John Luther Adams's Inuksuit: The Playtime of Contemporary Classical Music?

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—On Sunday, I experienced what may well be the classical-music equivalent of Jacques Tati's Playtime, which I only recently decided was probably my favorite film ever.

A taste, to start things off:



This all-too-brief video represents three iPhone-captured video clips that I stitched together from a performance of contemporary classical music I attended on Sunday—a Sunday I had off thanks to President's Day the next day—at the Park Avenue Armory in New York's Upper East Side (it was part of a four-day festival of new music entitled the Tune-In Music Festival).

Wait a minute, some of you might be saying after watching this short video. This doesn't look like a classical-music performance. What are all those people doing lying on the floor? Why are a lot of audience members walking around? And maybe, most of all, What kind of music is this??? 

The name of the piece is Inuksuit, and it is the latest work by an American composer named John Luther Adams. (No, this isn't the same John Adams who composed the music for the 1987 opera Nixon in China—which I saw in the Metropolitan Opera's new production on Saturday night, and which I might discuss in a future post, if I can settle on how I actually feel about it—or, more recently, the music for the recent film I Am Love. This other John Adams is, despite similar minimalist leanings, quite a different artist musically, at least based on this one work of his I've heard.) "Inuksuit" is the plural form of "inukshuk," which are human-built stones located in the Arctic Circle that Inuit tribesmen used as navigation tools. In the same way that Inuit people wandered around these stones, so does John Luther Adams envision for Inuksuit that audience members freely wander around the nine-to-99 (Adams's specification) percussionists situated in varying locations in a given space. This isn't the usual concert work where an audience sits down to listen and watch performers perform that work. Instead, we are put in the position of being active spectators, choosing where to go and what to perceive within the space in which the work is performed.

Such an idea could perhaps only work in a certain kind of space...thus Inuksuit's arguably most interesting aspect, which is that this work was conceived to be played outdoors, as the composer himself explained in a pre-concert talk I attended. So in a sense, hearing it performed in a huge indoor space at the Park Avenue Armory was going against the composer's original intentions. (Apparently, there were microphones placed near windows in the Armory's big auditorium, in an attempt to capture some of the sounds outside of the building; I didn't really hear much outside noise, though, until the quiet fading-away of the piece's ending.)

Taken with my iPhone at the Park Avenue Armory on Sunday

No matter; the sounds of Adams's score still managed to ring forth in all its sonic splendor. And when I say "sounds," I do mean sounds. Musically, Inuksuit is essentially 70 minutes of noise: There are no melodies to speak of, only this imposing epic soundscape that encompasses the heights of quiet serenity and the depths of clangorous cacophony. But this isn't a random assemblage of noises, by any means. From its near-silent beginnings—with some of the performers, all situated in the middle of the auditorium, creating soothing wind noises through paper megaphones—to the way it increases in volume and intensity—cymbals and tam-tams eventually enter the scene, as do conch shells and sirens—until it slowly eases down to triangles and piccolo evoking something like distant bird calls, the work conveys a pretty explicit dawn-to-dusk arc underpinning it all. The work's total effect was intensified by, well, nature itself. The sun was already starting to set by the time 5:20 p.m. rolled around, which made the work's slow dying away seem perfectly in tune with the world outside; that was the first time, by the way, I was able to hear outside street noises intrude into Adams's sonic architecture. (Surely this perfect timing had to have been a deliberate strategy on Adams's part!) It also helped that many of the audience members had, by that point, decided to sit or lie down, echoing the relaxed quality of those final 10 minutes.

Again, my familiarity with Adams's work is, as of now, limited this one work only—I hadn't even heard of the man until I was invited to the event on Facebook by one of the 72 performers, who lives right in my apartment building (he's actually pictured in the New York Times's review of the event here)—but, according to the program notes as well as some quick online research I've done on the composer, he seems to find much of his inspiration not only in trying to evoke nature in his music, but also in finding ways for creative imagination and nature to interact. The environment seems important to him; apparently, in addition to his music, he focused on environmental protection right after graduating from California Institute of the Arts in the early 1970s (he currently lives in Alaska).

Taken with my iPhone at the Park Avenue Armory on Sunday

This deep devotion to the mingling of art and nature comes through in Inuksuit, whether indoors or outdoors. The work not only suggests the creation of a sonic environment; it itself is a sonic environment, one that Adams allows us to literally bask in, to wander around in, even to pick apart. That sounds like what most of us might do in an unfamiliar physical environment, especially in a natural one. For me, the glory of Inuksuit is not so much that it refreshes our awareness of worlds outside of our own—the one defining characteristic of most of the art I cherish—but that it allows us to simulate the ways we engage with the world in general. It's a kind of controlled experiment: How will we all react to being plunked down in this unfamiliar milieu? We, of course, all have our own ways; in Adams's conception, all of those ways are made valid, not just the traditional "sitting and absorbing" manner of most concert music.

Playtime (1967)

Surely some of you will have an idea by now of how Inuksuit corresponds with Tati's cinematic masterpiece. Like Adams, Tati also demands active spectatorship in his de-emphasis on close-ups and central protagonists, basically throwing his viewers into his meticulously constructed world and asking them to figure out where to look and what to take in. Just as with a second performance of Inuksuit you may well pick up on sonic details you weren't able to hear the first time, Tati's images are vast enough that one can seize upon unnoticed details even on a third or fourth viewing. And, on a big-picture level, both artists take on nothing less than the whole wide world itself: how we live in it, interact in it, take stock of it.

Both works leave me reeling in sensory overload, in awe of the heights of the imagination in transforming ordinary human experience into something revelatory and sublime.

Taken with my iPhone at the Park Avenue Armory on Sunday

According to Adams in the pre-concert talk, there are plans afoot to stage an actual outdoor performance of Inuksuit in New York's Morningside Park sometime in June. If you have time for it, you ought to go hear it for yourself; it's truly a musical experience like few others.

In the meantime...well, someone more intrepid than I captured a 23-minute selection from Sunday's Park Avenue Armory performance. So you could start there, to perhaps get a better idea as to what this work is all about:

Playtime: Does It Get Any Better Than This?

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Every so often, people ask me what film I consider my favorite of all time. In the past, I've usually responded that I have a handful of titles in mind that I really love above most others, but that it was too difficult for me to narrow it down to one single favorite.

But folks, I went to see Jacques Tati's Playtime in 70mm on Saturday afternoon at the reopening of the Museum of the Moving Image up in Queens. Having finally seen this 1967 masterpiece projected in a theater, I think it's probably safe for me to go ahead and declare this to be officially my favorite film ever (at least, until I see another film that overthrows it in my affections).

When it comes to those handful of films that I prize above all others (Playtime, Vertigo and Fallen Angels are among that select few)...well, I don't really have any set criteria to make such a determination. As with a lot of my reactions to films, it's mostly a gut feeling, one that will eventually (hopefully) be buttressed by some kind of critical/intellectual content. In the case of Playtime in 70mm, that feeling manifested itself in the big smile on my face and a familiar lightheaded feeling that I get only from certain great films—a feeling Roger Ebert might call "elevation"—neither of which dissipated for all of the film's 124 minutes. (Only a maniacal elderly laugher sitting two seats to my right threatened to derail my blissful savoring of the experience, intruding as he did with horse-like top-of-his-lungs laughter that made one of my viewing companions want to strangle him.)

What is it about this particular film, though, that inspires me to proclaim it as the one I prize above all the others I've seen in my (admittedly relatively brief) lifetime? I think it has a lot to do with the fact that, within its deep-focus compositions, its de-emphasis on central characters and its ceaseless comic imagination, I sense a full expression of my own way of looking at the world.

I remember the first two times I watched Playtime, seeing it first on a tube television set while still a college student at Rutgers, then later on a plasma-screen TV at home after having received the updated Criterion DVD edition as a birthday present. Back then, my trips to New York City were far more infrequent than they would later become...but every time I would travel into midtown Manhattan, I would stare up at the tall buildings surround me and always think back to the skyscrapers and various other pieces of city architecture in Tati's Paris, and how overwhelming and coldly industrial they can all seem to an outsider. Then I started commuting into Manhattan regularly for my job, and gradually that sense of wonder dissolved, as it inevitably will once familiarity sets in.

So seeing, once again, that group of American tourists traveling through Paris—with occasional detours into the side adventures of Tati's own M. Hulot—helped reawaken that initial sense of wonder at experiencing the big city for the first time. But, having felt like I've lived a bit since the last time I saw the film, Playtime reawakened a lot of other familiar feelings. Its opening scene, for instance, set at the Aéroports de Paris, perfectly catches the sometimes bewildering hustle and bustle of being at an airport, and Tati is able to convey this not by taking one character's point of view and following his/her progress through an airport, but by basically taking an omniscient perspective and inviting us to observe all sorts of people interacting in this one unmistakably modern environment—and, in this film, Tati is so generous with giving just about every character something amusing to do that there is always something to look at, in just about every inch of its widescreen frames. (That kind of attention is detail is the reason why this film works better projected big in a theater rather than on a much smaller TV screen.)

It's that generosity, in the end, that moves me the most about Playtime. By de-emphasizing central characters, Tati is thus free to roam around all the various spaces in his (recreated Parisian) metropolis, to look not only for comedy wherever he can find it—whether in the sounds made cushioned chairs, or even in the droop of a model airplane in a restaurant with too much heat—but also for the possibilities of human connection in the potentially alienating modern milieu he so pitilessly captures. It's the same kind of generous spirit I'd like to think I embody in my own life: an embrace of humanity, in all its variety and mystery; an openness to all the world has to offer around me; and a willingness to forge personal connections wherever possible, especially in a highly populated metropolis such as New York. (That last part can sometimes be frustratingly difficult, as I've come to discover in the past few weeks...but I persist nevertheless, because you never know what sparks may fly in a chance encounter.) It's that curiosity about the world, and especially about the people who inhabit it, that I expect from any great artist and any great work of art; Playtime gives that cherished philosophy possibly its most sublime cinematic expression. 

For all the talk over the years about the film being about big-city alienation, Playtime is ultimately an exhilarating, enlivening and genuinely inspiring celebration of life. Even as, during its euphoric second hour, a fancy restaurant experiences one mishap after another, the people dining in that restaurant manage to find ways to look past the mess and enjoy themselves anyway. (Seriously, every weekend for me in New York should be like that extended restaurant sequence, dammit!) And then there's the gift that M. Hulot's gives to the pretty young female tourist (Barbara Dennek) as she is about to head back to the U.S. It doesn't even necessarily matter what it is he gives her; the point is, even though he realizes he may never seen this young woman again, he has nevertheless made a connection that may well be remembered for the rest of both their lives.

I live for those kinds of connections. And I live for movies like Playtime. Films like that are why I love this art form as much as I do.

Oh yeah, I saw other stuff this past weekend. I'll get to those. For now, though, allow me to just bask in the afterglow of Tati's masterpiece.

What It Means for a Film to Be "Revelatory"

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—Sure, I love to be touched and entertained at the movies as much as the next moviegoer. But when I come across a film that, by virtue of its artistry, refreshes the way I perceive something in the world in which I live and breathe...well, that kind of film is, to my mind, something that deserves to be treasured above many others.

One of the many reasons that I love Jacques Tati's Playtime (1967) as much as I do (even without having seen it in its original 70mm format, granted) is that, in his immaculate reconstruction of a modern metropolis, the great French comic filmmaker manages to construct a world so close to our own that he makes it all but impossible for us not to take notice of the looming skyscrapers and chilly modernist architecture whenever we find ourselves in a big city. I know that after every time I've seen this film, I always find myself walking around in midtown Manhattan and looking up more often to take in the sheer vertical majesty of the skyscrapers that loom above me.

(Courtesy of DVDBeaver)

This past weekend, I finally saw Michelangelo Antonioni's 1964 film Red Desert, and only five minutes into it, with its opening blurry and non-blurry shots of factories and industrial waste enveloped in a fog, I knew that this would be another one of those kinds of cinematic works of art. Surely everyone has seen or perhaps even walked amidst an environment such as this: coldly industrialized, uniquely modern, bereft of humanity. But Antonioni, with his distinctive eye for landscape and architecture, visualizes his images in a way that snatches an unexpected grim beauty from the air of general dehumanization.

(Above three "screen shots" were captured from the Criterion Red Desert Blu-ray via the "Glenn Kenny method" of taking photographs off my LCD television monitor. Obviously, I do not yet have a computer with a Blu-ray drive installed.)

There is plenty more to Red Desert than mere visual beauty, of course: It is of a piece with Antonioni's previous examinations of spiritual isolation (L'Avventura, La Notte, L'Eclisse), but this time on a grander and more overtly expressionistic scale. But ultimately the factories, the landscapes, the architecture and Antonioni's ravishing use of color are what I cherish most about this film.

And Monica Vitti...of course.

(Courtesy of DVDBeaver)

One of the functions of great art, I firmly believe, is that it has the power to sharpen your senses and increase your awareness of what is around you. Now, I have a feeling that whenever I find myself looking at a factory or walking in an industrial area, Antonioni's eye-catching depiction of these landscapes in Red Desert, and the way those landscapes correspond with Monica Vitti's desperation for human connection, is the association I will make in my mind. Antonioni's way of viewing the world has been seared into my mind's eye. This is what I consider "revelatory"—perhaps more viscerally so than intellectually, but either way, it's profoundly beautiful.

If any of you dear readers of mine have films, or other kinds of artworks, that affect you in this way, by all means, shout out your praises for such works in the comments section of this post!