The Place Where You Go to Listen

The Place Where You Go to Listen: In Search of an Ecology of Music by John Luther Adams, foreword by Alex Ross. 

Did Alaska create the music of John Luther Adams, or did the music create his Alaska? The place where you go to listen is the composer's largest, most complex work—a sound and light environment at the Museum of the North in Fairbanks, Alaska, that gives voice to the cycles of sunlight and darkness, the phases of the moon, the seismic rhythms of the earth, and the dance of the aurora borealis. In this new book Adams proposes an ideal of musical ecology, tells the story of the day-to-day emergence of the Place, and explains the musical, technological, and scientific dimensions of this "place for hearing the unheard music of the world around us. 

"John Luther Adams is the John Muir of music, reporting back to us from not only the wilderness of the world, but of the soul."—Kyle Gann, composer, former music critic for the Village Voice. 

"Listening into the depths of the inaudible, John Luther Adams translates the voices of silence into sculpted gradients of sound and floating color, intersecting sonic fields 'played' by the elemental forces of nature. This book offers us a glimpse into the creative alchemy of one of our most audacious and visionary composers."—David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous. 

Published by Wesleyan University Press.