'I want my art to matter.

I want it
to be of use': John Luther Adams
How to change the world? The Pulitzer-winning
composer explains why he chose music over
activism, and how his concern over the future only
raises the stakes
John Luther Adams Tue 30 Oct 2018 11.40 EDT

‘My music is born in solitudeʼ … John Luther Adams in Alaska.

In the early evening of 4 April 1968, while standing on the balcony of his
hotel room in Memphis, Tennessee, Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated.
Two years later, on the anniversary, my girlfriend and I climbed over the
locked iron gate of our exclusive boarding school on the north side of Atlanta
and hitchhiked downtown to join the candlelight vigil at Ebenezer Baptist
Church.

Dr King was one of our great heroes. I knew that he had drawn inspiration
from Mahatma Gandhi’s practice of nonviolent resistance. Gandhi had been
inspired by Henry David Thoreau’s essay On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,
which I’d encountered in my ninth-grade literature class. I revisited that
essay after King’s assassination with a deeper sense of purpose. And then I
turned to Walden, Thoreau’s 1854 memoir, subtitled Life in the Woods.

Thoreau’s retreat to the cabin he built at Walden Pond, and his outspoken
opposition to slavery and the Mexican-American war, showed me that an
artist could work in solitude yet be deeply engaged with the great social issues
of his time. Throughout my life I’ve steered an uneasy course between my
desire to help change the world and my impulse to escape it. The vessel in
which I navigate these turbulent waters is music.

As the US finally withdrew from the war in

I used to be a Vietnam, the passion I’d felt marching in the
short-term streets of Atlanta led me to Alaska. I went north
with big dreams: to be part of the campaign to
pessimist
save the last great wilderness in North America,
and a long- and perhaps to help create a model for a new
term society. In Alaska, I also imagined that I could
leave the world of contemporary culture behind,
optimist. In
to search for a new kind of music drawn directly
my mid-60s, from the Earth.
I don't feel
I served as executive director of the Northern
much Alaska Environmental Center for several years.
optimism In those days it wasn’t difficult for committed
young people to make a difference in politics in
Alaska. No one told us we couldn’t do these things, so we just did them. It was
a heady experience. I appeared regularly on radio and television, testified at
public hearings and lobbied in the state legislature. And in time, people began
to suggest that the next step for me was to run for office. I was passionate
about Alaska. I knew my stuff. I could speak well. But I didn’t have the right
temperament for politics, and activism began to take its toll. My relationship
suffered. My music suffered. My health began to suffer. It became clear that I
had to make a choice between politics and music.

I’d come to Alaska to help change the world. Now I retreated to a cabin in the
woods, where I took the passion I felt for Alaska together with my hopes for
changing the world, and put them into my art. This is the path I’ve followed
ever since.

My music is born in solitude. The work of composing is slow. It takes long

stretches of uninterrupted time, when I am as far removed as I can be from
emails, phone calls, meetings and social engagements. My work calls me to
live as close as I can to the Earth, which is the ultimate source for everything I
do.

John Luther Adams: Become Ocean

Watch a Seattle Symphony video about Become Ocean on YouTube

I wrote Become Ocean in 2013. It is a meditation on the deep and mysterious

tides of existence. Life on Earth first emerged from the sea. And as the polar
ice melts and sea levels rise, we humans find ourselves facing the prospect
that once again we may literally become ocean. As an artist, my primary
responsibility is to my art as art. And yet, it’s impossible for me to regard my
life as a composer as separate from my life as a thinking human being and a
citizen of the Earth. Although it begins in solitude, my work is completed in
community. The music doesn’t come fully to life until other people –
performing musicians, listeners, recording engineers, critics and so many
others – receive it and make it their own.

Conventional wisdom holds that as people age they become more

conservative. But now, in my mid-60s, I feel as passionate as ever about the
imperative for cultural and political change. Neither divine intervention nor
artificial intelligence will save us from the catastrophes that seem to lie ahead.
To find that salvation, we must find our rightful place in the larger-than-
human world – the world that encompasses great human cities and vast
mountain ranges, the Mass in B minor and the song of the hermit thrush, the
Sistine Chapel and the aurora borealis – this miraculously beautiful world
that is our one true home. If my music can inspire people to listen more
deeply to this miraculous world we inhabit, then I will have done what I can
as a composer to help us navigate this perilous era of our own creation.

When I was young, I called myself a short-term pessimist and a long-term

optimist. Now in my mid-60s, I no longer feel as much optimism. I believe we
need nothing less than a fundamental change in the way we live together, and
with other forms of life. If we’re unable to change our course voluntarily, a
major collapse of global economic, social and political systems may well force
us to.

John Luther Adams: ‘I took the passion I felt for Alaska together
with my hopes for changing the world, and put them into my
music.ʼ Photograph: Donald Lee

My growing concern about the future of humanity only raises the stakes for
my work as an artist, as does my growing sense of my own mortality. There is
no time to waste. I want my art to matter in the deepest possible way. I want
it to be of use.

From time to time, an earnest young person tells me that my music has some
deep resonance in their lives. I feel tenderness toward these young people,
and I do my best to encourage them in whatever their life’s work may be. Yet
their gift to me is greater than they may know. They renew my sense of
purpose and my determination to continue working.

For me, music is an invitation to the listener to become more fully present. If
we can imagine a culture and society in which we each feel more deeply
responsible for our own place in the world then we may be able to bring that
culture and society into being. This will largely be the work of people who will
be here after I am gone. I place my faith in them.

John Luther Adams’ Become Ocean is at the Barbican, London, on 31

October performed by the London Contemporary Orchestra and Choir
with an AI-generated installation created in response to the music by
Universal Assembly Unit.

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