Houses of the Wind is a shimmering, mesmerizing electro-acoustic piece composed in 2021.
The composer writes:
“Much of my music of the past thirty-some-odd years has grown out of my experiences listening to aeolian harps. Yet, until now, I’ve never incorporated those sounds directly into the music
“In the last two decades of the 20th century, I made field recordings of elemental sounds all over Alaska—fire, ice, thunder, glaciers calving into the sea. Recently, I transferred those aging tapes to more stable media. Listening to the very first segment of a small aeolian harp, recorded in the Arctic in the summer of 1989, I was captivated. The voices of the wind singing through the strings of the harp brought back vividly the clarity of light, the sprawling space, and the sense of possibility I had felt.
“Houses of the Wind (2021–22) is composed entirely from that single ten-and-a-half-minute recording, transposed, layered on itself, and sculpted into five new pieces of the same length. The world has changed since then, in ways we couldn’t have imagined. The winds rising around us now seem darker, more turbulent and threatening. Yet still, if this music is haunted by feelings of loss and longing, I hope it also offers some measure of consolation, even peace.”
A long-term sound environment, commissioned by the Stuart Collection for the campus of the University of California San Diego.
Commissioned by MetLiveArts to celebrate the opening of The Met Breuer, Soundwalk 9:09 takes its title from the time it takes to walk between The Met Fifth Avenue and The Met Breuer: nine minutes and nine seconds.
To The Listener: A Note from John Luther Adams
It’s a well-worn cliché that the streets of the city are noisy.
But what happens when we decide to listen to the sounds around us not as noise, but as musical voices?
Suddenly, the whole city becomes an enveloping, never-ending piece of music.
As we walk the streets with open ears, we hear far more than an undifferentiated roar. We discover much more detail than we might imagine—innumerable small sounds and unexpected pools of stillness. At times we can almost hear the city breathing.
These two Soundwalks are an invitation to listen more deeply to the music of the city.
All the sounds were recorded in the streets between The Met Fifth Avenue and The Met Breuer. In composing these pieces I’ve added nothing more, but simply sculpted and filtered these street sounds to reveal resonances that lie hidden around us all the time.
Listening carefully you may pick out the faint aura of human voices, the ubiquitous chipping of sparrows, echoes from a distant trumpeter, the melodic contours of a jackhammer, or bell tones emanating from the airbrakes of a passing bus.
These pieces are not complete until you are present—listening, walking your own route, and creating your own unique mix with the sounds you encounter.
The ideal listening balance between the “live” and recorded sounds is one in which you aren’t always certain whether a sound you’re hearing is coming from your ear buds, your imagination, or from the streets around you.
Four electro-acoustic soundscapes.
39:00
in a room
at the still point
in the rain
the place we began
four electronic soundscapes, to be heard successively or concurrently.
6 hrs
Falling Veil
Crossing Veil
Rising Veil
Vesper
“… Calming, beautiful, … an invitation to a crepuscular frame of mind.” - Kyle Gann, PostClassic
A continuous sound and light environment at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks Museum of the North.