from Winter Music by John Luther Adams

In his remarkable book The Tuning of the World, the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer uses the term "keynote" to mean the sonic ground of a particular place and time, the sound against which all other sounds are perceived. We rarely listen to these keynotes. Often they're most conspicuous in their absence. On the coast the keynote is the roar of surf. On city streets and highways it's the roar of the automobile. And the keynote of most modern homes and buildings is the 60-cycle electrical hum.

The keynote of the northern interior is silence. The rivers are frozen much of the year. Snow mutes the land. And the wind is calm more often than not. With human and animal life spread sparsely over sprawling distances, sound is the exception. This pervasive stillness can attune the ear in extraordinary ways. As Schafer observes, "In the special darkness of the northern winter . . . the ear is super-sensitized and the air stands poised to beat with the subtle vibrations of a strange tale or ethereal music."