On June 21, the rain gods finally relented, sweeping a downpour away from Banff and opening pockets of clear sky in what had been a day’s worth of dramatically inclement weather. A low mist crept into the valley, setting up a perfect backdrop for the world premiere of Inuksuit, an intricate work for percussion created for The Banff Centre by acclaimed American composer John Luther Adams.

Musicians in the first Roots & Rhizomes percussion residency, headed by master percussionist Steven Schick, moved into the Centre’s outdoor amphitheatre. They brought conventional instruments (heavy kettle drums, stacks of cymbals, marimbas) and unconventional instruments (paper cones, chunks of slate, corrugated tubes), and working collectively they created the ethereal polyphonic soundscape of Inuksuit.

Adams’s music is difficult to categorize. Over almost four decades, he has created a body of work that communicates a euphoric inspiration from the natural world, picking up the ambient sounds he hears near his home in Alaska and translating them into unique compositions.

Adams has been composer in residence with musical organizations including the Anchorage Symphony in Alaska, the Arctic Chamber Orchestra, and the Fairbanks Symphony, and he’s taught at the University of Alaska, Bennington College, and the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. In a 2008 feature profile for The New Yorker, music critic Alex Ross described Adams as striving to “create musical counterparts to the geography, ecology, and native culture of his home state,” which he does by “literally anchoring the work in the landscapes that have inspired it.”

He spoke to Inspired about his Banff residency.

What was the original inspiration for Inuksuit, both the composition and the creation of a new kind of experience for the listener?

John Luther Adams: My music has always been rooted in the earth. Over the past 35 years I’ve composed many works inspired by the outdoors, but heard indoors. In 2006 and 2007, I heard my percussion work Strange and Sacred Noise performed in the Anza-Borrego desert and the New England woods. During the last summer solstice, I heard it on the tundra of the Alaska Range. Ever since, I’ve dreamed of creating a large-scale work specifically to be performed out in the land. Inuksuit is a concert-length work for percussion, in which the performers are widely dispersed and move throughout a large, open area. The listeners, too, may move around freely and discover their own individual listening points. This work is intended to expand our awareness of the never-ending music of the world in which we live, transforming seemingly empty space into a more fully experienced place.

Your work is so intensely grounded in the natural environment of Alaska — did the location for the premiere of Inuksuit (the Canadian Rockies) affect the composition of it?

Inuksuit is inspired by the stone sentinels constructed over the centuries by the Inuit in the windswept expanses of the Arctic. There are Inuksuit all around the circumpolar North. We have them here in Alaska, but the greatest profusion of these haunting figures is in the Canadian Arctic. So it seems appropriate that the first performances of the new work will happen in Canada. Each performance of Inuksuit is different, determined by the size of the ensemble, the specific instruments chosen, and by the topology and vegetation of the site. I hope the new work will be performed in urban settings, as well as in wild country. The only restriction is that it may not be performed indoors.

You’ve worked before with Steven Schick, and you’ve created work specifically for percussion in the past. What are the particular attractions of composing for percussion?

I came of age as a rock drummer, and for years I was the timpanist with the Fairbanks Symphony and the Arctic Chamber Orchestra. So you might say I’m a recovering percussionist. Steven Schick is one of the most astonishing musicians working today. He’s also one of the foremost exponents of my music, and one of my closest personal friends. So I say “yes” to every opportunity to work with Steve.

Percussion is a kind of wilderness. Most of what we hear in the world around us is not conventionally musical tone. It’s noise. Wild sound. Percussion embraces noise as a basic material of music. In Western music, percussion includes every instrument and noisemaker that doesn’t fall into the string, brass, or woodwind family. The instrumentation of Inuksuit includes megaphones or bullhorns, conch shell trumpets, whirled plastic tubes and air raid sirens, as well as drums, cymbals, gongs, maracas, triangles and bells.

In his New Yorker piece, Alex Ross goes into considerable detail about the mathematical and technological aspects of much of your work. Did you bring those elements into Inuksuit as well?

Music is audible mathematics. Virtually all my music employs mathematical forms and processes. Some of these, as in my electronic soundscapes, are quite elaborate. Inuksuit is grounded in the geometry of basic shapes, stacked in a variety of ways to create distinctive forms. I think of these as sonic markers, sounding equivalents of the stone Inuksuit of the Arctic. Visually, the musical notation resembles stacks of stones. You can see the forms on the page.

What is some of the evidence of global warming that you’ve observed in the North, and how has that evidence been expressed in Inuksuit?

Climate disruption is arguably the single greatest challenge facing humanity today. Living in the North virtually all my adult life, I’ve experienced dramatic and unmistakable effects of change — shorter, milder winters, more intense wildfire seasons, the northward advance of the spruce bark beetle, the arrival of new plant and animal species. I’ve written about this extensively in my two books, Winter Music and The Place Where You Go to Listen.

As a composer I believe that music can serve as a sounding model for the renewal of human culture and consciousness. I hope that in some small way my music may contribute to the awakening of our ecological awareness and deeper creative thinking as we confront our troubled present and uncertain future.

I hope the experience of preparing, performing, and hearing Inuksuit may raise larger questions: What does it mean to act creatively with and within our environment? Can we listen and hear more deeply the field of sound all around us? How does where we are define what we do and, ultimately, who we are? And how do we understand the brevity of our human presence in the immensity of geologic time? The word “Inuksuit” translates literally: “to act in the capacity of the human”. This work is haunted by the vision of the melting of the polar ice, the rising of the seas, and what may remain of humanity’s presence after the waters recede.

Watch: The New Yorker video profile on the premiere of John Luther Adams Inuksuit at The Banff Centre

The Roots & Rhizomes percussion residency was supported by the Kahanoff Foundation.

Photos let to right:

Percussionists gather in the Centre’s amphitheatre for the premiere performance of Inuksuit, a new work commissioned by The Banff Centre. Photo: Don Lee

Composer John Luther Adams listens intently during the performance. Photo: Don Lee