Christopher Adler
// composer, improviser & performerCHRISTOPHER ADLER is a composer, improviser, and performer from San Diego, California. The Christopher Adler Trio’s “Transcontinental” (2004) is available from Nine Winds Records, Christopher Adler’s “Epilogue For A Dark Day” (2004) is available from Tzadik Records, The Alan Lechusza / Christopher Adler Duo’s “Mineralia” (2006) is available from pfMENTUM, and “Ecstatic Volutions In A Neon Haze” (2008) is available from Innova Recordings. Christopher Adler’s music essay “Reflections On Cross-Cultural Composition” appears in John Zorn’s “Arcana II: Musicians On Music” (2007) available from Hips Road. He is also an Associate Professor of Music at the University of San Diego.
Websites: www.christopheradler.com and www.sandiego.edu
Photo: Vika Golovanova / ChristopherAdler.com
Interview:
THREE ANECDOTES AROUND MUSIC AND SPIRITUALITY
The distinction between sacred and secular music, which is now the stuff of music history textbooks, was a distinction of function, setting, and text. Was the piece at hand written to be used in a church service, for a civic event, or for private enjoyment? Such distinctions do not speak to the ability of all music to access the spiritual. About a decade ago, in graduate school, I had the opportunity to study with celebrated Bach scholar Peter Williams, who pointed out that the modern distinction between sacred and secular music was irrelevant to J. S. Bach, who inscribed all his scores “S.D.G.” for “Soli Deo Gloria”, to the Glory of God alone. To be a Lutheran composer in Leipzig in 1723 was to experience sacredness as an everyday reality.
With his films, Werner Herzog seeks what he terms “ecstatic truth”, a transcendent experience of reality different from factual documentary truth. I respect Herzog for his close involvement in the creation of the music for his films, admirably documented in the special features on the DVD releases of “Grizzly Man” and “The Wild Blue Yonder”. It is no coincidence that in the latter film, which he first subtitled a “Space Oratorio”, the making of the music preceded the assembly of the film narrative. The ecstatic truth to which his science fiction fantasy aspires is most readily contacted through music rather than visual image or narrative.
In 2005, I titled a composition “Ecstatic Volutions In A Neon Haze”. This was my own poetic description of a series of paintings by Robert Yarber depicting couples tumbling in mid-air above a glowing nocturnal urban dystopia. In my composition, a homage to American pulse-minimalist music, the sensuality and persistence of musical groove gradually seduces each individual musician into a unified invocation of musical ecstasy. The experience is akin to the liminal stage of ritual process, as theorized by Victor Turner, in which individual identities are submerged into a collective experience of community in which social bonds are re-formed and transformed.
“The sensuality and persistence of musical groove gradually seduces each individual musician into a unified invocation of musical ecstasy.”
– Christopher Adler composer, improviser, and performer
