John Luther Adams: Become Ocean (2014)

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John Luther Adams: Become Ocean (2014)

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Awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music, John Luther Adams’ Become Ocean was commissioned and premiered by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra and Ludovic Morlot in June 2013. In May 2014 the orchestra and Morlot took Become Ocean to Carnegie Hall for the annual Spring for Music festival. Become Ocean is a 45-minute-long work for full orchestra. Adams borrowed the title from a verse by composer John Cage, written in honor of fellow composer Lou Harrison’s birthday. Describing Harrison’s music, Cage wrote, “Listening to it / we become / ocean.” A visionary whose life and work are deeply rooted in the natural world, Adams inscribed the following statement on the score of Become Ocean, “Life on this earth first emerged from the sea. As the polar ice melts and sea level rises, we humans find ourselves facing the prospect that once again we may quite literally become ocean.”

Composer: John Luther Adams
Conductor: Ludovic Morlot
Orchestra/Ensemble: Seattle Symphony Orchestra

Reviews: Performed by the Seattle Symphony under the baton of Ludovic Morlot, the music casts an expressive arc that’s by turns intimate and expansive - an ebbing and flowing sonic journey that finds the composer testing the very limits of his imagination.

“The title is stolen from John Cage”, Adams reveals, “from a little mesostic poem that he wrote in honor of Lou Harrison. He compares Lou’s music to a river in delta, with all these different influences and currents, coming together in a big beautiful sweep of music. And in the last line of the poem, Cage writes, ‘Listening to it, we become ocean.’ I’ve always been struck by what a beautiful image that is.”

Become Ocean premiered in Seattle in June 2013, and made its Carnegie Hall debut on May 6, 2014. In recent years, Adams has moved to fold natural processes into his approach to composing - the 'earth' element came through in particular with Cantaloupe Music’s release in 2013 of his open-air percussion piece Inuksuit.

Now with the 'water' element represented in Become Ocean (and with 'wind' being an integral force in his latest piece Sila), Adams continues to accentuate what he sees as the vital importance, especially in this modern age of irony and isolation, of connecting to something larger than ourselves.

Mixed and mastered for stereo and 5.1 surround sound, Become Ocean is a truly immersive experience that is meant to be felt at an emotional level. “What I want for you as a listener”, Adams explains, “is to be right in the middle of the orchestra. Become Ocean lends itself very well to putting you in the middle of this ocean of sound, with these three sections of the orchestra ebbing and flowing, rising and falling, crashing over and swirling around each other. It rumbles the floor and tickles your backbone, and at the same time, you feel the depth of the waves and the spray of the sea. That’s what I’m reaching for.”