John Luther Adams

Summary

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Radiolab: "John Luther Adams" (October 3, 2014)

Podcast: Radiolab
Hosts: Jad Abumrad, Robert Krulwich (with excerpts from Nadia Sirota’s "Meet the Composer")
Main Guest: John Luther Adams

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Overview

This Radiolab episode spotlights the influential contemporary composer John Luther Adams, exploring how his life, environment, and philosophy shape his unusual and immersive musical works. Drawing extensively from Q2 Music’s “Meet the Composer” series, host Jad Abumrad introduces listeners to Adams’ unique approach, blending personal narratives, nature’s influence, and an expansive musical vision that bridges sound, environment, and emotion.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Challenge of Talking About Music

• [01:29] Jad Abumrad opens by acknowledging the difficulty of making discussions about music compelling and introduces "Meet the Composer" as a standout in this area.
  • “It's really hard to build a bridge. And so when people do it well, I just feel like you got to give them props.” — Jad Abumrad, [01:36]

2. Early Musical Influences

• [02:56] Nadia Sirota describes a young John Luther Adams and his rock band, playing covers of "the three Bs": The Beatles, The Beach Boys, and The Byrds.
• Adams recounts his boredom with covers, leading to an interest in songwriting and avant-garde artists like Frank Zappa:
  • “On the back of Frank's early LPs there would always be this intriguing little quote. The present day composer refuses to die. Edgar.” — John Luther Adams, [03:47]
  • Adams and friends discover the music of Edgard Varèse, immersing themselves in its wild, unfamiliar soundscapes.
  • “We hear this desert, this ocean, these forbidding mountains of sound, and I remember thinking, I'll never be able to know where I am in this.” — John Luther Adams, [04:35]

3. Learning to Listen Differently

• Adams describes a transformative process of learning to find "landmarks" in unfamiliar music and encourages young musicians to embrace what they do not like.
  • “Listen to everything you can get your ears on, especially the stuff you think you don't like.” — John Luther Adams, [05:18]

4. Embracing Birdsong and Nature

• [07:24] Adams describes turning to nature as a major teacher after school, particularly the study of birdsong.
  • He explains his series Songbird Songs (1974–79), where he tried “to take dictation” from birds, capturing their essence, not literal accuracy.
  • “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.” — John Luther Adams, [08:46]

5. Alienation in Los Angeles and Quest for "Home"

• [10:47] Adams confesses a deep sense of alienation while living in LA, contrasting creative excitement with personal dislocation:
  • “I felt lost, and not in a good way… there was this deep, inarticulate hunger to find a place to which I might belong.” — John Luther Adams, [10:47]

6. Alaska: The Transformative Landscape

• [11:48] Adams finds his true sense of belonging upon arriving in Alaska, captivated by its vastness and indifference to human presence.
  • “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.” — John Luther Adams, [12:07]
  • Memorable anecdote: Mistaking a faraway owl for a rock, illustrating how “you lose yourself in that place and in that endless space.” — John Luther Adams, [14:25]

7. The Physicality of Sound and Music’s Primal Nature

• [20:34] Discussion on how Adams' music channels natural processes—like masses of sound, waves, crescendos—rather than strict musical systems.
  • “It was about like the movement of bodies, you know, masses of sound that sort of crescendo, decrescendoed, waves.” — Jad Abumrad, [21:13]
  • Adams reflects on music as elemental, speaking from “just outside of culture,” but also acknowledges:
    • “Everything we do, everything we think, everything we think we create, everything we are, derives from the world that we inhabit." — John Luther Adams, [22:51]

8. Composing as a Meditative, Nocturnal Process

• [23:09] Adams explains his method of internal composition: holding music in his mind as long as possible, sometimes composing in his sleep.
  • “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.” — John Luther Adams, [23:26]

9. “Become Ocean” and Environmental Message

• [25:01] Adams’ Pulitzer-winning piece “Become Ocean” is introduced, inspired by his time near the Pacific and nightly sounds of waves.
  • The piece uses three orchestras to create musical “tsunamis,” reflecting both the origins of life and climate concerns:
    • “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.” — Jad Abumrad, [25:38]
  • Adams discusses balancing activism and pure music:
    • “This is a global warming piece...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.” — John Luther Adams, [26:57]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On finding landmarks in difficult music:

  • “Gradually we begin to learn how to listen to the forbidding deserts of Varèse.” — John Luther Adams, [05:13]

• On the landscape’s effect:

  • “Landscape is the culture that contains all human cultures.” — John Luther Adams quoting Barry Lopez, [22:12]

• On musical composition:

  • “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...” — John Luther Adams, [24:28]

• On music and nature:

  • “I've always imagined that I might be able to work in a space that's just outside of culture… it's been a useful conceit for me to feel that I'm after something that…is somehow more element.” — John Luther Adams, [21:32]

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Key Timestamps

• [01:35] The challenge of talking about music
• [02:56] Adams’ early years and discovery of Varèse
• [05:13] Learning to listen for landmarks in avant-garde music
• [07:24] Transition to birdsong and nature as teachers
• [10:47] State of alienation in LA, yearning for home
• [11:48] The Alaskan landscape’s transformative effect
• [20:34] Adams’ music as physical movement and natural forces
• [23:09] Nocturnal, meditative composition process
• [25:01] "Become Ocean," environmental themes, Adams on activism vs. pure music

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Tone & Feel

Curious, contemplative, and deeply appreciative—Radiolab’s hosts and the featured interviewees guide listeners through Adams’ sensory, philosophical, and ecological approach with warmth, awe, and a touch of gentle humor.

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Further Listening

• Full “Meet the Composer” episode on John Luther Adams at Q2 Music
• Adams’ Pulitzer-winning orchestral piece, “Become Ocean”
• String quartet “The Wind in High Places” (unreleased track previewed in the episode)

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Radiolab masterfully presents John Luther Adams as a composer rooted in both the physical and sonic landscapes of the world, making a compelling case for music as both a reflection of and an antidote to our sense of place, culture, and the natural world.

Transcript

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[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, wait, you're listening.

[Producer or Host Assistant]

Okay.

[Jad Abumrad]

All right. Okay.

[John Luther Adams]

All right.

[Jad Abumrad]

You're listening to Radio Lab.

[John Luther Adams]

Radio Lab from WNYC.

[Producer or Host Assistant]

And npr.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay. So, Robert, you know that, like, talking about music in a way that's compelling can be kind of hard.

[Robert Krulwich]

Very hard.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[Robert Krulwich]

Particularly the music you like.

[Jad Abumrad]

Exactly. It's really hard to build a bridge. And so when people do it well, I just feel like you 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 focus on one of my favorite composers, a guy by the name of John Luther Adams.

[Robert Krulwich]

Oh, the opera guy? John Adams.

[John Luther Adams]

No, no, no, no.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is John Luther Adams. Different John Adams than the other guy.

[Robert Krulwich]

I've heard of, John Quincy Adams, but he was a former president of the United States.

[Jad Abumrad]

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 seem sort of indifferent to you and maybe might kill you. It has that kind of feeling to it.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm intrigued. Okay, okay. So how does it begin? Like, we're gonna meet this guy.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah. So the documentary Begins and. And by the way, it's hosted by Nadia Sirota. It begins with John Luther Adams as a boy playing in a rock band.

[Nadia Sirota]

Imagine 14 year old John in a cover band in New Jersey, opening for acts like Buffalo Springfield and playing predominantly the three Bs. Who are the three Bs?

[John Luther Adams]

The Beatles, close your eyes, 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.

[Nadia Sirota]

Frank zappa, the teetotalling 1960s and 70s musician and polymath with wildly eccentric tastes spanning from rock to jazz to European.

[John Luther Adams]

Modernism, 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. Edgar. My little rock and roll buddies and I would read that and scratch our heads and wonder, who is this far easy guy, right? And one day my friend 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 COVID with a great shock of electrostatic graying hair, bushy eyebrows and this stern countenance. And the title was the Music of Edgar, 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, 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 onto.

[Nadia Sirota]

So your response to what is this music? Was just to immerse yourself?

[John Luther Adams]

Give me more.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[John Luther Adams]

Which has always been my response to any new experience. And I often encourage young musicians, especially young composers, you know, 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 on 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 and the rest of the percussion. Gradually we begin to learn how to listen to the forbidding deserts of Varennes.

[Nadia Sirota]

Did that affect the music you guys were making?

[John Luther Adams]

Oh, sure. It meant that the process that was already underway was just accelerated. We, we rapidly abandoned the, the 1, 4, 5 chords and the backbeat and the 4 bar phrases and started discovering cage And Feldman and Caro and Paulina Livaros and Ruth Crawford and on and on. So thank you, Frank Zappa.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Robert Krulwich]

No.

[Jad Abumrad]

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. It's 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.

[John Luther Adams]

I had just left CalArts, hadn't yet gone to Alaska, and I would take long 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 teachers after James Tenney. And the result was a series of pieces that I composed between 1974 and 79, called simply Songbird Songs.

[Nadia Sirota]

What was the translation process between hearing this bird song that you just couldn't get enough of and constructing a narrative?

[John Luther Adams]

In working with the bird 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 it'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 the 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 hear, 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

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 LA and he gets kind of fed up.

[John Luther Adams]

I 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. 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 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.

[Nadia Sirota]

The place where Adams belonged, it turns out, was off the grid in wild, open spaces.

[John Luther Adams]

I went north in the summer of 1975. So I was 22 that summer. And from the moment I arrived, I knew I'd found home.

[Nadia Sirota]

When you showed up in Alaska, what did you see, what did you hear that made you feel like you knew you were home?

[John Luther Adams]

Where to begin. It all really starts in the summer of 1975, when I first canoed across Admiralty island, went into Glacier Bay, hiked on the tundra of Denali, 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 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 love, larger, older world that we still inhabit, but that we. 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. We said, well, why don't we walk over there? Why don't we hike 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, 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

We're hearing bits from Q2 Music's Meet the Composer series, this one on John Luther Adams. We'll continue in a moment. Foreign.

[John Luther Adams]

This is Darlene calling from Kampala, Uganda. Radiolab 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 [e-mail].

[Producer or Host Assistant]

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[Producer or Host Assistant]

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[Jad Abumrad]

We're back. I'm Chad Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Krulwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab and we're taking a. We're taking this podcast to present some music.

[Robert Krulwich]

Right.

[Jad Abumrad]

I'm foisting it on you, Robert, and on our listeners.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yes, but you notice that I'm not.

[John Luther Adams]

I'm not.

[Jad Abumrad]

You're not running away scared. 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, a 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 the like thump, thump, thump, thump has a sort of an inherent meaning to feels like falling.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, it's the music of action, falling.

[Jad Abumrad]

Bumping, bumping, tiptoeing, bonking. 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.

[John Luther Adams]

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, that is not. It's not part of a musical tradition. It's not specifically cultural. It's somehow more element.

[Nadia Sirota]

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.

[John Luther Adams]

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.

[Nadia Sirota]

Thinking about, like, the way that we are discovering how memory and the brain works. And every time you remember something, you're actually recreating a story.

[John Luther Adams]

Yes.

[Nadia Sirota]

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.

[John Luther Adams]

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. At a certain point, I lose it and I drift off to sleep.

[Jad Abumrad]

That nocturnal composition process is apparently what happened with John Luther Adams most recent and most famous piece. This is a piece I literally tried to copy during our recent apocalyptical tour. And it just won him the Pulitzer Prize. 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. Well, here he is in a conversation with WQXR's Helga Davis.

[John Luther Adams]

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.

[Robert Krulwich]

See, it is very, very outdoors. Yeah. And it's, it's, it's without. It seems like it hasn't have people in it at all. It has just openness.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah. You're floating on the surface if you're there at all.

[Jad Abumrad]

One of the many reasons you should go to iTunes and download Q2's Meet the Composers 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 Sirota, Alex Overton and Thea Chaloner and Alex Ambrose for allowing us to play some excerpts. I'm Jad Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Krulwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

Thanks for listening.

[John Luther Adams]

Sa.