by Roger Downey
Inuksuit was performed on Saturday, September 19 at the Seward Park Amphitheater, organized by Melanie Voytovich. Photo credit: Seth Tompkins.
John Luther Adams says he wrote his Inuksuit for “9 to 99 percussionists.” That sounds as if it’s supposed to be epic in scale, and it is, in ambition. When you hear the commercial recording, with just 30-odd players, that feeling is confirmed. But Adams is thinking in terms of multiples of musicians, and 99 players would probably need more than nine times the footprint of just nine.
So the main shock of encountering Inuksuit live, on a sunny-cloudy, coolish-warmish Saturday afternoon in Seattle was the discovery that the piece is chamber music; that at its thundering climax about a half hour in iit’s just as calm and transparent as at its amplified breathing opening and its shimmering-triangles conclusion.
Every review of earlier performances round the world mentions how Adams’ slowly shifting soundscape captures the random sounds of its surroundings. That bare statement doesn’t convey the way it bends those sounds and enfolds them, makes them seem as appropriate to their moments as the sounds of the written score.
Other composers are surely studying this piece, learning from it how to tear down the material concert hall built into their preconceptions and replace it with a virtual cathedral, where the winds are the walls and the sky Shelly’s dome of multicolored glass, “staining the white radiance of Eternity.”
Inuksuit is a 79-minute masterpiece written for 9 to 99 percussionists composed by John Luther Adams. The title refers to a type of stone landmark used by native peoples of the Arctic region; listeners discover their individual listening points as they, too, move freely during the performance. This work is designed to heighten our awareness of the sights and sounds that surround us every day, and deeply influenced by the composer’s belief that “music can contribute to the awakening of our ecological understanding. By deepening our awareness of our connections to the earth, music can provide a sounding model for the renewal of human consciousness and culture.” Adams has notated in Inuksuit that the piece should only be performed outdoors. The piece uses a mix of standard and less common instruments, including glockenspiel, toms, cymbals, conch shells, whirly tubes, vuvuzelas, and sirens.
My biggest inspiration for producing this piece was my experience at the Chosen Vale Percussion Seminar in the summer of 2014. Doug Perkins and Amy Garaphic are the organizers of this seminar, and also very involved with JLA and have produced a number of performances of Inuksuit. That summer, Adams was invited to be a composer-in-residence for the program and we had the privilege of playing through the percussion parts of his piece Sila: The Breath of the World before the premier performance at Lincoln Center. Sila is written for large ensemble and voices, so we only represented a fraction of the final product, and the experience was really moving for us all. I was able to learn about his experiences and inspirations first hand, and developed a deep interest in learning more and performing this major work for percussion.
