Speaking of Adams: In 2003, Berkeley's John (Coolidge) Adams won the Pulitzer Prize in Music; on April 14, Alaska's John (Luther) Adams won the 2014 Pulitzer for Music for his orchestral work Become Ocean.
J.L. Adams was born on Jan. 23, 1953, in Meridian, Mississippi; his music is inspired by nature, especially the landscapes of Alaska where he has lived since 1978.
Commissioned by the Seattle Symphony, which premiered the work last summer, Become Ocean is on the orchestra's schedule at its Carnegie Hall concert on May 6. The composer said of the work: "My hope is that the music creates a strange, beautiful, overwhelming — sometimes even frightening — landscape, and invites you to get lost in it."
Seattle Symphony Music Director Ludovic Morlot said:
"What really attracts me to a composer is the individuality in the voice — and John Luther Adams' music is very much inspired by the natural landscapes that are all around us. Become Ocean is written for three different orchestras, each of which has its own journey and rhythm. Three times in the piece they meet in that crucial moment, at the peak of their dynamics together. It's ultimately about you becoming an element of nature yourself, and disappearing in the whole landscape of things."
The composition was inspired by the oceans of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest and it's said to "immerse the audience in an organic and constantly evolving sound world that reflects the natural environment with an orchestral technique that is deeply original and unique to Adams."
"It may be the loveliest apocalypse in musical history," a New Yorker review said of Become Ocean. Adams spoke of its "sonic geography":
My music has led me beyond landscape painting with tones into the larger territory of "sonic geography" — a region that lies somewhere between place and culture, between human imagination and the world around us. My music is going inexorably from being about place to becoming place.
The score includes this inscription by Adams: "Life on this earth emerged from the sea. As the polar ice melts and sea level rises, we humans face the prospect that once again we may quite literally become ocean." See the composer describe his The Music of a True Place and talk about his work in general.
San Francisco Symphony will perform its first J.L. Adams work Feb. 26-March 1, 2015, the chamber version of The Light that Fills the World.