Museum filmmaker debuts new work in New York
February 15, 2011
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February 15, 2011
When the world music festival Tune In opens in New York City next week, all ears – and eyes – will be on composer John Luther Adams. The audience will hear his work “Inuksuit” performed indoors and in New York for the first time.
At the same event, the film Strange and Sacred Noise by Leonard Kamerling, curator of film at the University of Alaska Museum of the North, premieres. This new film explores Adams’ work through an outdoor performance of his percussion piece by the same name. “I am a documentary film-maker,” Kamerling said. “I deal with the narratives of real events, of people living their lives, and I look at stories through that filter. Strange and Sacred Noise pushed me far beyond that familiar zone.”
It was something new for Adams, as well. “I’m not usually a hands-off kind of guy,” he said. “In this case I’ve done my best to stay out of Len’s way. He’s the filmmaker. My attitude now is one of curiosity about what I might learn and what Len made of that extraordinary night.” Kamerling and Adams had long talked about making a film together, but nothing stuck. Then a musician who had already performed “Strange and Sacred Noise” in various outdoor locations wondered what it would be like to return to an Alaskan setting, the source of the glaciers, rivers and mountains that inspired the piece.
This time Kamerling, who is also a professor of English at UAF’s College of Liberal Arts, sensed a story. So the crew trucked musical instruments, recording equipment and camping gear to one of Adams’ favorite camping spots in the Alaska Range. “It was an incredible circus getting a percussion orchestra into the wilderness,” Kamerling said. “I thought this story would be the center of the film, but in the end I didn’t use any of that material. With any film I don’t really know what it’s about until I’m in the editing room. That’s where the discovery takes place.”
The performance transpired through an Alaska night in June of 2008. As the sun dips below the mountains, bathing the lake and tundra in a supernatural glow, Kamerling shows the audience different perspectives of the environment, from huge expansive mountain vistas to miniature elements like the small white flowers that flourish on the tundra. “To experience it there was moving,” he said. “The sound that was huge in the auditorium blew away with the wind. It was like setting an animal free in its environment.”
Kamerling decided to use self-reflection in the form of on camera narration from the composer as a balance between the live performances and location footage. With that addition, the film became an exploration of Adams’ artistic process as well as a record of the performance. Adams said he took “Strange and Sacred Noise” outdoors – from the desert of California to the woods of New England, a meadow in Ohio and finally the tundra of the Alaska Range – in a spirit of exploration.
“The experience was humbling and transformative for me. Outdoors some things that sounded so powerful, even frightening in the concert hall simply blew away in the wind. But at other moments, I began to hear a magical dialogue between the music of my composition and the music of the places in which we performed it.”
That experience led Adams to compose “Inuksuit,” a piece for nine to 99 percussionists. It is his first piece specifically intended for an outdoor performance. It premiered in the summer of 2009 at the Banff Centre in the Canadian Rockies. Since then it has been performed across North America, with performances now planned all over the world.
The film, Strange and Sacred Noise, debuts in the Park Avenue Armory in New York City on Friday, Feb. 18, 2011 at 8 p.m. Kamerling said it will be presented at Harvard and Northwestern Universities before he returns to Alaska, where he hopes to show it to local audiences.