Roots and Rhizomes Outdoor Concert
Sunday, June 21 · 9 p.m.
Donald Cameron Hall Amphitheatre · The Banff Centre
Adult $20 · Student/Senior $15 · Child $9
Banff Centre Box Office: 1.800.413.8368 or 403.762.6301
Presented as part of the 2009 Banff Summer Arts Festival
“One of the most original musical thinkers of the new century.”
—Alex Ross, The New Yorker
“As a composer I believe that music can serve as a sounding model for the renewal of human culture and consciousness,” says John Luther Adams. “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.” On June 21, the evening of the summer solstice, Adams will premiere a work for percussion commissioned by The Banff Centre, played outdoors at the Centre, against the backdrop of Banff’s glorious Bourgeau mountain range.
Created as the centrepiece of Roots and Rhizomes, the Centre’s inaugural music residency for percussionists, Adams collaborates with percussion guru Steven Schick on Inuksuit, which was specifically written to be performed outdoors. After the solstice performance, Adams and the percussionists will take the work deeper into the woods, playing in Alberta’s Kananaskis Country wilderness.
“When we first conceived of a residency for percussion, we hoped we would be able to commission a piece by John Luther Adams,” says Barry Shiffman, director of music programs at The Banff Centre. “We felt that his work would capture perfectly the spirit and energy of this place, and reflect the philosophy of the collaborative work we do here. Now, it’s all come together.”
Adams’s work is deeply grounded in ecology, and particularly in the natural and cultural environment of the north. Many of his compositions are inspired by mathematical models, at the same time tied directly to the ambient and spontaneous sounds of nature. In a 2008 feature profile in 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.”
The summer solstice concert on June 21 will begin with a performance of Iannis Xenakis’s seminal work for percussion, Persephassa.
John Luther Adams
Village Voice critic Kyle Gann describes John Luther Adams’s music as “beautiful, shimmering, vast, luminous, ecstatic.” Originally from New Jersey, Adams has been living and composing in Alaska for more than 30 years. His most celebrated pieces, including The Place Where We Go To Listen, a site-specific work installed currently at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, reflect the natural world in constantly evolving, rolling tonal changes. Adams has been composer in residence with musical organizations including the Anchorage Symphony, the Arctic Chamber Orchestra, and the Fairbanks Symphony, and he’s taught at the University of Alaska, Bennington College, and the Oberlin Conservatory. He is the author of Winter Music: Composing in the North and The Place Where We Go To Listen.
Inuksuit was co-commissioned by The Banff Centre, Musik3 Foundation, and Furman University.
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- More information about the 2009 Banff Summer Arts Festival
- More information about Music at The Banff Centre
