episode what I want to do is I want to basically present a couple of the musicians that inspire the sound of the show because I love them and also I feel like they are amazing and you perhaps all of them too and also tell you a story Ok but let's do this one now this person. There stereotypes or or. I don't know if it's stereotypes or architects and both I mean here. And then and when they was displayed in looking for a job that gave me. Enough money to play music I thought t.v. Was the best option you you went to t.v. To help pay for music so what you did was she went to the local t.v. Station somehow convinced them to give her a job reporting fake news sort of like The Daily Show and eventually she got her own show called. East and. It was which means want to honor sister sort of a comedy show and it was just a sketch is that they go for 3 years at the beginning it works very well because they had money and they could pay my rent and make it her lessons and but then I got big she became a huge hit was the kind of situation where you'd walk down the street and be recognized much to her dismay. Suddenly she was an actress not a musician and as she puts it her life kind of got out of hand well but then she got pregnant I got pregnant I need to stay in Vegas. So I had time to to think about my life and realize that I had totally missed my go it was just that I didn't want to miss it I didn't want to date that I'm not having then what I wanted to do so at the height of her popularity as an actress. She drops out. That's not what I wanted I just wanted to be a musician so she starts playing in these little clubs just her and her guitar. a lyric sometimes most of the tense so when the song pops into your head and you develop it you're not thinking of a story you never say never but you put the story on afterwards why. You know to be able to sing. India the song. How did that how did that happen was warming up for the show and I started going to bloat and is due to play doodling. And it sounded like one day it life and I wrote to her just then I said I love music I love this song. Can I think he makes it. Amazingly her manager wrote me back and he said totally You can remakes it really so I remakes the song oh my God I was was this guy you know it was just going on but as I was so it was where was he no eternal he's just I'm sure. It was in New York can we hear your version Yeah. Can I do that. Ok And Gary here. Is Here is a short excerpt from remakes had her manager was nice enough to let me do of of her song of one minute song. Or Ok I want to thank Paul De Wine in want to know you know you can also go to 1000000 dot com She got her music and I want to thank Michael Ray feel for some of the sounds used in that remake as well Stuart Dempsey for some of the music and I'm javelin rod and I'm Robert Krulwich Stay tuned we'll be back in a moment but he was just back heard him calling from Columbia South Carolina Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred p. Sloan Foundation and it's a Public Understanding of Science and Technology in the modern world more relation about every Debbie Debbie got loaned out or. Michael girls from Portland Oregon Radio Lab is supported by constant contact proffering email marketing features like drag and drop editing and mobile friendly templates costing context products are focused on helping small businesses more a Constant Contact dot com. Hi This is Leslie from Miami Beach Florida Radiolab is supported by live offering product features like infinity the technology that gives the ability to read different image on every business card where you are at dot com . Support for Alaska Public Media comes from Tower joint replacement clinic a console twit Dr Steven tower will help you learn about options for joint pain more information at t.j. Our Clinic dot com resume active life I think is a Robert you know that like talking about music in a way that's compelling can be kind of hard very hard to predict music you know it's really hard to build a bridge into when people do it well. You gotta give him props. And I just ran into a really great podcast that I think everyone should be listening to it's called Meet the composer. It's from Hugh to music which is sort of the digital sister station of w. Q x r And it's kind of what it sounds you know every episode the energy to one composer but they do such a good job of seducing you into listening and maybe caring about music you wouldn't normally listen care about that. I just thought you know I really want to play some of their latest episode for you because they just focus on one of my favorite composers a guy by the name of John Luther Adams This is John Adams is a composer who makes music that sort of conjures these wide open spaces that kind of invite you in. But also seems sort of indifferent to you and maybe my kill you it has that and if you're into it. Ok so how does the bigger like we're going to meet this guy this Miss In the documentary begins and by the way it's hosted by not a yes or Rhoda It begins with Johnny through Adams as a boy playing in Iraq than imagine 14 year old John in a cover band in New Jersey opening for acts like Buffalo Springfield and playing predominately the 3 B.'s who are 3 faced the Beatles. Could be. The perfect. Ok so we started out as cover bands and I got bored with that and so did my buddies and. Over time we started trying our hand at songwriting and I was a big fan of Frank Zappa. Frank Zappa the teetotal in 1000 sixty's and seventy's musician and polymath while the central banking rocked the jazz to American audiences they get 3 office goodness contemporary classical music and on the back of Frank's early LP is there would always be this intriguing little quote the present day composer refuses to die it Garver residence in my little rock n roll buddies and I would read that and scratch their heads and wonder. Who is this for he's a guy right and one day my friends think I'm hearing this commission through the record bins shop in the West Village and came across this with us from had some interest on the cover of the great shock of the electrostatic. Bushy eyebrows. Stern countenancing. I don't want the music and I thought I thought of this volume. Part of. The group's. Sound. Like much of noise to. This desert this Ocean Mist these forbidding mountains of sound and I remember thinking I'm never be able to know where I am and that's I don't know what thing I'm. So your response to what is this music was just to immerse yourself in any more yeah which is always been my response to any new experience of that I often encourage young musicians especially young composers you know listen to everything you can get your ears on especially the stuff you think you don't like. I started to realize Ok there's the Peter you know the with the oboe and Ok that's a landmark I can grab onto that oh and here's this place where there's sort of a tattoo figure with a snare drums and then these unison steps in the rest of the percussion gradually we begin to learn how to listen to the forbidding deserts of revs. Did that affect the music you guys were making Oh sure it meant that the process that was already underway was just accelerated We have a league abandons the you know the 145 chords from the back beat and the form. Bar phrases. Started discovering Cajun Feldman and then kero in polling all of Arrow's owners coffer of them and on and on. So thank you Frank Zappa. I love that that was his response to music that you know can be defined as very alienating I mean present not easy stuff but instead of just writing it off as ugly he was like. So in a case just to skip forward a little bit in the Meet the composer hour from Q 2 John Luther Adams goes off to school. He has a teacher named I believe it's James $21.00 of his 1st big influences but he goes off to school Alex and right afterwards he meets one of his next big influences. I had just left cow arts hadn't yet gone to Alaska and I would take long walks in the early morning and again a dusk and I became captivated by this singer that I kept hearing deep in the woods and I could never find the bird but I couldn't get enough of the song. I started taking notes the birds became my teachers after James telling. And the result was a series of pieces that I composed between 1000 some the forum 79 called simply songbirds all. I mean what was the translation process between hearing this bird song that you just couldn't get enough of and constructing a narrative of him working with the bird songs and just try to take dictation I try to listen carefully to the birds where they are as they're singing and write down what I hear I'm not interested in accuracy because if I were I'd just make recording and play the recording. I'm interested in what gets lost in translation because after all in this is music has as perhaps a language that we will never understand. Also there weren't very many field recordings of ala Bill in those days but there were some and I decided I'm not going to use them I really wanted to hear them and to learn them for myself that's actually very different from the way I work much of the time rather than working with very specific details of the music and then building the piece up I usually sculpt away the whole field of sound and work with one big shape or image or color or atmosphere than what I have in mind that I can't quite hear but I want to hear and try to hear that sense that write that down as clearly as I can and then all the moment to moment details of music. We're listening to the excerpts from an hour from cue to music from their fantastic series Meet the composer this one is on the composer one of my favorites John Luther Adams now after the song where peace John is living in l.a. . And he gets kind of fed up I hated to listen to. The whole time I was there and I felt really lost and not in a good way it's such an interesting contrast because it was one of the most the most in periods of my life in terms of discovery but at the same time there was this kind of inner knowing and I just felt lost in the freeways and all that sprawling city that seemed to just go on forever it made me long for home. Which I never felt that I had because we moved all the time and I'd grown up here and they are equally homogenous. Suburban surroundings so there is this deep inarticulate hunger to find a place to which I might belong. The place where Adam's belong to it turns out it was off the grid even wilder opened. I went north in the summer of 1975 so I was 22 that summer and from the moment I arrived I do it how. When you showed up in Alaska what did you see what did you hear that made you feel like you knew you were home. Where to begin. It all really starts in the summer of 175 when I 1st knew it across Admiralty island and into Glacier Bay a hike on the tundra of I. Made my way to put picture Ange to the Arctic you know there was and still is in those places a sense of openness and space and. Possibility as well as danger these are big places in which we feel very very small and we realize that we're in significance and the place doesn't care if we are there or not and the weather or the bear. Or the river can rise up at any moment to snuff me out and you know I find a certain reassurance certain profound comfort him that. So in the summer of 1977 my visited the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and we flew over the crest of the park's range an element of the coastal plain here the coastal plain and there in the distance was the ice and and of course the sun even even a midsummer the sun doesn't get very high on the horizon so there's this incredible warm up saturated lights and we're going to colors in the shadows and everything just stands out and then you get out on the tundra and you lose all sense of scale I remember one evening where the body and we're just so excited to be alive and out that Arctic evening light and we saw this quite a rock out across the tundra and it was just looking things that well when we walk over there when we hike to the raw eggs. And we hike and of course the tundra is not easy to walk on but we kept walking we kept walking and you know the rock didn't get any closer. So we kept walking. And suddenly we stopped because frankly there are little what I. Thought was a snowy owl sitting on the tundra and you know it could have been. 12 foot I'll crawl. Thing of white stone just you know you lose yourself in that place in that white and that endless space that's right morning. You know. And you know what I think about when he was working for me when I 1st encountered looney tunes in the way that the length of them has a sort of an inherent meaning to it and he feels like falling you look at the music of action he's bumping bumping tiptoeing bonking all of these things have a kind of musical expression that feels almost like a physical language that we came into the world with and never had to learn and when I went to music school. It was so difficult and dense because suddenly I was thrust into this world of contemporary classical composition and it was all about understanding the rigor of serial 12 tone composition which is like you create these little mathematical systems that guide your choices like I don't know what this has to do with music I don't understand this and then you hear it you know like I might you can pick up on it I feel lost you feel like you're literally in the forest but then I encountered composers like John Luther Adams where it wasn't about that at all. Something or primal it's about like the movement of bodies you know masses of sound that sort of question to the question and leaves Yeah I do think of the sounds of musical forms and of them as fourths of this. Is a natural elements in some way and they may sound so ridiculously grandiose or laughably a naive but I've always been mansions that I might be able to work him let's face it that's just outside of culture of course is patently absurd there's no way that we work outside of of culture and these days so many cultures. And yet. As my friend Barry Lopez the writer says landscape is the culture that contains all human cultures and I believe that everything and we do everything we think everything we think we create something we are derives from the world that we inhabit our language our music our minds everything is shaped by this incredibly complex and wondrous world that we inhabit so alternately this nation a culture a dichotomy in a way doesn't exist. It's been a useful conceit for me to feel that I'm after something that that is. Part of a musical tradition. It's not specifically cultural that somehow more elemental . Where does music come from how does a composer take an assignment like write an 11 minute piece for String Quartet and translate those instructions into a concept into notes into a score. For composer John there Adams It seems almost like the transformation happens in his sleep I try to resist composing for as long as I can I really want to get it something essential before I start manipulating notes pushing things around and I try to hold things in my mind's ear as long as I can and it's maybe an inefficient way to wark but he has worked for me I find that if I'm trying to remember trying to hear something that I can't quite name it focuses my attention in a certain way and then I finally start composing when I can't not to compose when I have to write it down thinking about like the way that we are discovering how memory and the brain works and every time you remember something you're actually recreating a story yes so I really like that you have an idea and you are continually remembering it so basically you're making a lot of mental xeroxes of it yeah over and over again until it becomes something which is so steeped in your brain stuff that if it is a piece exactly so night after night when I lie down to go to sleep I'm imagining this group of instruments in this particular space what they might sound like and how they might move through the space physically and through the musical space of of the piece and it's repetitive I'm doing it every night a certain point I lose it and they drift off to sleep. That nocturnal composition process is apparently what happened with John Luther Adams most recent most famous piece. This is a piece I literally tried to copy during our recent apocalyptical tour and it just one in the polls surprise apparently John was spending some time near the Pacific Ocean he would fall asleep to the sound of ocean waves and it seeped into his dream and what emerged to. Compose was this orchestral piece for 3 orchestras actually it's called Come ocean. And what happens in the piece is that over the course of about 40 minutes all 3 orchestras form these massive swells of a conversation with the Stars tell that Davis this is a global warming piece. And I would say everything that I do these demands in some way. Addressing the state of the world around her the delicate time could carry us. Position of we human animals in the world. And yet I will also out of the other side of my mouth insists that it has absolutely nothing to do with with current events or politics or activism and that music must stand on its own and has music. I like to can have a. Very very outdoors and it's what it's without. It seems like it hasn't have people in it all it's just openness and. You're floating on the surface if you're there at all 2 2. One of the many reasons you should go to i Tunes and download cuties meet the composers Our with John the 3 Adams is that they play this unreleased track of his string quartet called the wind in high places which is just beautiful go to Radiolab org We will link you to more information about the composers I highly recommend by past Thank you so much to Nadia Serota Alex Overton and the a challenger and Alex Ambrose from Javelin Rod I remember Kroeber church stay tuned this is Brian Shannon in Ocean City Maryland Radiolab is supported by Blue Apron delivering gourmet recipes pre-selected portions and fresh ingredients to customers to use more Apple apron dot com slash Radiolab. This is a carrot from Canada Radio Lab is supported by host gator working to provide bloggers a small business owners with the tools to build and host their websites on line all in one place for it host gator dot com slash Radio Lab. Support for Alaska Public Media comes from advanced physical therapy who support the vision of Alaska Public Media making a more informed and connected life possible for all of last can. I work you're both right because I like doing interesting and funny and cool things and I don't like to do the work where I know saying I'm Jesse thorn an expose I will talk with Gloria color on callate and Mike Royce that you teamed up with Norman Lear to make a terrific new reboot of liers classic sitcom One Day at a time on the next bull's eye for maximum fun dot org And n.p.r. Today at 3 o'clock here on f.m. 91 point one Alaska Public Media Hey I'm Jad I mean I remembered college All right so this is radio coming up a story about a 2 stories actually yeah the story of a composer and an artist intersecting in the weirdest way possible in one piece of music across space and time are you with me know because musicians always know if this isn't the end for rent for rent it's not the same thing it's not like a piece so I'm not going to a lady there's no way it's done that this is yeah I know what you're thinking it's woman I know you're thinking Ok well this is not that good maybe we should just listen to it let's listen to an idea. I think the 1st story begins in the early 1980 s. In Vancouver British Columbia with a woman named Ann Adams who was a brilliant cell biologist so yes and was highly articulate that's her husband Robert Adams you know extremely capable with language she did cancer research she actually developed a cell line well so she was very sharp as a scientist she was a natural but then rather suddenly at the age of 46 and kind of does a 180 something happened in 86 which changed the course of her life and it all started when their 3rd son Alex gets into a really bad car accident and we were told that he would probably never ever walked . Again and decides he's going to take some time off to help him recover and he does he does learn to walk again but while at home she just decides to quit and become a painter Yeah and made up her mind then and there that she was going to take up art full time for painting for well she did a fair amount of it when she was in high school which was a very long time ago so the whole thing struck him as kind of out of the blue but he rolled with it and within a short period of time she converted a room in their house into a studio and she was painting houses and buildings little churches simple at 1st then after that brightly colored versions of what you see when you look down the barrel of a microscope you know cells bacteria after that strawberries there were things called Strawberry universe where the strawberries had rings around them like Saturn and so I think there were something like $35.00 or $36.00 strawberry painting but then she would switch to something else and she would work all day long 10 hours a day making these paintings that got bigger and bigger and more abstract and there were times he says when he was like wow. Because for someone who hadn't painted since high school she was suddenly so prolific. And it's entirely possible that something was happening to or even Then way below the surface I mean on the surface she was painting it was working people were buying the painting she was having solo shows she was becoming a successful artist but then in 1994 she decided I don't know what gave her this idea she decided she was going to do a painting of well. Yes Yeah. Robert says he's not quite sure how it happened but at some point that year and heard this famous piece by Maurice rebel became obsessed couldn't stop listening to it. Playing it on the piano playing then deconstructing it mapping every pitch in a melody in the bass to a color Here's. Here's one page which isn't very long it's from the notes she's got a silver a flat copper b. Leaf green b. Flat metallic green eventually the painting is quite a large work to panel side by side very electric colors a blizzard of symbols and triangles to type things with marks on them that all mean something and rectangles marching back and forth across the 1st panel there was a triangle in the bottom of each one of the rectangle and the height of the rectangle represented the loudness it's an incredibly obsessive translation of the music into the visual language and just like the melody in Bolero the symbols repeat and repeat and repeat obsessive we're getting bigger and bigger and bigger until at the very end of the 2nd panel. Any. Things unravel by the way her title for the painting was unraveling Bolero And here's where things start to get a little spooky and did this at a time when she knew nothing about rebel she called her piece unraveling Valero having no idea that that's exactly what would happen to ravel right after he wrote Bolero. Which brings us to Story number 2 well Ok jump in placed. Professor of Music at the Aaron Copeland School of Music at Queens College he's written about Ravel perform Ravel talk to anyone who ever knew rebel kind of is a. Kind of a living presence inside my head to Ok Maurice Ravel composer obviously one of the greats on an 875 papa was an engineer mother was and from an old boss family as into Spanish Yes which is why some of his music like well there it does sound a bit Spanish in any case my. Encourage them to study music he goes off to Paris in the $890.00 s. Meet Claude Debussy. And together they sort of invent this style of music which we now call impressionist which was this kind of free floating dream like century. A lot of colors very flowery Yes. But then like in rebel makes a kind of shift 92853 same age and wasn't did the painting is having an absolutely phenomenal year just through the United States performs with thousands use at the zenith of his creativity and he's back in France at a beach house wearing a pink bathing suit story goes right before he steps out onto the beach this melody swoops into his head he runs over to the piano. And he goes. Down. It just came to him fully formed Well I don't know if he played the whole melody but at least started it off but here's the shift when he sat down to flush the whole thing out instead of developing the Melanie making it super flowery like this other stuff. He said No I'm not going to that I'm going to take this melody and repeat it again and again and again and then again some more. And it's more the theme never changes one note The only thing that does change is the orchestration which grows around the melody very slowly bit by bit. Gets bigger and bigger complement more instruments play the melody of the melody itself. For 340 bars never fairies. To the point he says where the performers there if they're ready to see a psychiatrist by the time they're done playing this piece and Ravel at the 1st performance in Paris some woman screamed out he's crazy. Which turned out to be not exactly true but in the neighborhood 6 years after he wrote Bolero $1033.00 Ravel begins to forget words. He always been forgetful so no one really noticed at 1st but then one day at dinner. He grabs the knife by the wrong side and he doesn't realize it and he continues to try to eat holding the shop side of the knife and try to cut with the handle then he visits a friend leaves not 2 hours go by knock on the door it's Revelle again he didn't remember that he'd been there before just 2 hours earlier eventually by 935 he could not write anymore or speak his language had evaporated Darby says there are documents we can see Ravel desperately trying to really learn the alphabet a a a a over and over again b b with kind of a shaking hand very small. Very very painful to see. Were ever it was that was wrong was getting worse here's the weird symmetry just like Ravel 6 years after finishing her Bolero by 2000 I would say and also begins to forget words she would try to say things and couldn't she would try to find words and couldn't. So how do you today find. Eventually and ends up at the University of California San Francisco and this was in 2002 they gave her a bunch of tasks can you tell me your full name please. And Theresa Adams. Adams in research Val were unraveling in the exact same way the exact same speed to the same soundtrack you might say it just roughly 60 years apart we think Ian and down to the very molecular process had the exact same disease and he thinks Bolero the music and then the painting in both their cases was the 1st symptom of that disease. This takes a couple steps to explain so bear with me but to start the disease is called frontotemporal dementia death Jonah Lehrer author and it begins when spin the cells in your frontal cortex this part kind of right above your forehead. Start to weather and die and so your frontal cortex is pockmarked with sometimes visible holes we know this about and from tests and brain scans we suspected about Ravel because according to RB just before he died on December 28th 1037 a French surgeon opened up a skull and saw that one of the lobes of the 2 lobes of the brain had some clue because it was disintegrating. Now in both their cases the part of the brain a part of their cortex that got hit was on the left which is the part that does a lot of things memory recalling them rays finding memories and most importantly for our story it governs language what happens is as the frontal cortex starts to fall apart you lose the Billy to access language Now here's the thing about losing language our brains or you Bruce are basically a series of circuits that are all tightly connected with progress and when a dominant circuit like language turns on it's basically wired to turn a bunch of other circuits off to basically go. Other parts of the brain we have this constant dance where one circuit or many circuits turned on and then they're obligatorily turning off other circuits so language x. Is a kind of brake on other things the brain could be doing like daydreaming thinking in images and pictures but when the language is no longer there to hold things back often what can happen is that those other parts like say the visual parts can just rush forward and suddenly the mind is flooded with images all the sudden people have these rich rich intense sensations the world is so beautiful and they need to express and this is very common we see a number of patients who become visually obsessed from every possible walk of life investment bankers who have never been interested in art before never even walked into an art museum and of a sudden they decided the age of 55 to move into a loft become an artist one of the 1st glimmers of their own this is this insatiable need to create That's right how many of these cases of use. Scene 5060 well manifests itself in as many different kinds of art as there are people but at the end of the day what all these people have in common is that this explosion of creativity in their heads well it's not a free flowing kind of creativity it's quite mechanical the repetition the obsession they get stuck in a kind of loop taking one thing and just doing it again and again painting or. Like Bolero this drive to repeat happens very early in the course of us all of us what can seem like a simple creative choice to repeat a melody may actually be driven by a condition that you won't you know you have for 6 years we think that this had something to do with the very unusual rhythmic repetitive sorts of music that Ravel produced. And why the repetition where does it come from. I think this is the release of of Marie says we don't really know but he offered up a theory which I find fascinating. Which may get to the root of creative obsession of any kind. He says there might be several parts of the brain that are held back by the language circuit and one of them is this very ancient part of our brains of basal ganglia the part of the brain we move with you can call our reptile brain is the part of us that governs you know basic behaviors like eating running motor programs that we do repetitively every day and so does it sense Mansingh move move Eat Eat run run birds and snakes get by with basically just this part of the brain keeps him alive now normally he thinks the language part of us inhibits these habits these repetitive motor programs that when the language part is not there to do the shushing these motor commands filter up to so magine you're one of these people your mind is suddenly flooded with pictures maybe sound. And it's also flooded with these kinetic repetitive instructions move move move do it again and in the early stages of the illness you still have enough brain to make sense of it all there's still a lot of cortex that is still available to act upon this desire to repeat and so you get art that is obsessive and repetitive yes but also beautiful and abstract like unraveling Blair Oh but then as the disease progresses and more of that front human part fades away the repetition becomes much simpler and not creative at all. In the latter stages of a disease he says you'll often see patients pouring water into a couple 100 times in a day a squishy Nantz over and over again the complexity of the behaviors are diminishing as well as we're losing these parts of the brain that make us so human sort of what Thanks to Robert Adams Bruce Miller at the University of California San Francisco and. Queens College. Credit. Can like the guy a Radio Lab listener from Seattle Washington bailout the support in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred p. Sloan Foundation enhancing Public Understanding of Science and Technology in the modern world more information about sound at w w w Sloan dot org Thank you guys. And if message. Comes from. Thank you for supporting. You think that extra. Work nights weekends holidays through son's baseball game daughter's wedding so maybe just. This week. Brass Ring stuff that storytelling. Saturday night at 7 on Alaska Public Media.