John adams composer windows#

John adams composer windows#

Certain that the sun had come out, I left “The Place,” and looked out the windows of the lobby. After a few minutes, there was a noticeable change: the solar harmonies acquired extra radiance, with upper intervals oscillating in an almost melodic fashion. Clouds covered the sky, so the Day Choir was muted. Some minor seismic activity in the region had set off the bass frequencies, but it was a rather opaque ripple of beats, suggestive of a dance party in an underground crypt. Checking the Alaskan data stations on my laptop, I saw that geomagnetic activity was negligible. The first day I was there, “The Place” was subdued, though it cast a hypnotic spell. And shimmering sounds in the extreme registers-the Aurora Bells-are tied to the fluctuations in the magnetic field that cause the Northern Lights. Pulsating patterns in the bass, which Adams calls Earth Drums, are activated by small earthquakes and other seismic events around Alaska. The moon is audible as a narrow sliver of noise. After the sun goes down, a darker, moodier set of chords, the Night Choir, moves to the forefront. In overcast weather, the harmonies are relatively narrow in range when the sun comes out, they stretch across four octaves. Its notes follow the contour of the natural harmonic series-the rainbow of overtones that emanate from a vibrating string-and have the brightness of music in a major key. What you notice first is a dense, organlike sonority, which Adams has named the Day Choir. You sit on a bench before five glass panels, which change color according to the time of day and the season.

“The Place” occupies a small white-walled room on the museum’s second floor. In keeping with that magical idea, the mechanism of “The Place” translates raw data into music: information from seismological, meteorological, and geomagnetic stations in various parts of Alaska is fed into a computer and transformed into an intricate, vibrantly colored field of electronic sound.

The title refers to Naalagiagvik, a place on the coast of the Arctic Ocean where, according to legend, a spiritually attuned Inupiaq woman went to hear the voices of birds, whales, and unseen things around her. At the Museum of the North, on the grounds of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, the composer John Luther Adams has created a sound-and-light installation called “The Place Where You Go to Listen”-a kind of infinite musical work that is controlled by natural events occurring in real time. On a recent trip to the Alaskan interior, I didn’t get to see the aurora borealis, but I did, in a way, hear it.