Adams composed In the White Silence in 1998 as a memorial to his mother, who died in the fall of 1996, as he had composed Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing five years earlier following the death of his father. While these two pieces share the same number of instruments and a similar form, they are very different from one another as far as sound and orchestration are concerned. In fact, In the White Silence seems to have grown out of Dream in White and White (1992), a fifteen-minute piece in one movement. In the White Silence was premiered in the year of its completion by the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble, conducted by Tim Weiss in the Finney Chapel in Oberlin, Ohio.
Like many of Adams’s previous works, In the White Silence is an example of his concept of “sonic geography,” through which he attempts to realize the notion of music as place and place as music and reveals his obsession with the “treeless, windswept expanses of the Arctic.” The title of the work thus points to Alaskan landscapes in a general sense. And like Dream in White on White, it specifically refers to Adams’s fascination with the color of white, a dominant feature of Arctic landscapes. As Adams explains in his preface to the score: “White is not the absence of color. It is the fullness of light. As the Inuit have known for centuries, and as painters from Malevich to Ryman have shown us more recently, whiteness embraces many hues, textures, and nuances.”
Whiteness is evoked in In the White Silence in various ways. First of all, the instrumentation comprising celesta, harp, orchestra bells, two vibraphones, and strings produces luminous and iridescent sonorities. Further, the work often features durations consisting of whole and half notes (“white notes”) and is based - like Dream in White on White - exclusively on the nonchromatic “white” tones (the “white” keys of the piano). These aspects, including the frequent use of perfect intervals, harmonics, and unstopped string tones, all connote the color white.
