Natural light
  • News and Blog

Between Place and the Human Imagination

31/8/2015

0 Comments

 

Hear and Now: a portrait of John Luther Adams

Picture
Ornithologist, musician and broadcaster Tom McKinney presented music by John Luther Adams for BBC Radio 3’s Hear and Now on Saturday. This portrait programme includes excerpts from Adams's cycle of chamber pieces songbirdsongs, music from his Alaskan opera Earth and the Great Weather, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning orchestral piece Become Ocean.  The programme is available to hear for another four weeks on the BBC iPlayer via the button below.
Hear and Now
John Luther Adams's music has a profound connection with the natural world.  He was born in 1953 in the American Deep South and brought up in the suburbs of New York.  His music is mostly closely associated with the culture and landscape of Alaska, where he moved in the 1970s and lived for 40 years.

Tom McKinney writes a blog that includes a 52-part weekly feature on birds that have influenced music.  He writes “as a way into the music Adams wrote in Alaska, have a go at Dark Waves, inspired by the Pacific Ocean of the Bering Sea. It was the first piece I heard by him, and I think it's pretty incredible.  It's massive music, slow moving blocks of sound, gradually changing textures that rise and fall with intensity. It's as big and slow as the Alaskan landscape and ocean.”

During Hear and Now, Adams describes his Earth and the Great Weather as “a sacred work of some sort” and “a kind of sonic geography; I’m still not sure what that means but is has something to do with the interrelationship between place and the human imagination.”  Written in collaboration with four native Alaskans, it includes natural sound, native drumming and Aeolian harps.  Adams reveals that, in his sixties and now living mainly in Mexico, he has returned to bird song as a major influence, decades after songbirdsongs.
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Welcome

    to 
    NATURAL LIGHT
    a site devoted to nature, and artists who are 
    inspired by it

    editor Laurence Rose

    Follow us on 
    Facebook and Twitter
    Email us

    RSS Feed

    Tweets by @Naturemusicpoet

    Archives

    October 2018
    September 2018
    May 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    August 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    October 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    April 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014

    Categories

    All
    Australia
    BBC Proms
    Biodiversity
    Birds
    Campaigns
    Cheltenham Festival
    Conversations
    Endangered Species
    Environment
    Fenland
    Festivals
    Flamenco
    Hear And Now
    Iceland
    Landscape
    Literature
    Moth
    Music
    Norfolk Festival Of Nature
    Olivier Messiaen
    Peter Sculthorpe
    Poetry
    Re:Tweet Of The Day
    RSPB
    Sibelius
    Soundscape
    Spain
    Ted Hughes
    The Long Spring
    Uplands
    Wetlands
    Words
    WW1

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.