The starkly contrasting black and white images of Ansel Adams’ Yosemite have inspired many who have seen them, the most recent of which is the piano legend, Dave Brubeck. The jazz legend has collaborated with his son, Chris Brubeck to set Adams’ famous images of Yosemite National Park to music.
The new orchestral works, Ansel Adams: America, were a result of Dave Brubeck spending time studying a book of four hundred photographs and then creating what he felt the images evoked for him. Brubeck had more than the photographs before him on which to draw as he began making his own Yosemite tours when he was a teenager, driving his mother there to take in the sights surrounding Yosemite Valley.
Brubeck would initiate each new work by composing such on the piano, and then passing it along to his son, Chris, who would then transform it to incorporate a full orchestra. The two collaborated over the course of a year with many phone calls and e-mails while each was touring the country doing separate concert tours. Along their journey they were both thrilled to be well into the work and then discover that Ansel Adams had actually studied to become a concert pianist before he became distracted by the beauty of nature and dedicated himself in that direction. He once discussed his ambivalence about leaving the piano during a BBC interview in the seventies. The fact that Adams possessed a passion and skill for the piano gave the Brubecks added pleasure and increased commitment to designing music that would be musical interpretations of the images. Knowing that Adams also held a great fondness for Chopin and Bach, the Brubecks went to great lengths to flavor the pieces that they created with influences from those artists. The compositions were commissioned by the Stockton Symphony Orchestra and made their debut there at the end of March.
