Alex Ross, the magazine’s music critic, traveled to Fairbanks at breakup to research a profile of Adams. The result is a great tribute to the Fairbanks musician and composer. I can’t remember the last time that notoriety of this magnitude has been accorded an Alaska artist.
Ross describes the work of the Fairbanks composer in detail, highlighting his 2006 installation at the museum in which natural phenomena such as the aurora and earthquakes are transformed in a special room into “an intricate, vibrantly colored field of electronic sound.”
The May 12 issue of the magazine features Adams and several other innovators. His musical contribution to the museum, known as “The Place Where You Go to Listen,” is a unique work of art.
Ross, who won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism in 2007, writes that the sound room at the museum “confirms Adams’s status as one of the most original musical thinkers of the new century.”
“At the age of 55, he is perhaps the chief standard-bearer of American experimental music, of the tradition of solitary sonic tinkering that began on the West Coast almost a century ago and gained new strength after the Second World War, when John Cage and Morton Feldman created supreme abstractions in musical form,” Ross said.
“Talking about his work, Adams admits that it can sound strange, that it lacks familiar reference points, that it’s not exactly popular — by a twist of fate, he is sometimes confused with John Coolidge Adams, the creator of the opera ‘Nixon in China’ and the most widely performed living American composer — and yet he’ll also say that it’s got something, or at least, ‘It’s not nothing.’”
Amid the praise for Adams’ music, Ross writes the composer “blends in well with the proudly scruffy characters who populate the diners and bars of Fairbanks.”
Adams and his wife, Cindy, who runs the Internet business GrantStation, are both members of the community board of directors of the Alaska Goldpanners.
“When they go shopping at Fred Meyer, the all-purpose store in town, they are peppered with questions about the state of the team,” Ross writes.
The critic notes that Cindy “has been the mainstay of his occasionally precarious existence since the late 1970s,” which is a nice way of putting it.
