Inspirations Behind John Luther Adams: Among Red Mountains

At the Seattle Tacoma Airport (Sea-Tac), there’s an art collection that cannot help but catch your eye. The Port of Seattle is in charge of the art collection, which began in 1968; a percentage for art ordinance in 2000 formalized their acquisitions. There are nearly 300 works of art at Sea-Tac, including paintings, murals, stained glass pieces, video art, and sculptures; the value is put at over $40 million.

One of those works, entitled York Factory A, is by American artist Frank Stell (1936–2024). A modernist who worked in the fields of minimalism and ‘post-painterly abstraction’, he was noted for his works from the 1950s that focused on the ‘picture-as-object’, i.e., it’s not a representation of something, be it something in the physical world, or something in the artist’s emotional world. Few of these works came from initial sketches but were done ‘following the path of the brush stroke’.

Frank Stella

Starting in 1967, he began his ‘Protractor Series’, named after the half-circle protractor that many of us used in math classes.

Protractor

Stella’s paintings in this series are based on arcs within square borders. Many of Stella’s works in this style were named after circular-plan cities he had visited in the Middle East in the 1960s. His use of colour in these paintings was vibrant and far away from his earlier monochromatic pieces of the 1950s.

York Factory A is enormous: 9′ high x 27′ wide (2.75m x 8.25 m). York Factory was a Canadian settlement established in 1684 by the Hudson’s Bay Company and was one of their first fur-trading posts. It was closed by the Company in 1957 and is now part of Parks Canada. It’s on the southwest shore of Hudson Bay in Manitoba, Canada.

Stella: York Factory A, 1972 (Sea-Tac Airport)

The colours are muted, and as a change from his original protractor series works, the arcs and straight lines overlap and combine. Although Stella’s original idea came from Middle Eastern city design, when placed in the context of a busy airport, the design could also be read to reflect freedom of flight and the stabilizing position of the airport in the curved and straight lines. Earlier versions of this image, dating from 1971, were done in light pastel colours and at a smaller size (17 7/16 × 44 1/2in. (44.3 × 113 cm).

Stella: York Factory I (edition 51/100), 1971 (Whitney Museum of American Art)

American composer John Luther Adams (b. 1953) saw this work at Sea-Tac and described it as a painting in which ‘arcs of bright colours weave in and out of one another in a dizzying counterpoint of imaginary planes’. It’s not clear if ‘planes’ is meant as ‘airplanes’ or as an art definition of ‘a flat, two-dimensional surface’.

John Luther Adams

The 11-minute piano piece based on the artwork starts with an immediate crash – he doesn’t read the muted colours of the painting as indicative of a retiring image, but as a confrontation in colour and so he creates a confrontation in sound.

John Luther Adams: Among Red Mountains (Stephen Drury, piano)

Adams had recently heard a work by Kyle Gann that used multiple tempos simultaneously and, after hearing Gann’s music and studying Stella’s painting, Adams tried to create a piece that set up ‘5 independent tempo planes’, to be realized by only 2 hands.

In his note for the piece, Adams says that ‘The internal resonance of the piano is an essential element of this music. If possible, the instrument should be amplified—not to make the music louder, but to allow listeners to hear more clearly the interweaving of harmonic colours.’

The title of the work, Among Red Mountains, is a translation of the original Athabascan name for a place in the Brooks Range in Alaska.

It’s just as outspoken as Stella’s inspirational work and comes to a ringing close.

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