New Environmental Music from John Luther Adams

Composers of classical music often put performance directions or notes throughout their scores. John Luther Adams, a composer known for expansive, landscape-themed music, includes only one word on the score of Become Ocean, a 42-minute piece for symphony orchestra and the largest orchestral work Adams has written yet: “Inexorable.”

“That’s what I hope,” Adams explains over a cell phone from his apartment in New York City. “That this music has the feeling of an inexorable force — of these currents and tides rising and falling with this inevitable gravity and power.”

Listening to Become Ocean, it’s easy to imagine dark, swelling tides and open seas, and it’s easy to feel an urgency about it. The recording was released last week on CD via Cantaloupe Records, just days after 300,000-plus people marched in Manhattan to rally against global warming.

“As the polar ice melts and sea level rises, we humans find ourselves facing the prospect that once again we may quite literally become ocean,” the CD liner notes warn.

But on the phone, Adams downplays the politics of Become Ocean, which had its debut in June under the commission of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra and its music director, Ludovic Morlot, and won the Pulitzer Prize for music this year. “Too often political art fails as both art and politics,” he says. Adams goes on:

“Art needs no justification other than itself. Yet, I also believe that music can serve as a sounding model for the renewal of human consciousness and human culture and that it can invite us to listen more deeply to expand our awareness of this miraculous world that we live in.

“So like everybody these days I think a lot, I think all the time, about climate change, and as I composed Become Ocean I had very much in my mind images of the melting of the polar ice and the rising of the seas. But I hope it transcends any metaphors, transcends its title, to become a purely musical world of its own.”

You can listen to moments from Adams’ swirling epic with an excerpt of our conversation above.