Letter from the Archive: John Luther Adams

On Tuesday, the composer John Luther Adams won a Pulitzer Prize for “Become Ocean,” a forty-two-minute piece for orchestra. Reviewing the work’s première, in 2013, Alex Ross wrote that it “may be the loveliest apocalypse in musical history”: “Like the sea at dawn, it presents a gorgeous surface, yet its heaving motion conveys overwhelming force.” The piece builds slowly to a series of crescendos, and then begins running in reverse, “in the manner of a palindrome.” Adams, Ross writes, placed a brief note in the score: “Life on this earth first emerged from the sea. 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 tempo is marked as “Inexorable.”

No one has yet issued a recording of “Become Ocean,” but you can get a sense of Adams’s music in other ways. In 2008, Ross travelled to Alaska to write a Profile of the composer, in a piece called “Song of the Earth.” He visited a museum installation, created by Adams, called “The Place Where You Go to Listen”: using computers, the installation transforms data from seismic, meteorological, and magnetic sensors throughout Alaska into music. (“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.”) Later, they go walking on a frozen Lake Louise:

The sun was burning faintly through the mist above. Periodically, a curtain of snow descended and the shores and islands of the lake disappeared from view. I noticed that Adams was listening closely to this seemingly featureless expanse, and kept pulling information from it: the fluttering of a flock of snow buntings, the low whistle of wind through a stand of gaunt spruce, the sinister whine of a pair of snowmobiles. He also noted the curiously musical noises that our feet were making. 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.

Finally, there’s this short documentary, shot for newyorker.com by Evan Hurd, the photographer who accompanied Ross to Alaska. It shows Adams and his ensemble as they perform Adams’s “Inuksuit,” a percussion piece meant to be played outdoors. “Listening is the way I know where I am,” Adams says. “I’m trying to hear as far as I can.”

The New Yorker’s archive is available online—all the way back to our first issue, in 1925.