I want my art to matter. I want it to be of use': John Luther Adams
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.
John Luther Adams: a force of nature
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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.
I used to be a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist. In my mid-60s, I don't feel much optimism
As the US finally withdrew from the war in Vietnam, the passion I’d felt marching in the streets of Atlanta led me to Alaska. I went north with big dreams: to be part of the campaign to save the last great wilderness in North America, and perhaps to help create a model for a new society. In Alaska, I also imagined that I could leave the world of contemporary culture behind, to search for a new kind of music drawn directly from the Earth.
I served as executive director of the Northern Alaska Environmental Center for several years. 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.
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.’ 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.