Letters From the Earth

If you're interested in music, you owe it to yourself to read Alex Ross' article in the New Yorker about composer John Luther Adams. You should also listen to the sound file at the bottom, a recording of his piece "Dark Waves." Regular readers will know (or will have gotten the sense) that I have little patience for hippies, and so the fact that I am endorsing a guy who writes pieces about "the land" should tell you just how good this is.

It's unfortunate that the orchestra is so rarely the forum for respected new music these days. Aside from a few operas and film scores, people who listen to "good music" are listening to small ensembles, whether those be wind quintets, jazz combos, or the Arcade Fire. And I think something has been lost in that. What gets forgotten in the orchestra's image as exemplar of high art respectability is that orchestras are really fucking loud. The three loudest experiences of my life are standing directly in front of Luke Jenner's amp at a Rapture show, taking my earplugs out for a second while performing Glenn Branca's "100 guitars" symphony, and playing in the back of the violin section for a performance of the Hallelujah Chorus. Sure, none of the instruments in an orchestra are electronically amplified, but there are 100 people all playing at the same time. Even if they were all paying harmonicas, that would be pretty loud. Once you start putting trumpets and cymbals and violins in there--lots and lots of violins--you can make a hell of a racket. That we think of orchestras as quiet has something to do, of course, with the fact that the audience is supposed to be quiet at performances; the noise of the music is not being amplified by the reaction of the crowd. And orchestras certainly have a much broader dynamic range than do rock bands. Somehow, we've come to think of these giant collections of musicians as restrained and quiet.

Rock bands, on the other hand, had to become seen as loud. Jonathan Richman had it right in "Fender Stratocaster" when he described the sound of that most iconic of rock instruments as "so thin it's barely there." We think of Jimmy Page and John Bonham as having these massive, gigantic sounds, but listen to "Black Dog" after you've played the John Luther Adams piece for a while. The guitar sounds tinny now, the drums thin. Partially, of course, this is just a technical issue. Guitars occupy a fairly narrow sonic range, and even with a pitch shifter they can't reach the robust heights that a violin can. The drums fill in some of that spectrum, especially with the cymbals taking over the upper register, but they're recorded we have to perform technical tricks to make it sound as rich as an orchestra does. And we still have to make sacrifices. The kick drum is simply smaller than a full bass drum or timpani, and so we can boost its low end, but then we give up some of the thump. Thump or whoomp: each serves an important purpose for rock, but it's hard to have both. Rock bands have tried to imitate the feel of an orchestra, even going so far as to add orchestral instruments, but ultimately, orchestras make a noise that rock bands simply can't, and you hear that noise in "Dark Waves."

Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. I may lament the absence of orchestras from our musical life, but in terms of classical music, my alligiences ultimately lie with string quartets. This should come as no surprise; after all, quartets are structurally almost identical to rock bands, sans drummer. Four people, working without a conductor, have to listen to each other to follow along, and play off what everyone else is doing. They're lean but versitile. Even the parts are similar: the first violin is the lead singer, the second violin is the lead guitar, the viola is the rhythm guitar, and the cello is the bass. Not everyone writes for quartets this way, but you certainly could.

It's interesting, then, that Adams' work echoes many of the values associated with rock. Certainly "music you can live with" is pop's economic motor, and his emphasis on texture is key to rock's appeal, too. In the piece Ross focuses on, "The Place," you find classically rockist ideas, and I'm using that in a neutral way here:

“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 Place” occupies a small white-walled room on the museum’s second floor. You sit on a bench before five glass panels, which change color according to the time of day and the season...

“Actually, my original conception for ‘The Place’ was truly grandiose. I thought that it might be a piece that could be realized at any location on the earth, and that each location would have its unique sonic signature. That idea—tuning the whole world—stayed with me for a long time. But at some point I realized that I was tuning it so that this place, this room, on this hill, looking out over the Alaska Range, was the sweetest-sounding spot on earth.”

This emphasis on place speaks strongly to rock's standards. The idea of localism and of community play a strong part in rock's mythos, of course, from local scenes to regional music. But in placing the piece not only within a particular environment but within a particular room, Adams echoes rock's strange obsession with "hearing the space." On a good rock album, supposedly, you can hear the room it's recorded in, and the particular venues bands play have meaning. Even live recordings are as much about the particular place of the performance as the performance itself.

So maybe "loud" is the wrong word to use here. Maybe what I'm really talking about is hugeness. Ross describes "Dark Waves," in a lovely turn of phrase, as suggesting "a huge entity, of indeterminate shape, that approaches slowly, exerts apocalyptic force, and then recedes." You can mass enough Marshall stacks to produce more decibels than an orchestra, but you never quite get that sense of hugeness. Again, this is partially a technical issue. With 100 people, you can get a much higher variety of sounds, and these can then build up to sound occupied, dense and rich. Because you have so many different instruments, you have all these different tambres. And because you have all these violin, viola, cello, and bass players playing the same part at the same time, the minute variations in each individual person's performance combine into this slightly fuzzy yet coordinated recitation of the part. Rock, again, tries to get this effect by technological manipulation; that's what chorus pedals are for. (Chorus, for those who are unfamiliar, is the effect that, when applied to a guitar, makes you think of 80s hair metal bands.) But it never quite sounds right.

Nevertheless, that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. Listen to "Dark Waves." Surely that's a sound worth producing; hell, it almost sounds like metal. The feeling I get from the piece is essentially the same one I get from watching a thunderstorm: an ineffable physical reaction to some immense externality. I feel isolated from other people but wrapped up entirely in this phenomenon. I get that feeling from other classical music, too. If I get it from other places, it would probably be Carla Bozulich's Red Headed Stranger album, which used similarly indistinct sonorities and dynamic shifts. But I liked the smallness of that; for all its virtues (it's certainly in my top ten for the current decade), it ultimately evokes a distant storm more than one passing over you.

I'm not just saying that there's something to be gained from reconsidering the orchestra. I think Adams has a lot to say to non-classical composers in the way he approaches familiar problems and issues in unfamiliar ways. And art music in general has something to say to lots of other styles; it always has, and as much as we might consider it to be a remote thing, it always will.

Labels: alex ross, classical, john luther adams, musicology

posted by Mike B. @ 11:16 AM 3 Comments