On December 31, 2016, the composer John Luther Adams posted a “Prayer for the New Year” to his Facebook page. “May we conduct our lives as if our neighbors, our future generations, our fellow species and our home, this sacred earth, matter as much as we ourselves,” read one of his 35 theses, hammered Reformation-style to the Church of Social Media. Another included the incantation, “May we listen and hope to hear.”
The message had added resonance at the end of a year that saw one of the most traumatically triggering election cycles in U.S. history. But for Adams, there was no novelty in the message. At 65, the American composer has been preaching the vastness of life — coupled with a bit of small-world synchronicity — through the medium of sound for most of his career.
Over a year and a half later, I still think about that post on a weekly basis. I thought about it on Inauguration Day. I thought about it during the airport protests a week later. I thought about it when men and women armed with tiki torches rallied across the country in the name of white supremacy—a rally that, on August 12, 2017, claimed the life of a counter-protester my age, Heather Heyer.
Nearly one year to that day, I thought about it again this past weekend, which saw the second annual Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and, in New York, the world premiere of Adams’s latest work, In the Name of the Earth. Written for four choirs comprising over 600 singers, the piece was presented in a free performance by Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival. And I wondered, as I wandered St. John the Divine (the rain location for a work intended to have been performed in Central Park): have we progressed at all in the past year? Have we lived our lives as though the lives of others matter as much as we ourselves? Have we listened and hoped to hear?
One year earlier, I’d been at another Mostly Mozart production of Schubert’s Winterreise that made the idea of history oppressive. In a theater across the street from Trump Tower while news unfolded in Charlottesville, I was struck by a connection shared between Schubert and another dark spot of history: the German Democratic Republic. By 1976, the work had, in musicologist Elaine Kelly’s words, “emerged as an anthem of disillusionment” for a state governed by tyranny. But it was a work that also contained, per East German author Christa Wolf, “a hidden clue as to how art can nevertheless survive.”
One year later, it’s more clear that art can survive. But it also must do more.
The idea of art nevertheless surviving (even persisting) circles back on an Edgard Varèse quote that Adams encountered on the back of a Frank Zappa LP: “The present-day composer refuses to die.”
At that time, Adams was a teenager in New Jersey, playing in bands while underperforming in school. When a friend actually found a Varèse album in a Greenwich Village record store, as Adams recalled to Nadia Sirota on a 2014 episode of Meet the Composer, he was confronted with “forbidding mountains of sound,” and thinking to himself, “I’ll never be able to know where I am in this. I don’t know what to hang onto.”
Singers performing in the world premiere of ‘In the Name of the Earth’
at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, August 11, 2018. Photograph: Stephanie Berger
His response was to ask for more. It led him to trade the Beatles, Beach Boys, and Byrds for John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Pauline Oliveros. In a way, it was trading one form of rebellion for another, discovering another school of musicians who hadn’t inherited a centuries-old musical lineage and therefore were building a soundscape from the ground up.
Compared with many of Varèse’s works, Adams’s pieces have a deceptive simplicity that belies his roundabout path to becoming a composer—rejecting an offer to study at Columbia, dropping out of graduate school, and spending the majority of his adult life living in Fairbanks, Alaska before relocating in recent years to New York. Much like those first encounters Adams had with Varèse, the simplicity of his music can be just as jarring as Varèse’s dense and jagged scores. It’s a simplicity that can leave the listener at times grasping in the dark in search of something to hold onto.
An additional challenge is that many of Adams’s works are intended to be performed outside of a traditional concert hall. A composer without borders (at least those that are manmade), his works echo the Alaskan landscape and demand a similar setting: big places that allow listeners to realize how small, at times even insignificant, they are in relationship to the rest of the planet. Such pieces also eschew the kind of concert-going etiquette that drove American audiences for the 18th, 19th, and much of the 20th Centuries. One of his most famous pieces, Inuksuit, has been performed everywhere from the Park Avenue Armory to the U.S.–Mexico border.
In Buddhism, giving up the idea of “otherness” – that the larger world is separate from us – is known as “no-self.” It’s not that we don’t exist, but rather that the boundaries we construct between who we are and what our experience is do not exist. The practice then becomes learning how, stitch by stitch, to unconditionally open ourselves up to the world.
Such a practice can quickly become two-steps-forward, one-step-back. As humans, our proclivity is to stay addicted to the stories we tell ourselves and one another about our experience, especially in the current political climate. Each news update that pings on our phone gives us a rush of dopamine that activates the pleasure center of the brain. This stimulation is fueled by a lack of predictability (which explains why the president’s unpredictable Twitter patterns tend to spark a sizable flame) and an instantaneous feedback loop. Adams seems a natural antithesis to this dopamine rush, to the hamster-wheel of narratives we use to maintain a false sense of self. Performances of his music are as much about no-space as they are about no-self.
At a score-level with Adams, it’s possible to see the meticulous patterns that he creates as he sculpts a field of sound into a single shape, image, color, or atmosphere. The act of composing for him seems almost an act of divination towards a preexisting unified whole, one that Adams seeks to make concrete. As Kyle Gann wrote in in “Time at the End of the World” (included in the 2012 essay collection, The Farthest Place: The Music of John Luther Adams), “the pleasure of comprehending seems inferior: One wants to feel the full force of the mystery. That the whole ultimately makes sense, that it condenses into a unitary gesture, becomes a matter…of faith — and perhaps that faith itself allows one to surrender to the unmediated details.”
Surrender, in an era defined by resistance, is a key theme in being able to experience Adams’s works. While there is inherent, perhaps even dopamine-loop–like “pleasure in tracking the progress of the form,” Gann notes that “in the process of listening [one] must still submit to the vastness, the unknowability, the richness of the textures and the patterns, the accidental coincidences of large-scale process.” We must surrender our sense of self in order to understand the collective whole, in order to understand the landscape of which we are but a small part.
The massive choir assembled for ‘In the Name of the Earth’
at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, August 11, 2018.
Photograph: Stephanie Berger
It thus was a further twist of synchronicity – or Adams’s brand of accidental coincidence – that rain predictions drove Lincoln Center to move In the Name of the Earth indoors from its original location at Harlem Meer. Rather than nature-nature, we were in a space meant to examine human nature, and built for us to fall to our knees and surrender to a similar sense of vastness and ultimate insignificance.
This was no conventional church concert setting. In weaving around the naves and chapels of St. John, we also were contributing to the listening environment, to the sounds of the ecosystem. There were the fans — everything from industrial-size turbines to repurposed Bed Bath & Beyond coupons – plus selfie sticks, people napping, people listening intently. And there was an acceptance of being with whatever occurred, even as it altered the soundscape or the physical space itself.
During the performance, I considered the multitude of generations alongside me in the audience, from a wide-eyed infant being bounced in his mother’s arms to an old man stationed in a wheelchair, unable to move around the space during the performance as we were encouraged to do. Adams’s positioning of his art makes you think about generations, both those that came before and those for which you’re setting the stage.
I catch myself drifting from the music itself to the way I would want my future grandchildren to know about this music, to wondering about the state of political and social affairs for those future grandchildren. I think about my late grandfather-in-law, David H. Marlowe, whose anthropological career included the development of greater cohesion in the U.S. Army through the “Band of Brothers” model. Had David lived to see the 2016 election and all that followed, he would have said, “I’ve seen this movie before; I know how it ends.”
While no prayer, credo, or faith gives us carte blanche for certainty, I think many of us can intuit — when we pull out to see the larger pattern of history — how events and actions in this country will progress at the macro level. For better or for worse, we see how the pendulum of our country has swung over time, no matter the level of unprecedented circumstance.
And so at a certain point, we’re left to surrender. Adams’s music suggests that we can see from a higher perspective how the proverbial movie ends, but that’s immaterial. It’s the moment-to-moment living we still have to go through. We still have to contend with the earth and with each other.
It’s easy to run off into nature, to go full-Thoreau and escape the true state of affairs. Adams himself tried it in several iterations and varying degrees of extremity before realizing that the monastic model is not sustainable in the new millennium. It’s on all of us to show up. “All along, I’ve had this obsessive, delusional idea that I could somehow be outside culture, which is, of course, patently absurd,” he told Alex Ross for a New Yorker profile in 2008. “I tried to run away, I hid for quite a while. But I can’t live there anymore. Because, in a sense, it doesn’t exist anymore.”
Music is Adams’s way of inviting us to drop the storyline just a little bit more, to experience a sense of no-self and at times of no-space. Rather than stock a home fallout shelter or move even further into the wilderness, Adams advocates being “fully present in the fullness of the present moment in this world.” Taken without the context of his music, the sentiment seems overly-optimistic. Taken within the context of his music, it seems utterly imperative. To quote American Buddhist teacher Reggie Ray, “We’re not here for a purpose that you can put into words. We are here so that the torrent of life can flow through us.”
John Luther Adams (L) and conductor Simon Halsey acknowledging applause
following the world premiere of ‘In the Name of the Earth,’ August 11, 2018.
Photograph: Stephanie Berger
In opting for California Institute of the Arts over Columbia for his undergraduate studies, Adams worked with James Tenney, a composer and newly-minted pedagogue who recognized that “nobody was going to teach me anything,” Adams recounts to Sirota on Meet the Composer. But, Adams continues, Tenney “had this uncanny knack for asking just the right, gently-pointed question at just the right moment.” Following one particularly long rant by Adams in Tenney’s office, his advisor asked in return, “So why are you here?”
It’s a question that Adams is continuing to answer.
For art merely to survive, therefore, is not enough as Christa Wolf put it in relation to the context of Schubert’s Winterreise. If 2017 was the year for us all simply to survive, 2018 is becoming the year when we expand, mobilize, and come together. As Adams writes in “In Search of an Ecology of Music,” both art and science search for truth with the intention of understanding what it is we perceive. Yet while “science examines the way things are,” he notes, “art imagines how things might be.”
His sentiment echoes across time: Even Schubert said that faith is “far superior to knowledge and understanding.” The new role of art is to reach believers across time and space. It’s a non-denominational gospel that helps us, in times increasingly agnostic, to conduct our lives as if our neighbors matter as much as we ourselves.
Art is our way of making sense of the big questions. Like any good teacher, Adams has some idea of the answers, but knows that he is not likely to teach any of his audiences anything. His music then asks those questions, and gives us the space to consider a response.
May we listen, and hope to hear, our own answers.
Olivia Giovetti has covered music and arts for Paper, the Washington Post, NPR, VAN, and beyond. She’s previously served on staff at Time Out New York and WQXR/Q2 Music, and her writing has been heard onstage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of the Next Wave Festival. She combines her love of the arts and meditation practice on The Meditation of Art.
Classical music coverage on National Sawdust Log is supported in part by a grant from the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation. The Log makes all editorial decisions.