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Winter Music: Composing the North.

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Winter Music: Composing the North. By John Luther Adams. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004. [xxiv, 204 p. ISBN 0-8195-6742-6. $24.95.] Music examples, index, catalog of works, compact disc.

John Luther Adams's Winter Music: Composing the North defies categorization and rejects easy summary, much like his music. Not a scholarly book in the traditional sense, there is no over-riding thesis or proposition being argued, although there is an over-arching theme: music as communion--with nature, with place, with Alaska most especially. The author is obviously well informed, trained, and read, and quotes liberally from a range of people and materials; however, there is little by way of documentation save a list of sources for the single chapter "Resonances of Place." The end materials contain "Writings by John Luther Adams," "Writings About John Luther Adams," an enumeration of interviews with the composer as subject, and a catalog of his works. As Adams explains, the book includes "essays about music" as well as "excerpts from journals and anecdotes from travel, work, and daily life" (p. xxi). The book comes with a compact disc that includes three newly recorded works: Roar, Velocities Crossing in Phase-Space, and Red Arc/Blue Veil. They may very well...

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