Radiolab - John Luther Adams

Episode Date: October 3, 2014

What's the soundtrack for the end of the world? We go looking for an answer. When Jad started to compose music for our live show Apocalyptical, he immediately thought of John Luther Adams. Adams' symphony “Become Ocean,” rooted in the sounds of nature, is elemental, tectonic, and unstoppable. It seemed a natural fit for our consideration of the (spoiler alert) extinction of the dinosaurs. In this piece, Jad introduces Robert to a special on Adams from a podcast called Meet the Composer. Through interviews and snippets of his music, it captures all the forces at play in Adam's work and reveals the dark majesty of Adams' take on the apocalypse.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W-N-Y-C. See? See?

Yeah. And N-PR. Okay, so Robert, you know that, like, talking about music in a way that's compelling can be kind of hard. Very hard. Yeah. Particularly the music you like. Exactly. It's really hard to build a bridge.

And so when people do it well, I just feel like you've got to give them props. And I just ran into a really great podcast that I think everyone should be listening to. It's called Meet the Composer. It's from Q2 Music, which is sort of the digital sister station of WQXR. And it's kind of what it sounds. You know, every episode they introduce you to one composer. But they do such a good job of seducing you into listening and maybe caring about music you wouldn't normally listen or care about that I just thought, you know,

I really want to play some of their latest episode for you. because they just focused on one of my favorite composers, a guy by the name of John Luther Adams. Oh, the opera guy, John Adams. No, no, no, no. This is John Luther Adams, different John Adams than the other guy. I've heard of John Quincy Adams, but he was a former president of the United States. Yes, this John Adams is a composer who makes music that sort of conjures these wide open spaces

that kind of invite you in, but also seems sort of indifferent to you and maybe might kill you? It has that kind of feeling to it. I'm intrigued. Okay. So how does it begin? We're going to meet this guy. Yes, so the documentary begins. And by the way, it's hosted by Nadia Sorota.

It begins with John Luther Adams as a boy playing in a rock band. Imagine 14-year-old John in a cover band in New Jersey, opening for acts like Buffalo Springfield and playing predominantly. The Three Bees. Sure, the Three Bees. The Beatles. The Beach Boys. and the birds.

Okay. So we started out as cover bands, and I got bored with that, and so did my buddies. And over time, we started trying our hand at songwriting, and I was a big fan of Frank Zappa. Frank Zappa,

the teetotalling 1960s and 70s musician and polymath, with wildly eccentric tastes spanning from rock to jazz to European lives. He said it gets me off as good as some contemporary classical pieces. And on the back of Frank's early LPs, there would always be this intriguing little quote. The present-day composer refuses to die at Garvarez. And my little rock and roll buddies and I would read that and scratch our heads and wonder, who is this for easy guy?

Right. And one day my friend Dick Einhorn, Dick Einhorn was rummaging through the record bins in a shop in the West Village and came across this album with this mad scientist on the cover with a great shock of electrostatic graying hair and this bushy eyebrows and this stern countenance and the title was the music of Edgar Perez Volume 2. So he brought it home and we quickly wore out the grooves. It just all sounds like a bunch of noise to me.

We hear this desert, this ocean, this, these forbidding mountains of sound. And I remember thinking, I'll never be able to know where I am in this. I don't know what to hang on to. So your response to what is this music, was just to immerse yourself in it. Give me more, which has always been my response to any new experience. and I often encourage young musicians, especially young composers, listen to everything you can get your ears on, especially the stuff you think you don't like.

I started to realize, oh, okay, there's that repeated note in the oboe, and, okay, that's a landmark, I can grab onto that. Oh, and here's this place where there's sort of a tattoo figure with the snare drums, and then these unison stabs in the rest of the percussion. Gradually we began to learn how to listen. to the forbidding deserts of Verez. Did that affect the music you guys were making? Oh, sure.

It meant that the process that was already underway was just accelerated. We rapidly abandoned the 1-4-5 chords and the backbeat and the four-bar phrases and started discovering Cage and Feldman and Canero and Pauline Alaveros and Ruth Crawford and on and on. So thank you Frank Zappa. I love that that was his response to music that, you know, can be defined as very alienating.

I mean, Verez is not easy stuff. No. But instead of just writing it off as ugly, he was like... Ugly how? Yeah, exactly. So in any case, just to skip forward a little bit in the Meet the Composer Hour from Q2, John Luther Adams goes off to school. He has a teacher named, I believe it's James Tenney, is one of his first big influences,

but he goes off to school at Cal Arts, and right afterwards he meets one of his next big influences. I had just left Cal Arts, hadn't yet gone to Alaska, and I would take along walks in the early morning and again at dusk, and I became captivated by this singer that I kept hearing deep in the woods and I could never find the bird, but I couldn't get enough of the song. I started taking notes. The birds became my teacher after Jamie.

tenning. And the result was a series of pieces that I composed between 1974 and 79 called simply songbird songs. What was the translation process between hearing this bird song that you just couldn't get enough of and constructing a narrative? In working with the birds songs, I just try to take dictation. I try to listen carefully to the birds where they are as they're singing, and write down what I hear. I'm not interested in accuracy, because if I were, I'd just make a recording and play the recording.

I'm interested in what gets lost in translation, because after all, this is music, this is perhaps a language that we will never understand. Also, there weren't very many field recordings available in those days, but there were some, and I decided, no, I'm not going to use them. I really wanted to hear them and to learn them for myself. Now, that's actually very different from the way I work much of the time, rather than working with very specific details of the music

and then building a piece up, I usually sculpt away the whole field of sound, and I work with one big shape or image or color or atmosphere that I have in mind that I can't quite. here, but I want to hear. And try to hear that, sense that, write that down as clearly as I can, and then all the moment-to-moment details of the music follow. We're listening to excerpts from an hour from QT music, from their fantastic series, Meet the Composer. This one is on the composer, one of my favorites, John Luther Adams.

Now, after the songbird piece, John is living in L.A., and he gets kind of fed up. hated Los Angeles. The whole time I was there, I felt lost and not in a good way. It was such an interesting contrast because it was one of the most explosive periods of my life in terms of discovery. But at the same time, there was this kind of inner gnawing. I just felt lost in the freeways and all that sprawl, that city that seemed to just go on forever. It made me long for home.

which I never felt that I'd had because we moved all the time, and I'd grown up here and there in equally homogenous suburban surroundings. So there was this deep, inarticulate hunger to find a place to which I might belong. The place where Adams belonged, it turns out, was off the grid in wild open spaces. I went north in the summer of 1975, so it was 22 that summer, and from the moment I arrived, I knew I'd found home. When you showed up in Alaska, what did you see, what did you hear, that made you feel like you knew you were home? We're here to begin.

It all really starts in the summer of 1975 when I first canoed across Admiralty Island, went into Glacier Bay, I hiked on the tundra of Dinelli, eventually made my way to the Brooks Range to the Arctic. You know, there was and still is in those. places, a sense of openness and space and possibility as well as danger. These are big places in which we feel very, very small, and we realize that we're insignificant and the place doesn't care if we are there or not. And the weather or the bear or the river can rise up at. at any moment and snuff me out.

And you know, I find a certain reassurance, a certain profound comfort in that. I was trying to reconnect with the larger, older world that we still inhabit, but that we forget. And Alaska allowed me to feel like I was the only person in that place. So in the summer of 1977, I visited the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and we flew over the crest of the Brooks Range and out onto the coastal plain,

the Arctic Coastal Plain, and there in the distance was the ice. And, of course, the sun, even in midsummer, the sun doesn't get very high in the horizon. So there's this incredible, deep, warm, saturated light, and the colors and the shadows and everything just stands out. and then you get out on the tundra and you lose all sense of scale. I remember one evening with a buddy, we were just so excited to be alive and out in that Arctic evening light. And we saw this white rock out across the tundra,

and it was this odd-looking thing. And I said, well, why don't we walk over there? When we hiked to that rock, we hiked, and we hiked. And, of course, the tundra is not. easy to walk on. But we kept walking. We kept walking and you know the rock didn't get any closer. So we kept walking and then suddenly we stopped because the rock flew away. Wow. The rock was a snowy owl sitting on the tundra and you know it could have been a 12-foot outcropping of white stone. You just you lose yourself in that place in that light and in that endless

space and that's what I want in music. That's so beautiful. We're hearing bits from Q2 Music's Meet the Composer series. This one on John Luther Adams. We'll continue in a moment. This is Darlene calling from Kampala, Uganda. Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation,

enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.slawn.org. We're back. I'm Chad Aboum-Raw. I'm Robert Krollwich. This is Radio Lab, and we're taking this podcast to present some music. Right. I'm foisting it on you, Robert, and on our listening. Yes, but you notice that I'm not...

You're not running away scared. No, I'm not running away. That's good. I take that as a sign of success. And the excerpts that you've been hearing come from Q2's wonderful series, Meet the Composer, particular hour that they've just produced on the composer John Luther Adams, who after he moved to Alaska, began to make these amazingly huge, sometimes serene, sometimes violent pieces. And you know what I think about when I hear his work?

I remember when I first encountered Looney Tunes, and the way that they're like, thumb, thumb, thumb, thumb, thumb, has this sort of an inherent meaning to it. It feels like falling. Well, it's the music of action. Yeah. Bumping.

Bumping, tiptoeing. bonging, all of these things have a kind of musical expression that feels almost like a physical language that we came into the world with and never had to learn. And when I went to music school, it was so difficult and dense because suddenly I was thrust into this world of contemporary classical composition and it was all about understanding

the rigor of serial 12-tone composition, which is like you create these little mathematical systems, that guide your choices. And I was like, I don't know what this has to do with music. I don't understand this. And then you hear it and you're like, my ear can't pick up on it. I feel lost.

You feel like you're literally in the forest. But then I encountered composers like John Luther Adams where it wasn't about that at all. Something more primal, it was about like the movement of bodies, you know, masses of sound that sort of crescendo, decrescendoed waves. Yeah, I do think of the sounds of musical forms and events as forces, as natural elements in some way. And 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, it's 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 it's 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. Where does music come from? How does a composer take an assignment like, write an 11-minute piece for string quartet, and translate those instructions into a concept, into notes, into a score?

For composer John Luther Adams, it seems almost like the transformation happens in his sleep. I try to resist composing for as long as I can. I really want to get at something essential before I start manipulating notes, pushing things around. I try to hold things in my mind's ear as long as I can

it's maybe an inefficient way to work, but it has worked for me. I find that if I'm trying to remember, trying to hear something that I can't quite name, it focuses my attention in a certain way, and then I finally start composing when I can't not compose, when I have to write it down.

I'm thinking about the way that we are discovering how memory and the brain works. And every time you remember something, you're actually recreating a story. Yes. So I really like that you have an idea and you are continually remembering it. So basically you're making a lot of mental Xeroxes of it

over and over again until it becomes something which is so steeped in your brain stuff that it is a piece. Exactly. So night after night, when I lie down to go to sleep, I'm imagining this group of

instruments in this particular space and what they might sound like and how they might move through the space physically and through the musical space of the piece. And it's repetitive. I'm doing it every night. A certain point, I lose it and I drift off to sleep. That nocturnal composition process is apparently what happened with John Luther Adams' most recent, most famous piece. This is a piece I literally tried to copy during our recent apocalyptic tour, and it just wanted him to pull surprise. Apparently, John was spending some time near the Pacific Ocean,

and he would fall asleep to the sound of ocean waves, and it seeped into his dream. And what emerged, when he finally started to compose, was this orchestral piece for three orchestras, actually. It's called Become Ocean. And what happens in the piece is that

over the course of about 40 minutes, all three orchestras form these massive swells of sound, like these three huge crescendos, like massive tsunamis coming and crashing over you. I'm talking about the title of the piece, Become Ocean. John Luther Adams said, life on this earth first emerged from the sea. As the polar ice melts and sea levels rise, we humans find ourselves facing the prospect that once again we may quite literally become ocean. Um, well, here he is in a conversation with WQXR's Helga David.

This is a global warming piece, and I would say everything that I do these days is in some way addressing the state of the world and the delicate and precarious position of we human animals in the world. And yet I will also, out of the other side of my mouth, insist that it has absolutely nothing to do with current events or politics or activism, and that music must stand on its own as. music and I like to believe that we can have it both ways. It is very, very outdoors. Yeah. And it's without, it seems like it hasn't have people in it at all. It's just. Openness, yeah.

Yeah. You're floating on the surface if you're there at all. One of the many reasons you should go to iTunes and download Q2's Meet the Composer's Hour with John Luther Adams is that they play this unreleased track of his string. quartet called the wind in high places, which is just beautiful. Go to RadioLab.org. We will link you to more information about Meet the Composers. I highly recommend this podcast.

Thank you so much to Nadia Sorota, Alex Overton, and Thea Chaloner, and Alex Ambrose for allowing us to play some excerpts. I'm Chad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krollwich. Thanks for listening.