Ansel Adams: America Paying tribute to America's beloved photographer and environmentalist

It’s visual music.

A fanfare of trombones evokes the grandeur of High Sierra peaks. A rush of strings practically makes you feel the wind sweeping across the Yosemite Valley. Ansel Adams: America is a 22-minute orchestral evocation of the great nature photographer’s imagery.

Adams’ black-and-white photographs — of Half Dome, El Capitan, Bridalveil Fall — imprinted the Sierra Nevada and, especially, Yosemite, on the American imagination: “That initial view, when the valley opens up to you. It’s like, Holy God, this is unbelievable!” says Chris Brubeck, who co-composed the piece with his late father, jazz icon Dave Brubeck. “If you were a Viking, that would’ve been Valhalla, and it’s heaven to me still.”

In 2009, the Brubecks put the finishing touches on their composition and gave it to the world. The Stockton Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Peter Jaffe, presented the world premiere and led a commissioning consortium of orchestras that included the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Sacramento Philharmonic Orchestra, Monterey Symphony, Fresno Philharmonic, Temple University Orchestra, and Abilene Philharmonic Orchestra. The work was quickly taken up by orchestras large and small, and the recording, released in 2012, was nominated for a Grammy Award. The Brubecks’ name recognition may have helped catapult the work to its initial success. But more than that, this multimedia work — which matches the orchestra’s performance with more than 100 images by Adams — deftly integrates a pair of artistic visions, each nurtured by the wide-open landscapes of Northern California in the early 20th century.

Adams, who trained to be a concert pianist, grew up near Seal Rock Beach in San Francisco. His life changed at age 14, when he visited Yosemite with his family. “One wonder after another descended upon us,” he wrote of his experience. Dave Brubeck grew up on his cowboy father’s ranch in the Sacramento Valley. After getting his driver’s license at age 14, he would often drive his mother, a classical pianist, to the Yosemite Valley, a place that brought her spiritual sustenance. Chris Brubeck believes that both men carried a sense of “artistic isolation” into their respective work. That, he says, may explain why Ansel Adams: America offers “a one-two punch where you’re getting your visual senses and your aural senses bombarded — or massaged — by these two unique but simpatico visions.”

About 15 years ago, one of Chris Brubeck’s writer friends bumped into Adams’ daughter- in-law at a concert in Sacramento. Impulsively, the writer broached the idea of somehow merging the visions of Ansel Adams and the Brubecks — and soon after repeated the conversation to Chris. “Wheels began to turn,” he says.

He picked up Adams’ autobiography and began to see what he describes as “cultural parallels of creativity between this guy who revolutionized photography and my father.” And when he learned that Adams had originally intended to be a pianist, he thought, “We should do this. And it would be so much more fun if I could get my dad involved.”

Dave Brubeck, then in his late 80s, was skeptical.

“So I conspired with my mother,” Chris Brubeck recalls, laughing. “My parents had the sweetest routine: Often when they went to bed, they would have a mutually agreed-upon book that they would read together. So I got my mom to read Adams’ autobiography — and it really got into my dad’s consciousness, all these parallels between photographic technique and musical technique.”

“It really got into my dad’s consciousness, all these parallels between photographic technique and musical technique.”

He ticks off some of the parallels: how a photographer must capture the “fleeting moment” in an image, while a jazz pianist must do the same in the midst of an improvisation. Moreover, Adams once likened a photographic negative to a musical score. He might spend days developing an image from that negative in the darkroom, and that was his performance.

Dave “was hooked,” Brubeck says. “I told him, look, you tackle some of the themes, and I can expand them. And I’ll handle the grunt work, all the orchestration.”

Each purchased the same 400-page compilation of Adams’ images. They spoke constantly by phone: “Which photograph resonates with you? Plate 49 on page 382? Me, too!” Chris Brubeck recalls their conversations. “And soon, a piece of music paper with my dad’s sketch of the melody would arrive in the mail.”

It was their final collaboration as composers.

It was also the first time the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust allowed Adams’ photographs to beused in a concert setting. The Trust’s approval didn’t come easily. Amidst the composing, Chris Brubeck negotiated with William Turnage, the Trust’s managing director. “He was rightfully protective of Adams’ legacy,” Brubeck says. “It was completely understandable. They didn’t want the Adams name to be exploited out in the marketplace — to have Ansel Adams frisbees and stuff like that.”

He kept Turnage apprised of the composition’s progress and gradually convinced him that the project was deserving of the Adams imprimatur.

All the while, father and son built their musical work, fine-tuned it — and brought it into focus. Week by week, over the course of a year, they connected the notes to the images.

The proof is with us in Ansel Adams: America.