Is there any better lazy Sunday afternoon activity than listening to Radiolab? It was featuring excerpts from a brand new podcast, from WQXR (Q2 Music) called Meet the Composer. After hearing just the few snippets of the first episode, about composer John Luther Adams, I absolutely needed to hear the entire episode. Funded in part by a successful kickstarter campaign, and launched into the big time immediately by the Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich seal of approval, this podcast is definitely worth your subscription. You can listen to the entire first episode, and find your way to a subscription, at the link below.
John Luther Adams: Bad Decisions and Finding Home – a Meet the Composers podcast
The place doesn’t care if we are there or not
What does all this have to do with culture vs. nature? Because it doesn’t take long, listening to John Luther Adams’ talking about making music, before you realize that he is clearly moved by the same questions that this blog grapples with. Shortly after graduating from CalArts, he moved to Alaska, where he finds what he calls his home place, and it dramatically tightens the connection between the physical Earth, and human existence, his existence. “There was and still is, in those places, a sense of openness and space and possibility as well as danger…The place doesn’t care if we are there or not. The weather or the bear or the river can rise up at any moment and snuff me out. And you know, I find a certain reassurance, a certain profound comfort in that.”
His music is profoundly influenced by this connection. He says, describing a piece called The Place Where You Go To Listen that was designed to be listened to only in a specially designed room installed at the University of Fairbanks Museum of the North:
You’re in a place you’ve never been before, but I wanted you, at the same time, to feel, to hear with your ears, to sense with your eyes, and to feel through your body that this hermetically sealed, man made world is vibrating in harmony with something much larger.
Everything is shaped by this incredibly complex and wondrous world
Luther Adams won the Pulitzer Prize for composition this year, for his piece “Become Ocean.” It is described as “a haunting orchestral work that suggests a relentless tidal surge, evoking thoughts of melting polar ice and rising sea levels.” The piece is incredibly evocative of the power of the sea, and succeeds in reminding us, not only of our society’s environmental peril, but our own personal inexorable connection to the sea and to all the powerful forces of planet earth.
Meet the Composer also features the exclusive opportunity to listen to a brand new piece of music from Adams, called “The Wind in High Places.” This stunning string quartet, the first Luther Adams has written, is vast, and open, and rapid, and at times terrifying and exposed. In other moments the music seems only to gently swirl about you. The lines between the sounds of string instruments and the harmonics of gales and breezes in the mountains are blurred.
Landscape is the culture that contains all human cultures
I’ll leave you with more of the worlds of John Luther Adams, and the hope that you will listen to the entire podcast on WQXR and support both that project, and the composer they featured in their inaugural episode.
It may sound ridiculously grandiose or laughably naive, but I’ve always imagined that I might be able to work in a space that’s just outside of culture. Of course, its patently absurd. There’s no way that we work outside of culture, and these days so many cultures.
And yet, as my friend Barry Lopez, the writer, says, ‘Landscape is the culture that contains all human cultures.’ And I believe that everything we do, everything we think, everything we think we create, everything we are, derives from the world that we inhabit. Our language, our music, our minds, everything, is shaped by this incredibly complex and wondrous world that we inhabit.
So ultimately this nature-culture dichotomy in a way doesn’t exist. But its been a useful conceit for me to feel that I’m after something that is not… it’s not part of a musical tradition. It’s not specifically cultural, it’s somehow more elemental.
Louis Wertz 