ice and was howling to itself. “He has some fantasy he’s a wolf,” Adams said. He yelled at the dog to go home.
Adams recalled the Yukon River trip that led him to write
Strange and Sacred Noise
and other tone poems of natural upheaval. “When the ice breakup comes, it makes incredible sounds,” he said. “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. I have literally hundreds of hours of field recordings that I made back in the
Earth and the Great Weather
period, in the early nineties. I keep thinking that maybe one day I could work with some of that material—maybe try to transcribe it, completely remove it from the original reality, extract the music in it.”
We were standing on a tiny island, where cormorants had built a network of nests. Adams had discovered these nests on a trip to the lake a few weeks earlier. One of the nests had slid off the ridge onto the lake, and we carried it back to land.
“All along, I’ve had this obsessive, delusional idea that I could somehow be outside culture, which is, of course, patently absurd,” he said. “But
I could at least hold the illusion of being outside culture, where culture is put in proper perspective. That’s why I am so concerned with the landscape. Barry Lopez”—the author of the epic travelogue
Arctic Dreams
—“says that landscape is the culture that contains all human cultures, all forms and artifacts and culture and language. Maybe it’s just a hippy-dippy sixties-seventies thing, but, to tell the truth, I was never such a good hippie.”
Adams is well aware of the naïveté, sentimentality, and outright foolishness that can attach to fantasies of dropping out of society in search of “the real.” But that same naïveté can lead to work of uncompromising power, especially when it is wedded to artistic craft. In this regard, Adams cites another of his heroes, the Alaskan poet John Haines, who, after the Second World War, took up residence in a one-room cabin he built off the Richardson Highway, south of Fairbanks, and stayed there for some twenty years, living off the land in time-honored fashion. Not long before Adams moved to Alaska, he read Haines’s first book,
Winter News,
falling in love with poems such as “Listening in October”:
There are silences so deep
you can hear
the journeys of the soul,
enormous footsteps
downward in a freezing earth.
In a collection of writings titled
Winter Music,
Adams mentions, among other reasons for moving to the state, the richness of its silences. He writes, “Much of Alaska is still filled with silence, and one of the most persuasive arguments for the preservation of the original landscape here may be its spiritual value as a great reservoir of silence.”
One evening, in Fairbanks, we went to see Haines at his home. He was then eighty-three years old, and had recently endured a near-fatal bout of pneumonia, but he still welcomed visitors, especially those who brought a good bottle of whisky—in this case, a seventeen-year-old Highland Park single malt. Haines was at work on several reminiscences to supplement his memoir
The Stars, the Snows, the Fire,
an elegant account of his long years in isolation. He described for us a surreal episode that took place in
1966, shortly after
Winter News
was published. One day, he looked out his window and saw a small group of people ascending the path toward the cabin. On opening the door, he found himself face-to-face with the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who had with him a professor from Queens, a photographer, and a reporter from
Life
magazine. Yevtushenko had been told that an unsung American bard was living in the area. Haines served the party blueberry wine that he had made in his backyard.
Adams asked Haines to recite one or two of his poems. Haines chanted several of them in a courtly, melancholy voice, somewhat in the manner of William Butler Yeats delivering “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” He ended with “Return to Richardson, Spring 1981,” which looks back fondly and sadly on the homestead period, when his life was “like a boat set loose,” and evenings were spent reading books since forgotten:
In this restless air I know
On this ground I can never forget
Where will I set my foot
With so much passion again.
After a pause, Adams said, “That hurts.” We talked for a few more minutes, Adams gave Haines the whisky, and we said goodbye.