“It’s symphonic. In the note that accompanied it, he wrote, “songbirdsongs, no doubt. I knew that I wanted to hear the unheard, that I wanted to somehow transpose the music that is just beyond the reach of our ears into audible vibrations. But, after much soul-searching and many long conversations, we finally resolved that, as we entered our sixties, we were ready to take a leap and embark on a grand new adventure. “In a way, that experience challenged me to reëvaluate my whole relationship to the idea of success,” he says. In the next decade, Adams further explored the sonic extremes that he had mapped out in his opera. The moon is audible as a narrow sliver of noise. Here is the first recording of Harry Partch’s “Delusion of the Fury.” Here, on LP and in two different CD editions, is the complete “Studies for Player Piano,” by Conlon Nancarrow, and here is the “Missa Prolationum” of Johannes Ockeghem, an astonishing work that, five hundred years before Nancarrow, explores a similar multidimensional concept of musical time. The sun was burning faintly through the mist above. Knowing of Adams’s love for Alaska’s remotest places, I asked him to take me to one of them. After a few minutes, there was a noticeable change: the solar harmonies acquired extra radiance, with upper intervals oscillating in an almost melodic fashion. Newsletter. But, for now, with a small room in Harlem and a truck in the desert, I seem to have everything I need to do my work. I walk to the back of the cabin and open the door. — Winston Cook-Wilson, Audubon "One of the most original musical thinkers of the new century." At the age of fifty-five, he is perhaps the chief standard-bearer of American experimental music, of the tradition of solitary sonic tinkering that began on the West Coast almost a century ago and gained new strength after the Second World War, when John Cage and Morton Feldman created supreme abstractions in musical form. “Wagner kind of caught the perfect wave. I know that my music would not be the same had I not made my home here. What our staff is reading, watching, and listening to each week. It’s a way of fighting back, asserting that my vision is still fully functional. And shimmering sounds in the extreme registers—the Aurora Bells—are tied to the fluctuations in the magnetic field that cause the Northern Lights. The hundredth anniversary of Stravinsky’s formerly scandalous Rite of Spring, on May 29th, raised the question of whether a twenty-first-century composer can produce a comparable shock.Perhaps not: the twentieth century elicited such a numbing array of shocks, both in art and in reality, that the … John Luther Adams' Inuksuit was performed on June 21, 2011 in Harlem's Morningside Park, the first outdoor performance of this major work in New York. Hayes, and all at once I was overcome by the intense love that I have for this place—an almost erotic feeling about those mountains. “Maybe it confirmed my outsider resolve—‘No, I’m not moving from Alaska; this is who I am, this is where I belong, this is what I’m supposed to be doing’—but most of all it helped my sense of humor. But on both sides the powder-light glacial soil is blanketed with a thin layer of moss and lichen, low-bush cranberry, and Labrador tea. John Luther Adams: Lines Made by Walking (New York Premiere) Up the Mountain Along the Ridges Down the Mountain. And the vision we’d shared of an ecological utopia in Alaska had faded. “In the White Silence,” a seventy-five-minute piece for harp, celesta, vibraphones, and strings, is derived from the seven notes of the C-major scale; in a striking feat of metaphor, the composer equates the consuming whiteness of midwinter Alaska with the white keys of the piano. In several running feet of papers are detailed letters and notes from our year working together on the cantata “Forest Without Leaves.” Here are drafts of many other poems and essays, earnest letters and bawdy cards, sent from John’s residencies and travels in Montana, Ohio, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Washington State, and Washington, D.C., from Anchorage, from his homestead on the Richardson Highway, or from just down the hill, when he was living in Fairbanks. “I thought, This couldn’t be repeated,” Adams told me. But I can’t live there anymore. Some of my best work happened on my short walk between the studio and the house. In 1971, Adams moved to Los Angeles to study music at CalArts. But would I be able to compose in New York? One teacher there, the composer James Tenney, became a significant mentor, his wild imagination balanced by the mathematical rigor of his methods. Just what is it that makes a studio a studio? John is always very gracious. Now there would be no more casual wandering around, into and out of my work. Woven into the dense fabric of moss and twigs are long strands of cassette tape. After the second successive winter in which I fell into a deep depression, it was clear that I had to leave. Certain that the sun had come out, I left “The Place,” and looked out the windows of the lobby. At the Museum of the North, on the grounds of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, the composer John Luther Adams has created a sound-and-light installation called “The Place Where You Go to Listen”—a kind of infinite musical work that is controlled by natural events occurring in real time. With the proceeds from the sale of our house, we decided to buy an apartment in New York. We slept in a loft with such a low ceiling that I couldn’t stand fully upright even in the very center of the space. Haines is now eighty-three years old and recently endured a near-fatal bout of pneumonia, but he welcomes visitors, especially those who bring a good bottle of whiskey. He’s not unworldly—he travels frequently to New York, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, and other cultural capitals—but he is happiest when he goes on extended camping trips into the wilderness, especially to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The politics of the state had become increasingly strident. Over the decades, people would sometimes ask me, “Do you ever think about leaving Alaska?”, In my twenties and thirties, my stock reply was “No. Others were entranced. Here are colorful and humorous diatribes from Peter Garland about the sorry state of politics and music in the U.S. In this physical distancing-friendly performance audience will walk the grounds while instrumental sounds commingle with the calls of wildlife, rustling leaves, and human footfalls. ... Canticles of the Holy Wind John Luther Adams & The Crossing The Haines homestead is a hundred and sixty acres that stand face to face with the towering presence of Mount Hayes. Nonetheless, he and Margrit married, and for several years he coexisted uneasily with her powerful father. But I was really just interested in working with new media. Around that time, he met Cindy, who was also an environmental activist. Wednesday, April 7, 2021, 7:30 p.m. Seneff Arts Plaza Tickets: $10, $5 with UCF ID (Use code UCFCTA2021) Get Tickets. Talking about his work, Adams admits that it can sound strange, that it lacks familiar reference points, that it’s not exactly popular—by a twist of fate, he is sometimes confused with John Coolidge Adams, the creator of the opera “Nixon in China” and the most widely performed of living American composers—and yet he’ll also say that it’s got something, or, at least, “It’s not nothing.”. 03.22.2021. Tapping the crust of snow atop the ice, under which the wind had carved little tunnels, he compared the sounds to those of xylophones or marimbas. Snoops: Welcome to the monthly dinner of the Society of Professional Investigators. (If a major earthquake were to hit Fairbanks, “The Place,” if it survived, would throb to the frequency 24.27Hz, an abyssal tone that Adams associates with the rotation of the earth.) Collected here for the first time, with newly remastered versions of Become Ocean and Become Desert by acclaimed engineer Nathaniel Reichman, The Become Trilogy pays tribute to a magical partnership between Adams, conductor Ludovic Morlot and the renowned Seattle Symphony.As a whole, the music speaks both to the meditative solace of solitude, and the universally shared … It had to have the ring of truth. On the two days I visited “The Place,” various tourists came and went. As we were preparing to sell our house and land in Alaska, Cindy and I kept in mind the cautionary tale of our friend John Haines. To revisit this article, select My Account, then, To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. But, as global climate change continued to accelerate, my personal vision of Alaska as a place apart was challenged in an inescapable way, and I felt a growing imperative to expand my music to embrace a broader vision of the world. “John Luther Adams, in his The Light That Fills the World, keeps all the orchestra in play, sections changing chords in nonsynchronous patterns for an always-shifting color formula. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. This was scary, but exciting. Not long before Adams moved to Alaska, he read Haines’s first book, “Winter News,” falling under the spell of poems such as “Listening in October”: There are silences so deepyou can hearthe journeys of the soul,enormous footstepsdownward in a freezing earth. I love the feeling of a good, sharp pencil gliding across high-quality paper. Lately, Perkins has been organizing large-scale percussion events that encourage a sense of community and new ways of experiencing live music. Up ahead, through the trees, the rough-cut siding of the cabin comes into view. Cindy, as spirited as her husband is soft-spoken, runs GrantStation, an Internet business that advises nonprofit organizations across the country. How could I leave that?”, As we moved into our fifties, Cindy and I began to entertain the possibility that one day we might try living somewhere else, and, as we talked about this with our friends, a new question came up: “Aren’t you worried that, if you leave Alaska, you’ll lose your inspiration?”, Usually, I would wave this off with a confidently dismissive “Nah!”. Wherever my wife is is home. When I finally left my cabin in the bog and moved up onto the hillside with Cindy and her son, Sage, I wasn’t at all sure where I was going to work. It was a small place—a third-floor walkup, not very fancy, and a little reminiscent of our early days in Alaska. Likewise, beneath the dreamlike surfaces of Adams’s work are mathematical schemes controlling the interrelationship of rhythms and the unfolding of melodic patterns. And the music itself has become a kind of home for me. In Alaska, I discovered music that I might not have found in any other place. Ellen Reid. And I knew that it had to be real—that I couldn’t fake this, that nothing could be recorded. In part this is a response to changes in my eyes. By the nineteen-nineties, Adams had begun to carve out a singular body of work, which can be sampled on recordings on the New World, New Albion, Cold Blue, Mode, and Cantaloupe labels. He lives on a hill outside Fairbanks, in a sparsely furnished, light-filled split-level house, much of which he designed and built himself. “I was your classic problem kid,” he said. But what makes those art studios so alluring? Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. “I hid for quite a while. New York, New York. By now, I don’t imagine that will happen. My walk to and from the studio became a cherished daily ritual. Even more spectacular were the high sounds showering down from speakers on the ceiling. “The Place,” meanwhile, has now been playing at the Museum of the North for more than two years. “Once I discovered that stuff, I rapidly lost interest in the backbeat and the three chords,” Adams said. Here is the black leather cymbal case filled with the fourteen-inch high-hat cymbals and the sixteen-, eighteen-, twenty-two-, and twenty-four-inch Zildjians from my rock-and-roll drummer days. Everything That Rises by John Luther Adams, released 16 February 2018 1. One of the nests had slid off the ridge onto the lake, and we carried it back to land. There are paper birches and spruce, both black and white. John Luther Adams :: Silences So Deep October 20, 2020 8:00pm ET Composer John Luther Adams returns to the Evolution Series to discuss and share readings from his new memoir, Silences So Deep: Music, Solitude, Alaska.This evening features a … I had the impression of a carillon ringing miles above the earth. Adams is now contemplating a large-scale work in the vein of “Dark Waves.” It might bring him into a Brucknerian or even Wagnerian realm. And I couldn’t imagine living any other way. Much of his adolescence was spent in Millburn, New Jersey, where he developed a passion for rock and roll. It was in this room that “Earth and the Great Weather” and “Dream in White on White” were born. In 1989, he moved out of the woods, and has never returned to his old cabin. If things didn’t work out for us “Outside” (as we provincial Alaskans refer to the rest of the world), we could always come back home and build a house somewhere on the five acres around the studio. And I wasn’t at all sure that I would feel a similar sense of possibility anywhere else. This small cabin has been the birthplace of the major part of my life’s work. In 1969, the family moved again, to Macon, Georgia. Tall and rail-thin, his handsomely weathered face framed by a short beard, he bears a certain resemblance to Clint Eastwood, and speaks in a similarly soft, husky voice. I had a rich life; I had incredible experiences, a very slow development of a certain musical world. On the sill of the tiny corner window, high on the western wall, perches an oriole nest that Barry Lopez gave me. Adams had never been to Carnegie Hall before hearing his work played there to a sold-out house. In 2014 Adams won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for his orchestral piece Become Ocean, which Alex Ross of The New Yorker called "the loveliest apocalypse in musical history". John Luther Adams has been called “one of the most original musical thinkers of the new century" (Alex Ross, The New Yorker). ... John Luther Adams’s “Sila: The Breath of the World” had its premiere in an outdoor performance on … Like working at the piano, working on paper keeps me more directly in touch with the physical reality of the music. But at some point I realized that I was tuning it so that this place, this room, on this hill, looking out over the Alaska Range, was the sweetest-sounding spot on earth.”. First came a conceptual Alaskan opera entitled “Earth and the Great Weather,” much of which is given over to the chanting of place-names and descriptive phrases from the native Inupiaq and Gwich’in languages, both in the original and in translation. I loved it. Out in the desert, wherever we decide to stop, I set up in the shade of a cardon cactus or a mesquite tree. And we reasoned that, if it didn’t work out for us, we could always sell it. Instead, we went south, to Lake Louise. “This may be where our musical worlds meet,” Adams said to him. Its notes follow the contour of the natural harmonic series—the rainbow of overtones that emanate from a vibrating string—and have the brightness of music in a major key. What Adams needed most, after a turbulent decade, was solitude. The UCF Percussion Ensemble will present a performance of John Luther Adams’ concert-length work Inuksuit (2009).Composed for 9 to 99 percussionists and designed to be performed outdoors, Inuksuit is a unique experience for both the performers … Here are the Mississippi Delta bluesmen; “A Love Supreme,” by John Coltrane; and Ornette Coleman’s “Free Jazz.”. We moved into that first apartment on Cindy’s birthday. But which came first, Alaska or the music? The Breath of the World: Pulitzer-winning composer John Luther Adams moved from Alaska to New York… Here are the books of poetry, essays, and memoirs by the late John Haines, a dear friend, personally and sometimes quite irreverently inscribed by the author. The JACK is a natural fit with John Luther Adams, called by The New Yorker, “One of the most original musical thinkers of the new century.” John Luther Adams is the composer of silence, of the motion of stars, of the Northern Lights, of nunataks, mountains buried in snow, of the vast empty spaces in which he has spent his life. It was premiered in 2013 by Ludovic Morlot and the Seattle Symphony and performed by the same conductor and orchestra at the 2014 Spring For Music music festival at Carnegie Hall. Some minor seismic activity in the region had set off the bass frequencies, but it was a rather opaque ripple of beats, suggestive of a dance party in an underground crypt. By the mid-seventies, Adams was working with the Wilderness Society and other conservation groups. But we kept the studio. For now, I take comfort simply knowing that it’s still there, waiting for me to walk down the trail and open the door. There I would roll out of bed in the morning, crawl down the ladder from the sleeping loft, and find myself standing in the middle of my work. The big guys aren’t coming out.”. On the way to Lake Louise, we passed Haines’s old homestead. I was drawn to Alaska by the land itself and by my desire, in life and in my art, for certain qualities that this place represents. That work galvanized Adams, teaching him that music could break free of European tradition while retaining a sensuous allure. A composer takes inspiration from the Arctic. Born in eastern Mississippi in 1953, John Luther Adams grew up in the South and the New York City area. I thought that it might be a piece that could be realized at any location on the earth, and that each location would have its unique sonic signature. Even as so-called reality TV perpetuated the myth of the last frontier, it had become painfully evident that Alaska was a colony of Big Oil. Here I composed “Red Arc/Blue Veil”—the first time I combined acoustic instruments with an “aura” of electronically processed sounds derived from recordings of the instruments. They chime together in the wind. The influence of this place on my creative life is immeasurable. The title refers to Naalagiagvik, a place on the coast of the Arctic Ocean where, according to legend, a spiritually attuned Inupiaq woman went to hear the voices of birds, whales, and unseen things around her. He talked about various future projects—an outdoor percussion piece for the Banff Centre, in Alberta, Canada, an installation in Venice—and explained why his work was becoming more global in focus. In 1947, at the tender age of twenty-three, John had carved his homestead out of the woods on a bluff above the Tanana River. Here are the symphonies of Sibelius and Bruckner, which I’ve come to in recent years. In the liner notes to Zappa’s 1966 album “Freak Out!,” Adams noticed a quotation: “ ‘The present-day composer refuses to die!’—Edgard Varèse.” Adams went hunting for information about this mystery figure, whose name he pronounced “Var-EE-zee.” A friend, the composer Richard Einhorn, discovered a Varèse disk in a Greenwich Village record shop, and the two braved the sonic hailstorms of “Poème Électronique.” Adams was soon devouring the music of the postwar European and American avant-garde: Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, György Ligeti, and, most important, John Cage. Here, with “Among Red Mountains” and, later, with “Nunataks,” I finally discovered a way of composing for solo piano that felt like my own. Sometimes I think about leaving Alaska. He became obsessed with the plight of the California condor, which was facing extinction. A ski mountaineer and a history of tragedy. On a recent trip to the Alaskan interior, I didn’t get to see the aurora borealis, but I did, in a way, hear it. When I arrived the next day, just before noon, “The Place” was jumping. Because Alaska is such a powerful place, it may influence artists who live here more directly than geography influences artists in many other locations. I walk around to the front of the cabin and stand there in the sun, gazing south, downhill, across the Tanana Flats, toward the peaks of the Central Alaska Range. John Luther Adams has been called “one of the most original musical thinkers of the new century” (Alex Ross, The New Yorker). Here, alongside the scores of “Parsifal” and “Boris Godunov,” is Debussy’s opera “Pelléas et Mélisande,” a gift to myself for my thirtieth birthday. There are more art books than music books on the shelves of his studio, a neat one-room cabin that faces south, toward the Alaska Range. At CalArts, the novice composer also familiarized himself with the oddball heroes of the American avant-garde: Harry Partch, who adopted a hobo life style during the Great Depression; Conlon Nancarrow, who spent the better part of his career writing pieces for player piano in Mexico City; and Lou Harrison, who sought musical truth in the Balinese gamelan tradition. Adams blends in well with the proudly scruffy characters who populate the diners and bars of Fairbanks. Working on paper, I can make large, sometimes intricate formal structures. I step off the dirt road and into the woods. As a composer, I wholeheartedly endorse the notion that all the arts aspire to the condition of music. Here is the Aeolian harp that provided the music for Cindy’s and my wedding ceremony, in the Arctic Refuge. In the first year of our urban adventure, using the living room/kitchen area as my studio, I completed “Sila: The Breath of the World”—an hour-long orchestral work that premièred at Lincoln Center. Get the ... John Luther Adams’s “Become Ocean,” at the Seattle Symphony. The first snows of autumn, which we could always expect in September, now came as late as the end of November. But in recent years I’ve returned to composing more with pencil and paper. At the time, one of their major projects was lobbying for the Alaska Lands Act, whose purpose was to protect large tracts of the state from oil drilling and industrial development. In the year before my assistant, Jim Altieri, and I moved into the Museum of the North to install “The Place Where You Go to Listen,” I spent innumerable hours here in the studio, fine-tuning the computer-generated sounds of “The Place”—listening to them in every season and time of day, in all kinds of weather and light—to test whether they had what I call “the ring of truth.”. A composer takes inspiration from the Arctic. Recently, someone thought he was me. By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. Adams spoke also of the scary pace of climate change, of how the thaw now comes as much as a month earlier than it did when he moved to the state. “Actually, my original conception for ‘The Place’ was truly grandiose. In the tall filing cabinets to my left are hundreds of such notes and letters from composers and writers, conductors and record producers, musical colleagues and my dearest friends. There was no place at all for me to work. With John Luther Adams, Raúl Castro, Raúl Roa García, Eugene Jarecki. But as helpful as it is to have a good workshop, what ultimately makes it a studio is the presence of the artist at work. Here, too, are the scores of “The Conquest of Mexico” and many other works by my friend Peter Garland, along with my collection of Soundings, the journal of scores that he published throughout the seventies and eighties. Very sweet.”. In overcast weather, the harmonies are relatively narrow in range; when the sun comes out, they stretch across four octaves. The fantasy subsided when Cindy suggested in a non-roundabout way that he should either join her full time—by now the couple had a son, Sage—or go his own way. Here are the Odyssey, “Beowulf,” and “Gilgamesh.” Here is “Moby-Dick.” Here is John Muir’s “Travels in Alaska” and “Arctic Dreams,” by Barry Lopez. Here are some of the first scores I ever bought—Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” and “Déserts,” by Edgard Varèse. Artists are workers, and our studios are our workshops. They’re merely symbols. In this same period, not incidentally, John Adams, of Berkeley, California, found fame with “Nixon in China.” The two composers had known each other since 1976; they moved in the same circles, and one week they stayed together at Lou Harrison’s house. In the back of the truck are a folding table, a folding chair, and a folding writing desk. Ad Choices. Haines proceeded to chant several of them in a courtly, melancholy voice, somewhat in the manner of William Butler Yeats delivering “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” He ended with “Return to Richardson, Spring 1981,” which looks back fondly and sadly on the homestead period, when “our life like a boat set loose,” and evenings were spent reading books since forgotten: In this restless air I knowOn this ground I can never forgetWhere will I set my footWith so much passion again. At the same time, it is a forbiddingly complex creation that contains a probably unresolvable philosophical contradiction. Alaska’s “great reservoir of silence” is disappearing; even in the farthest reaches of the Brooks Range, Adams commented, you will sooner or later hear the drone of a snow machine or the hum of a small plane. Before long, I slip around the aspen that juts into the trail and step up onto the deck. Perhaps Adams’s most crucial encounter was with Morton Feldman, the loquacious New Yorker whose music has an otherworldly quietude and breadth. He was born in Meridian, Mississippi; his father worked for A. T. & T., first as an accountant and later in upper management, and the family moved often when he was a child. Behind me, I feel the forest sweeping north to the Yukon River, across the Arctic Circle, and on to the solitary peaks of the Brooks Range. Up here, unfettered by competitive careerism, I felt free to follow the music wherever it might lead me. Above Sunset Pass Maclaren Summit Looking Toward Hope. We were standing on a tiny island, where cormorants had built a network of nests. There, in recent years, I’ve composed the concert-length choral work “Canticles of the Holy Wind”; “Become River,” for chamber orchestra; and my largest symphonic work to date, “Become Ocean.”. Cindy and I agonized over this. A few days later, the Anchorage Symphony played the première of Adams’s “Dark Waves,” an extraordinary piece for orchestra and electronics, which the composer dedicated to Wright. In the last band, a trio called Sloth, we were trying to work with open-form scores and graphic notation.”. And it doesn’t matter what I think I’m doing. The commissioners may have expected something like my big, noisy percussion music in “Earth and the Great Weather” or “Strange and Sacred Noise.” But, for some reason, I remembered a quiet little piece I’d begun thirty-two years before, when I was a student at CalArts. But as fascinating as they may be, the notes I’m writing are not music. Whether unabashedly sweet or unremittingly harsh—“Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing,” a memorial to the composer’s father, manages to be both at once—Adams’s major works have the appearance of being beyond style; they transcend the squabbles of contemporary classical music, the unending arguments over the relative value of Romantic and modernist languages. In a collection of writings entitled “Winter Music,” Adams cites, among other reasons for moving to the state, the richness of its silences. My two closest friends, Gordon and John, had passed away. The sense of vastness, separateness, and solitude is even more pronounced in Adams’s recent electronic compositions. Adams is well aware of the naïveté, sentimentality, and outright foolishness that can attach to fantasies of dropping out of society in search of “the real.” But that same naïveté can lead to work of intimidating power, especially when it is wedded to artistic craft. I float down the trail—my feet intimately familiar with each little dip and rise, each stray root protruding from the ground. John Luther Adams writes in The New Yorker … For more than twenty-five years now, this sixteen-by-twenty-foot, one-room cabin in the woods has been the center of my world. As we crested the central peaks of the Alaska Range, I looked down at Mt. The trail is barely visible, unless you know it’s there. He said it moved him to tears. On the one hand, it lacks a will of its own; it is at the mercy of its data streams, the humors of the earth. In one of the smaller eastern windows stands a chambered nautilus that was a gift from my friend Kyle Gann, the composer and musicologist. “All along, I’ve had this obsessive, delusional idea that I could somehow be outside culture, which is, of course, patently absurd,” he said. But I have the greatest studio in the world. But I now feel at home in several places. John Luther Adams named artist-in-residence for 2016 Knoxville Big Ears music festival - 10/13/2015. A mild earthquake in the Alaska Range, measuring 2.99 on the Richter scale, was causing the Earth Drums to pound more loudly and go deeper in register. "One of the most original musical thinkers of the new century." © 2021 Condé Nast. I have literally hundreds of hours of field recordings that I made back in the ‘Earth and the Great Weather’ period, in the early nineties. — Alex Ross, The New Yorker John Luther Adams: The Wind in High Places. Or whirlpools open up along the shore or out in the middle of the river, and water goes swirling through them. A summer of vast wildfires would be followed by a summer of seemingly incessant rain. Here are my original Beatles records and LPs by Frank Zappa. All rights reserved.