A couple of my recent blogs – here and here — have saluted John Luther Adams as “among the most esteemed present-day American composers for orchestra. . . . Encountering Adams’s Become Ocean on a 21st-century symphonic program is so fundamentally enthralling that it risks cliché. It is the proverbial oasis in the desert. The Sahara here is contemporary American concert music inscribed in sand.”
Long a resident of Alaska, then of the American southwest, Adams moved to Australia two years ago. In a recent piece for Australia’s The Saturday Paper, he addresses “Why I moved from the US to Australia.” You can read it here.
Some excerpts worth pondering:
–“The culture creates the politics and, with tongue lightly in cheek, I’ve taken to referring to my wife and myself as ‘cultural refugees.’ The relentless commercialization, rising tides of xenophobia, the strident acrimony of social discourse, the violence and the increasingly hysterical tenor of life in the USA have simply worn us down. We are among the few privileged enough to be able to leave.”
–“I’ve come to believe that ultimately art does more than politics to change the world. Music is not what I do, it’s how I understand the world.”
–“I don’t believe that politics will change fundamentally until culture changes. Throughout history, the ideas that transform societies have come from writers, painters, novelists, poets, even composers. From scientists, philosophers, theologians and others whose lives are dedicated to asking new questions, to seeking beauty and truth, not power.”
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