San Francisco Contemporary Music Players: From the Composer: John Luther Adams

Clouds of Forgetting,

Clouds of Unknowing (1996)

Love is most nearly itself

When here and now cease to matter.

—T. S. Eliot

Quantum physics has recently confirmed what shamans and mystics, poets and musicians have long known: the universe is more like music than like matter. It may well be that our most fundamental relationship to the great mysteries is one of listening. Through sustained, concentrated attention to the fullness of the present moment, we listen for the breath of being, the voice of God.

Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing is a work of musical contemplation, an aspiration to consecrate a small time and space for extraordinary listening. The work is titled after The Cloud of Unknowing, a fourteenth-century Christian text which has much in common with the teachings of contemplative traditions throughout the world, be they Jewish, Buddhist, Sufi, Native American, or other. The essence of the contemplative experience is voluntary surrender, purposeful immersion in the fullness of a presence far larger than we are.

The Cloud of Unknowing teaches that we can achieve communion only through the Grace of divine Love. To prepare ourselves to receive this gift, we must enter a state of quiet stillness, suspended between heaven and earth. Above—between us and God—lies a “cloud of unknowing” that our understanding can never penetrate. Between ourselves and the world, we must create a “cloud of forgetting,” leaving conscious thought and desire below. In this timeless place of forgetting and unknowing, we may begin to hear that for which we are listening.

T. S. Eliot said it this way:

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

for a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and the empty desolation. . .

John Cage once inquired of a musician trained in the classical traditions of India: “What is the purpose of music?”

Her reply made a profound impression on the composer: “The purpose of music is to quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences.”

Of course music can have many purposes. But in order to quiet the mind we must give up our attachment to that which is “interesting,” that which diverts and engages our intellect. We must let crumble the walls of boredom we build between our awareness and the fullness of each moment.

Cage was fond of saying that if he found something boring for five minutes, he would try it for fifteen. If it were boring for fifteen minutes, he would try it for half an hour. If it were still boring for half an hour, he would try it for an hour, and so on. Sooner of later, he said, we discover that everything is interesting. Beyond interest and boredom lie “another intensity” and “a deeper communion.”

To find communion we must lose perspective. What, after all, is perspective but a way of removing ourselves from experience?

A painter friend once showed me slides of his paintings from Antarctica. Among these was a view of the Ross Ice Shelf that struck me as one of the most compelling of his images I had ever seen. The composition is stark in its simplicity. A large field of azure and lavender sky is separated from a lower field of somber purples and coal black by the startling yellow edge of the ice.

Although it occupies the middle ground between the open water and the plateau of ice and sky, that serrated yellow line appears to float—emerging into the foreground only to recede again into the middle ground and the distance. The result is a continual shifting between vertical and horizontal, here and there, near and far.

“What makes this happen?” I wondered. Is it the interrelationships of the shapes? The relative weights and masses of the large color fields? The vivid contrast of the jagged line?

In the same portfolio was another image of the same portion of the Ross Ice Shelf, painted from a vantage point only a few hundred feet away from the first. Despite breathtaking hues, this painting struck me as less effective. Initially I couldn’t say why. But my eye kept returning to a rock outcropping in the lower right-hand corner. Finally it occurred to me that this was the crucial difference.

The outcropping defines the foreground. In doing so it fixes the ice edge in the middle distance, freezing its mysterious floating quality at a specific point in space. Because of the outcropping, the second painting projects a more definite sense of the almost incomprehensible scale of the Antarctic landscape. At the same time it removes one from the full presence of the place. The country is so large it seems to disappear, as if viewed through too wide a lens.

The first painting has no definition of foreground. It invites no fixed perspective. By not telling us precisely where we are standing, it invites us to travel freely within the full dimensions of an ambiguous space—from the farthest horizon to a veil of colored mist suspended just before our eyes. This painting is so powerful because it creates a presence that demands our participation. It requires us to explore and discover for ourselves an imaginary space grounded in a remarkable natural landscape. I aspire to a similar experience in music.

In Western music melody and harmony are the equivalents of figure and ground. Together they constitute a kind of musical perspective, which evolved parallel to that of Renaissance painting. In the musical textures of Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing I wanted to lose musical perspective, to blend line and chord into a single sphere of musical space. Clouds of short melodic cells are superimposed on expansive harmonic clouds of the same tones. Figure becomes ground in dense clouds of expanding, rising lines. Ground becomes figure in the glacial movement of large harmonic clouds, which (as the listener enters the suspended time-frame of the music) begin to sound melodic—like exaggeratedly slow chorales.

Near the end of the piece elongated piano arpeggios rise above sustained harmonic clouds in the strings and woodwinds. But the chords are simply echoes of the arpeggios, extending and amplifying the effect of the piano’s sustain pedal.

Much of my recent work has explored the natural intervals of the harmonic series, in just intonation and other non-tempered tunings. But Clouds is a return to the rich complexities and ambiguities of equal temperament and chromatic modes. This is my most complete and direct statement to date of a personal harmonic idiom that has developed over the course of many years. Formally, the work describes a single, expansive harmonic arch—moving over the course of an hour from unisons and minor seconds, through the succession of equal-tempered intervals, to major sevenths, and finally to the perfect clarity of octaves.

A somewhat unlikely pair of ghosts haunts this music: Morton Feldman and Anton Bruckner. These two have more in common than might first meet the ear.

Bruckner, we are told, was a shy, simple, and retiring man of deep Christian faith. In contrast, Feldman was an urbane and outspoken man of strong opinions. Although he joked that he aspired to be “the Jewish Mozart,” it’s not clear to me what role the practice of Judaism may have played in Feldman’s life. But once in conversation, when he complained that most contemporary artists seemed to be in some form or other of “show business,” I asked him: “What’s your business?”

After a long, pregnant pause, he replied with a single startling word: “Religion!”

For me, both Bruckner and Feldman are essentially religious composers. Both worked with expansive scales of time and space. Both were romantic idealists who—even at their most passionate and sensuous moments—aspired to transcend self-expression through concentrated images, clarity of sound, breadth and balance of form. Both Feldman and Bruckner created music that is not so much a language of tones as an architecture of sounding images, a sonic sculpture of transcendence.

One of the great powers of music is that it can mean nothing and anything, sometimes at once. Living in Alaska for most of my creative life, I’ve come to measure my own work and all human creations against the overwhelming presence of the place itself. My music has long been grounded in a strong sense of place and a deep response to the landscapes of the far north, exploring a territory I call “sonic geography. But the landscapes of Clouds are more essentially sonic and geometric than geographic in nature.

In this work I wanted not to compose a piece of music, but to create a wholeness of music with no extra-musical references—a sonic presence somehow equivalent to that of a vast landscape. Still (perhaps unavoidably for me), the sound of this music has a certain coldness, clarity, aridity, and starkness reminiscent of the light, atmosphere, and landforms of the Arctic.

I began work on Clouds immediately after the death of my father, in early 1991. By March of that year I had completed a forty-minute fragment for large orchestra. The press of other commitments forced me to set this aside. Over the next five and a half years I returned to Clouds as time allowed, following as it evolved through various forms and instrumentations. I worked on it throughout 1994 during a fellowship from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, finally completing it in late 1995.

In composing Clouds I was determined to sustain an uncompromising faith in the musical materials, surrendering self-expression for trust in the instruments and the essential richness inherent within their sounds. In retrospect, I believe the only significant compromises in this music resulted from the limitations of my own concentration and imagination.