Winter Walk with John Luther Adams
John Luther Adams interviewed by Kyu-Young Kim
The Great Northern (TGN) and The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra (SPCO) wish to inspire our community to experience a walking meditation along the river of your choice while listening to the SPCO’s performance of composer John Luther Adams’ Become River. The SPCO commissioned and premiered this work, part of the Become Trilogy that also includes Become Ocean and Become Desert. The SPCO’s world premiere performance from 2014 is available to stream for free and on-demand on its website and in its Concert Library app. SPCO Artistic Director Kyu-Young Kim recently conducted a Zoom interview with John Luther Adams to discuss the story behind Become River, his newly released memoir Silences So Deep, and what gives him hope in these challenging times.
Kyu-Young Kim (KK): The Become Trilogy has just come out in a beautiful new recording from Seattle Symphony this year. Which one came first? Become Ocean or Become River?
John Luther Adams (JLA): Let me tell you the story. My wife Cynthia and I were in the process of extricating ourselves from Alaska, which was a slow and painful experience because we were so deeply attached to that place. We were spending more and more time in the desert, by the sea in Mexico. We had settled in for the winter and I was about to start work on a new score for Seattle Symphony, which would become Become Ocean. I had detailed sketches and a whole vision. I knew where that piece was going.
KK: You had written Dark Waves at that point?
JLA: Yes, so you know the background. Dark Waves was a twelve-minute piece for full orchestra and electronic sounds, a commission for Anchorage Symphony, our home town band! I spent almost a full year composing it, because it was so radically different from anything I’d done before. And then I heard it and I was thrilled. It was a new sound, something I hadn’t heard before. Several people that heard it in Anchorage and later in Chicago said something to me that you never want to say to a composer, which is, “I really like that piece, but it was too short. I was just starting to learn how to listen to it and it was over.”
I felt the same way about it. It was a new sound world that needed to be expanded to a much larger scale.
Jump forward to a meeting in Seattle with Ludovic Morlot and the Seattle Symphony to discuss a new commission. I had two options to present to him: one was a kind of symphonic version of my big, outdoor percussion work, Inuksuit, and the other was, what I called for shorthand, Dark Waves on steroids. Ludovic knew both pieces and I was certain that he was going to go for the Inuskuit idea, but much to my surprise and delight, he said he wanted to go with the dark one, the big waves!
I got back down to Mexico and I was ready to dive into composing Become Ocean, but I had to take a quick trip up to San Diego to finish up another project. I had dinner and afterwards a whiskey, as I always do when I’m in San Diego, with my dear friend [percussionist and conductor] Steve Schick.
Steve ambushed me! He played me like a Strad. He asked innocently, “So John, what are you working on?” I launched into a detailed description of this big oceanic symphony I was poised to write. Steve took a breath, let me take a sip of my whiskey, and said to me, “Well it sounds like you’ve pretty much already written that one. Why don’t you write a piece for me and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra about the river that flows into that ocean.”
Steve had me and he knew it.
Within a week I was hard at work on Become River.
KK: So, Become River did come first! It hasn’t gotten the same airtime as Become Ocean.
JLA: Part of that is because the first recording has just recently appeared. But Become River is a tough piece to program on a concert, because it has this ridiculous setup. You have the violins all the way in the back and a big percussion set up in the middle, the double basses in front. It’s an integral part of the piece. Physical space, not just poetic and metaphorical space, has become an integral part, a fundamental compositional element, of my music. It has to be done that way, but that’s a lot of furniture moving for an orchestra to deal with for a 15 minute piece, and so it hasn’t been performed as much as Become Ocean.
“Your ocean, your river, your desert. What I hope the music does is invite you into this beautiful, enveloping place, and for you have to your own journey, your own experience, your own float down the river, rather than me telling you a story about mine.”
KK: Was the actual Mississippi River part of the inspiration for the piece, given that you were writing it for the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra?
JLA: If you hear the Mississippi in Become River, I wouldn’t disabuse you of that notion. I’ve been a lifelong river rat; And the river I know best is the great Tanana river in central Alaska that feeds into the mighty Yukon.
But from time to time, people will ask me, which ocean, which desert, which river, and my answer is always the same.
Your ocean, your river, your desert. What I hope the music does is invite you into this beautiful, enveloping place, and for you have to your own journey, your own experience, your own float down the river, rather than me telling you a story about mine.
KK: That’s a beautiful answer and aligns perfectly with our intention for this winter walk that we want to encourage Minnesotans to take. We’re trying to create an opportunity for people to have this meditative experience, and a very personal experience of nature and your piece.
JLA: If you’re listening to Become River and walking along the Mississippi River, I certainly hope it has the ring of truth!
KK: Part of the idea behind The Great Northern Festival is to encourage people to embrace the winter and the outdoors. What would you say to Minnesotans as we enter what is bound to be a tough, long winter, and may not feel up to taking a 20 minute nature walk and listen to your music?
“We are immersed in beauty all the time. We only have to slow down and pay attention, whether it’s with our eyes or ears, or some other receptors.”
JLA: I lived through 40 Alaska winters, so I feel your pain! I can relate. I discovered something that you probably already know, but it’s essential to get outside, every day, no matter how cold it is. For me, all those winters in Alaska, that was a key. The other was to have rituals in our lives that honor the seasons. I’m not talking just about special occasions, but daily or weekly rituals. For me—and what I write about in the new memoir at length—what was so important was the weekly sauna with my friends.
KK: I love that part of the book, and I have to admit that I was so envious of that ritual, and the connection that you had with those extraordinary human beings.
JLA: Yes, and in an extraordinary place at an extraordinary moment. Alaska felt very different then. There was a feeling of openness and possibility, that sadly feels like it has closed down, at least for now. The sauna was at the heart of that feeling.
One vivid memory I have is of leaving sauna in early winter, walking back out to our vehicles, and starting to complain to my friend, Birch Pavelsky, the carpenter-poet.
“Here we go again, going into the tunnel. You seem to thrive on this. How do you do it?”
Birch stopped, took the flashlight and put it up by the side of my head. “Look John,” he said, and started shining the light on the branches of the spruce trees, catching the light on the snowflakes. There were diamonds everywhere. I inhaled and caught my breath. We are immersed in beauty all the time. We only have to slow down and pay attention, whether it’s with our eyes or ears, or some other receptors.
KK: Tell me more about your friends during that time in Alaska, and how those relationships shaped your music.
JLA: Someone said to me recently that at the heart of the book are two love letters to [conductor] Gordon Wright and [poet] John Haines, and that the whole book is a love letter to my wife Cynthia, and to Alaska itself. I’ll talk about Gordon and all the musical gifts I received from him in a moment, but my friendship with John Haines was also formative in the discovery of my life’s work as a composer — what we casually refer to as a composer’s voice.
Even before I met him, John was already an icon to me. I carried his poems with me on hiking and river running trips all over the Arctic. I felt in a real way those poems belonged to me, and then we met, and it was love at first sight. We saw ourselves in one another. He looked at me and saw this clueless, idealistic, sincere young guy who was going to make a new kind of music in this wild country which was exactly what he had done thirty years earlier. His voice as a poet is so strong and so singular, and it developed in that place, far removed from cosmopolitan culture.
Our first and largest collaboration was a cantata called Forest Without Leaves. We should do it in Saint Paul! It was during the time I was still working full time as an environmental activist. It was that collaboration with John that made me realize I’m going to have to make a choice here. Within a couple more years, I had chosen to leave my life as an activist and devote myself fully to my life as an artist.
Just the sound of John’s poetry and getting inside of the resonance of his words and the sound of his beautiful speaking and reciting voice really informed, not just that piece, but also had deeper resonances within my music as it was developing at that time, when I was just 30.
How long has John been gone in the flesh? A decade now? His poems are still with me every day. His late verses, which seemed so impenetrable at first, now, being older and watching history unravel, seem so prophetic to me.
KK: Before you tell us about Gordon and his influence, can you talk about how you got into music in the first place?
JLA: My dad was a musician. He was a trumpet player and conducted church choirs and he was a very sophisticated listener. I played his trumpet in grade school, and I had piano lessons throughout my childhood, but I never practiced.
It really was rock and roll, the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, that got me excited about music. By age 12, I had my first garage band. Everyone else had guitars so, by default, I was the drummer. And it worked! That’s when I caught fire with music, and everything else that had interested me (other than girls) — track, baseball — all of that just disappeared. It was all music, all the time. I had a brief but spectacular career as a rock and roller.
KK: Were you writing your own songs?
JLA: Yes. At the age of 12, we were covering the 3 B’s: the Beatles, the Birds and the Beach Boys. Then I’d start a new band, and we’d started getting more and more experimental and, somewhere along the way, we started writing our own material. Under the influence of Frank Zappa, we discovered Edgar Varese, Igor Stravinksy, John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, electronic music, John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, Indian classical music, Chinese classical, gamelan music.
KK: You had a voracious appetite!
JLA: I couldn’t get enough of things I hadn’t heard before. It was a great moment in the late sixties, early seventies. All of these recordings were coming out from all over the world. My bands stopped playing in dance halls and started playing “concerts”; we became artsier and artsier and more experimental.
KK: So then how did you receive your “education” in the classical canon. Was it with Gordon and the Arctic Chamber Orchestra?
JLA: Yes! The Brandenburg Concertos and Beethoven Symphonies had all been part of the mix, but up until then, what really excited me was the new stuff, and the really old stuff, the stuff that felt really close to the earth, like Delta Blues or Tibetan Buddhist music.
Shortly after I arrived in Fairbanks to stay, Gordon started a relentless campaign to try to conscript me to play in the Arctic Chamber Orchestra and the Fairbanks Symphony. I was a full-time environmental activist, living in a cabin in the woods, trying to maintain a live-in relationship with my girlfriend and her young son, so I kept putting Gordon off.
Finally, I relented when he made the devil’s bargain. “You play in my orchestra and we’ll play your music.”
KK: And the rest was history…
JLA: Yes, exactly, but it turned out, Gordon wasn’t the devil…I was! I got the long end of the stick. Not only did he commission and rehearse and premiere my very first orchestra pieces, he also introduced me to this whole world of music that I had eschewed. In my youth, I had thrown the whole European baby, bathwater and bathtub out the window, especially the Romantic period.
Gordon always said the timpanist was the second conductor and, of course, that appealed to my pride, to my ego, and I took it very seriously. We’d learn something like Sibelius Second Symphony or the Franck d-minor Symphony, and I’d really learn the piece — how it was put together architecturally, the orchestration. As I was counting rests, I was listening and I was hearing how the different instruments sounded and behaved. I was learning orchestration from the inside of the orchestra!
KK: Not your conventional path to learning orchestration!
JLA: Completely backwards!
KK: It seems like it opened up pathways for you to find your own voice.
JLA: The truth is nothing else would have worked for me. Because of my contrarian disposition. I always have to do things my own way. It’s a horrible way to do things. I’m left handed, and I do everything backwards. It’s painful, but when I learn something, it’s like primitive man discovering fire. I really get it! It’s mine!
KK: What I love about your story is the example that you don’t need to grow up listening and loving the classical canon to find a way into this music and this world. That there are different ways in than just the conservatory route.
JLA: We’re at this moment in history when we all need to ask ourselves: what am I doing and what is the best thing I can do, and the best way I can do it. What does that mean for me as a composer, or you as an orchestra musician and a concert programmer. What is an orchestra going to be in the middle and latter part of the 21st century? How can we reconceive this wonderful musical cultural institution in ways that can make sense in a post-racist society, in a society in the middle of a global melt. We’ve got to ask ourselves these questions.
I can tell you this. Zoom is not the answer; the internet is not the answer. The answer has something to do with community and culture and human connection, as it always has!
KK: But it has been so nice to do this interview by Zoom!
JLA: Actually, one of the great things that has come out of all this is the opportunity, once or week or so, for me to connect with a group of students somewhere. Really that’s what keeps me going — my love for and my faith in the next generations. People in their teens and twenties who are going to have to sort through the rubble that my generation is leaving being and imagine a new way of being in the world together and create a new culture.
KK: Where are you teaching now?
JLA: I’m not teaching anywhere! Students and teachers are just reaching out and asking me to talk with them, or work with them on my music. And, for the moment, we’re doing this over the internet.
What keeps me going is that I may do something that is useful to someone who I will never know, who will help imagine and bring about a society that I would love to live in, but will never inhabit. I love Zoom for those connections!
KK: That is very hopeful!
JLA: I’m a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist. Sure, there are days when I struggle to keep going, like all of us. I have to limit my intake of media in order to maintain my focus on my work, which is the best thing I can do. I hope we fully embrace this collective body blow that we’re receiving now, and we change as a result.
When people ask, when is it going to go back to normal, I say: “Never, I hope.” We cannot go back to the old normal. It’s not there anymore. And if we want our future to be better than our present, we better start imagining and working for new ways of living together on this earth.
For John Luther Adams, music is a lifelong search for home—an invitation to slow down, pay attention, and remember our place within the larger community of life on earth. Living for almost 40 years in northern Alaska, JLA discovered a unique musical world grounded in space, stillness, and elemental forces. In the 1970’s and into the 80’s, he worked full time as environmental activist. But the time came when he felt compelled to dedicate himself entirely to music. He made this choice with the belief that, ultimately, music can do more than politics to change the world. In works such as Become Ocean, In the White Silence, and Canticles of the Holy Wind, Adams brings the sense of wonder that we feel outdoors into the concert hall. And in outdoor works such as Inuksuit and Sila: The Breath of the World, he employs music as a way to reclaim our connections with place, wherever we may be. A deep concern for the state of the earth and the future of humanity drives Adams to continue composing. As he puts it: “If we can imagine a culture and a society in which we each feel more deeply responsible for our own place in the world, then we just may be able to bring that culture and that society into being. This will largely be the work of people who will be here on this earth when I am gone. I place my faith in them.” Since leaving Alaska, JLA and his wife Cynthia now make their home in the Chihuahuan desert.
Kyu-Young Kim is Artistic Director and Principal Violin of the Grammy winning Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. He lives in Saint Paul, MN, and enjoys regular walks along the Mississippi with family, friends, and his dog, Teddy.