Strange and Sacred Noise is a process-oriented piece. Process as an organizing principal is attractive for many composers. Both Reich and Adams have cited James Tenney regarding this; as Tenney has said, when one is composing with a process, “the composer isn’t privy to anything.” Strange and Sacred Noise is in nine movements. As Adams writes, “its dynamics range from the threshold of audibility to the threshold of pain.” Adams does not consider the movements as different pieces, but rather as separate places. So please, for these 9 minutes, remember this; and let this music be a place where you have come to listen.
In Adams’s writings about Strange and Sacred Noise, he quotes a small excerpt from Jacques Attali’s book, Noise: The Political Economy of Music. The following is the opening to Attali’s book. It is worth considering in relation to John Luther Adams’s music, but also in relation to music in general.
“For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible. Our science has always desired to monitor, measure, abstract, and castrate meaning, forgetting that life is full of noise and that death alone is silent: work noise, noise of man, and noise of beast. Noise bought, sold, or prohibited. Nothing essential happens in the absence of noise.
Today our sight has dimmed; it no longer sees our future, having constructed a present made of abstraction, nonsense, and silence. Now we must learn to judge a society more by its sounds, by its art, and by its festivals, than by its statistics. By listening to noise, we can better understand where the folly of men and their calculations is leading us, and what hopes it is still possible to have.” - Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (pg. 3)
