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Minimalist composer John Luther Adams first visited Alaska in the mid-1970s, returning over the next few summers to serve as a guide and work for preservation and conservation programs. His connection to the landscape would inspire a body of work incorporating natural sounds and eventually music randomly generated by the environment itself.
His early work tried to capture the complexity of nature with standard instruments. songbirdsongs, for example, used piccolos and percussion to reflect the mystery of bird songs. After moving permanently to Alaska, however, the scope of his work expanded as he created more elaborate compositions to convey a broader sense of place.
By the 1990s, Adams had taken another step in his effort to meld place and music. Earth and the Great Weather directly incorporated recordings of booming glaciers and melting ice to paint a portrait of the Alaskan Arctic. Fractals and the sounds of the Yukon River inspired Strange and Sacred Noise.
Adams eventually moved from using aspects of nature as musical instruments to relying on nature to guide the work itself. In an exhibition at the University of Alaska Museum of the North, geophysical data and programs monitoring the aurora borealis and the positions of the sun and moon determine the music and the shifting lightscape. The scientists who helped Adams with the installation felt that the collaboration helped them conceptualize their research in new ways.
The desire to use scientific data to bridge nature and music has a long history, and Adams’s work raises some interesting questions about how our perceptions of nature have changed over time. The theory of the “music of the spheres”–the idea that music could model the mathematics and astronomy of the day–played a key role in European art during the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, and grew out of the work of Pythagoras. However, these very early efforts differed from the work of Adams and other modern composers in one essential way. The first artists to explore the connection between music and nature appreciated nature for its fundamental structure, and saw precision and order as key for understanding both art and science. After the Romantic era, this view died away. Drawing from modern science, contemporary artists have learned to celebrate the randomness and complexity of nature.