Contemporary Classics June 18, 2019 - John Luther Adams Become Desert

Welcome to Contemporary Classics – tonight we are featuring the newly released John Luther Adams work Become Desert.  The recording on Cantaloupe Music featuring Ludovic Morlot and the Seattle Symphony Orchestra was released this past Friday.

John Luther Adams: Become Desert

“I’m drawn to the desert because, like the tundra, most deserts are places in which there are few people. But for me, the essence of the desert is not absence. It is presence. In the desert there are moments when, as Octavio Paz writes, you sense that “there is no one, not even yourself.” These moments a re invitations tosurrender our expectations, to lose ourselves in listening to the music of the present. My  own deserts are in Mexico and in South America . However Become Desert is not a painting of any particular landscape. I imagine this music as a landscape of its own, a  landscape that extends beyond the place in which it was composed. In the ears and the imagination of the listener, I hope this becomes a private desert of your own. Living in Alaska for almost forty years, I experienced first-hand the accelerating effects of anthropogenic climate change on the tundra , the forest, the glaciers, the plants, animals and people of the Far North. While composing Become Ocean, I was haunted by the image of the melting of the polar ice and the rising of the seas. Now in my new  home, far to the south, I’ve become aware of a very different manifestation of global warming—desertification. Rampant wildfires in California, the rapid evaporation of Lake Poopó in the Bolivian altiplano, deep droughts in the Sahel of Africa and in large parts of Australia are signs of  what is to come. And as human population continues to explode, it seems likely that vast regions all over the earth will soon become desert.

Become Desert is both a celebration of the deserts we are given and a lamentation of the deserts we create.”

— John Luther Adams

In an article entitled “What It’s Like to Hear the Desert in Music” in the New York Times back in March 23, 2018 By John Luther Adams gives a so much better explanation of what listening to Become desert is like than I can so here is his sense of what the experience of hearing “Become Desert” will be like:

·      From the stillness around you a high glassy sound descends, like first light. Each new sound seems to breathe — emerging from and receding back into the stillness — and the glint of bells, like desert plants, here and there.

·      Almost imperceptibly the music swells and continues falling in pitch.

·      From somewhere above — like a gleam of metal, like sunlight emerging from behind a ridgeline — comes the sound of flutes.

·      You are in a strange landscape. You don’t know how to read the weather or the light. You are unsure how long you will be here, or how challenging the journey may be.

·      “This is beautiful,” you think. “But will anything ever happen?”

·      You resist. Yet the sound draws you in. You resolve to suspend your impatience, to listen as carefully as you can, as if watching a sunrise.

·      You notice your breathing becoming slower.

·      Falling, still falling. … You notice that the sounds are a little lower, a little darker now.

·      From behind you hear women’s voices. Chimes and bells seem to be pealing all around you.

·      You think, “This music is never going to change.”

·      Yet, as in a landscape, the longer you stay in this place, the more you notice change. And the more carefully you listen, the more you hear.

·      No two moments are exactly alike. This music is always changing.

·      You find yourself listening in ways you never have before. The scale of your perception has changed. Small, subtle sounds have become singular events. The space around you seems larger than you had realized.

·      You notice that the musical light has changed again. The sounds are even lower. You hear trombones and men’s voices. The harmonies are clearer, but much deeper. You feel a sound through your feet — bass drums and double basses, rumbling softly, like distant thunder.

·      The music has become night. Is it ending?

·      You wait.   The music does not diminish. Then you realize that it’s rising. Slowly yet inexorably, it has begun to ascend.

·      The tones of the violins sound like the first rays of a new day. Here are bells again.   The sound grows higher and brighter. The space around you seems to expand.

·      You ask yourself, “How long has it been?” And you realize you aren’t sure.

·      The sound continues to rise. The musical landscape seems to be renewing itself, like the desert after a winter rain.

·      You begin to feel that this music you had thought was suspended in time is slowly leading you somewhere, pulling you somewhere. It continues upward, rising with inevitable force, like the wind or the light.

·      The air around you feels lighter, more transparent. Here again are the clear tones of the flutes.

·      You sense the space closing around you. You feel it receding, and you’re not certain that you want to let it go. You are listening more deeply than ever.

·      As the music continues to rise and brighten, you begin to feel something like nostalgia — not nostalgia for the past, but nostalgia for the present, nostalgia for this moment and your presence within it.

·      You try to hold onto this feeling as it continues rising — dissipating like dust, or smoke, or the light.

·      You can almost see the sound now. All that remains are violins and the highest bells.

·      The music continues floating upward, growing more and more distant, until at last it dissolves into a deep and resonant stillness.

Close your eyes and listen to the singing of the light …

—   Octavio Paz

Here is a performance of John Luther Adams’ Become Desert with Ludovic Morlot and the Seattle Symphony Orchestra from the album “Become Desert”  on Cantaloupe Records.

For the second hour we are featuring the other two parts of the Become Trilogy by John Luther Adams - Become River and Become Ocean

Become River has never been released on record but we have a recording of the live performance of the International Contemporary Ensemble            at the 2015 Ojai Music Festival, Ojai, California.  Here is the first of the Become Trilogy Become River by John Luther Adams

John Luther Adams: Become Ocean

We are closing tonight’s show with the Pulitzer prize winning “Become Ocean” featuring             Seattle Symphony conducted by Ludovic Morlot from the album  John Luther Adams: Become Ocean also on Cantaloupe Music

John Luther Adams wrote “Become Ocean” as a commission from the Seattle Symphony Orchestra and the Seattle Symphony Orchestra premiered it at Benaroya Hall, Seattle, on 20 and 22 June 2013. The work won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music and the 2015 Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition.  The oceans of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest inspired the work, which is performed as a single movement. Become Ocean is scored for a large orchestra divided into 3 spatially separated groups.   The first group, upstage right, are the woodwinds, harp and part of the percussion section.  The second group, upstage left, are the brass and a second group of percussion.  Finally, the third group, in a wide as possible arc across the stage, is the last group of percussion and the strings, piano and celesta.  On a personal note – the separation of players can have a spectacular effect on the music of John Luther Adams.  I was at a concert of Adams’ “10,000 Birds” at the Bang on a Can Summer Festival in the large room of Building 5 of MassMOCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art), where the performers roamed the cavernous exhibit space playing instruments.  This produced a spectacular effect, which tremendously enhanced the music and the listening experience. 

Each group is given slowly moving sequences of sound, often in the form of arpeggios for the strings, and each block has its own rise and fall. Thus the groups overlap in an ever-changing pattern. Harmonies are fundamentally tonal; simple diatonic intervals form the basis of the wind instruments' staggered chords. The phrase lengths are constructed so that there are three moments when all the groups reach a climax together; the first is early on, and the second represents the greatest surge of sound. From that point, the music is played in reverse: the entire piece is a palindrome.

Underlying this pattern, a rippling effect is provided by a centrally placed piano (which plays continually throughout), four harps, celesta, one percussionist on bass drums, timpani, tamtam and cymbals, and two percussionists, placed on each side, on mallet instruments.   John Luther Adams actually also specified the colored lighting to match the activity of the orchestral groups.

John Luther Adams has answered the question about the name.  He has stated “What’s the become in Become Ocean?  The title is stolen from John Cage.  John wrote this poem in honor of my mentor and friend Lou Harrison.  He compared Lou’s music to a river in delta.  All these different streams, all these different influences and currents coming together into this vast territory of music, this big, beautiful sweep of music.  And the last line in the poem, Cage says ‘listening to it we become ocean’.  And I have always been struck by what a beautiful image that is. It describes the oceanic dimension of music and that we become one with the music and through the music we realize that we are part of something much larger than ourselves.”   Beyond Ocean “feels like the culmination of many different things that I've been working on for 40 years or more now, trying to create a sense of endless space and suspended time. I'm obsessed with place as music and music as place. And what I want to experience as a listener, and what I hope for you as a listener, is to discover a strange and beautiful and maybe somewhat frightening new place, and invite you into that place to find your way and have your own experience.”   He feels that music without notes and without even a title could have an emotional impact.  But as an environmentalist, he is concerned about the state of our planet with climate change. "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." 

John Luther Adams has also written that “If you stop and think about the oceanic dimension of music, there’s this implication of immersion. We came from the ocean, and we’re going back to the ocean, right? We’re made up mostly of water, and life on earth first emerged from the seas. And with the melting of the polar ice caps and the rising sea levels, we may become ocean sooner than we imagine.”

In talking about the history of the piece, he has written “some time ago, I was commissioned to compose a piece for the Seattle Chamber Players. Then a few years later, the Seattle Symphony and their music director Ludovic Morlot approached me, and asked if I would be interested in composing something for the Symphony. Part of Ludo’s vision for the orchestra is to bring it into the 21st century, and to put a special emphasis on new music, so of course I was thrilled at the possibilities.  One idea that I suggested was to build on the sound world of an earlier piece I’d composed called Dark Waves, which is a 12-minute piece for large orchestra and electronic sounds. To my surprise and delight, Ludo was very interested. I was calling it “Dark Waves on steroids,” and I knew early on that I wanted to take that oceanic sound and expand it into a much larger timeframe. So the result was Become Ocean.”

Alex Ross, the critic and new music writer, wrote in his article in the The New Yorker, July 8, 2013 entitled "Water Music" the following: “Like the sea at dawn, it presents a gorgeous surface, yet its heaving motion conveys overwhelming force. Whether orchestras will be playing it a century hence is impossible to say, but I went away reeling . . .  its three huge crescendos, evenly spaced over the three-quarter-hour span, suggest a tidal surge washing over all barriers.”   [Become Ocean] may be the loveliest apocalypse in musical history. Whereas Dark Waves builds towering dissonances from simple intervals of the perfect fifth, Become Ocean is more tonally centered, almost to the point of lushness. Near the start, the winds present plaintive chords of B minor, while the brass luxuriate in soft D major. A broad spectrum of triadic harmonies unfolds, many of them enriched by neighboring tones, stirring associations with late-Romantic and early-modern repertory. When the harps play glittering arpeggios above the mass, you think of Debussy’s La Mer. An aching suspension of D-sharp against an E-major triad recalls the final measures of Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony. And the low, dark choirs of brass conjure Wagner. Anyone who has secretly wished, during the swirling stasis that opens the Ring, that the music would go on like that forever will find much to love in Become Ocean.

At the same time, it is a disorienting, unsettling creation. The majestic sonorities emerge from a musical machine, an inexorable process. (“Inexorable” is, in fact, the indication at the head of the score.) There are six hundred and thirty bars of music, plus a bar of silence. The three main sections of the orchestra play sequences of varying lengths, each of which swells to a climax and then fades, and each of which reverses course at its midpoint, in the manner of a palindrome. The winds have fifteen units of forty-two bars (including rests); the brass nine units of seventy bars; the strings twenty-one units of thirty bars. At three points, the crescendos of the various groups coincide, resulting in those Debussy-like climaxes. The really confounding thing is that at Bar 316 the music begins running in reverse. The work is a gigantic palindrome, ending where it began.

Anyone who has gone down a stretch of road and then reversed course knows that a landscape does not look the same when viewed from opposite directions. One mystery of Become Ocean is how different the material often sounds during the second half of the palindrome. The section after the first climax is thick with minor chords, particularly in the brass. Somehow, as these chords loom again during the buildup to the final climax, they take on a heavier, more sorrowful air. There is a sense of unwinding, of subsiding, of dissolution. I thought of Matthew Arnold’s “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,” and also of the line that the earth goddess Erda utters in the Ring: “Everything that is, ends.” That a piece constructed with such fanatical rigor can convey such potent emotion is the greatest mystery of all.”

Become Ocean was followed by Become River (2014), for chamber orchestra, and Become Desert (2018), for an ensemble of five orchestral and choral groups. The composer said these works formed "...a trilogy that I never set out to write in the first place."[13]

John Luther Adams:  Become River

John Luther Adams has said that “Steven Schick and I were having dinner together. I was just beginning work on a large-scale piece for the Seattle Symphony. So when Steve asked me if I might be interested in composing a new piece for The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, I must have hesitated.   Deftly, Steve asked me to tell him a little about the Seattle piece.  I went on at length about the music I’d begun to imagine, finally concluding:  “It’s called Become Ocean. The title comes from a poem that John Cage wrote in honor of Lou Harrison.”  Cage observed that the breadth and variety of Harrison’s music make it “resemble a river in delta.” He concluded that:   LiStening to it  we become  oceaN.

“So you’re already composing a symphonic ocean,” Steve said. “Maybe for a smaller orchestra you could go ahead and compose that river in delta.”    Steve had me, and I knew it. Within a week I’d begun work on Become River.  

From a single high descending line, this music gradually expands into a delta of melodic streams flowing toward the depths.    I now imagine this river and its related ocean, as part of a larger series of pieces encompassing desert, mountain, tundra, and perhaps other landscapes and waterscapes.”