The American arts are receding and blurring. Cultural memory—a prerequisite—is fast disappearing. American orchestras, espousing the new, privilege a surfeit of makeshift eclectic music dangerously eschewing lineage. American opera companies flaunt new American operas that are here today and gone tomorrow. What is needed is an informed quest for orientation, for future direction.
The Italian-born composer-pianist Ferruccio Busoni was a clairvoyant who will never cease to magnetize a coterie of adherents. In his Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music (1907), Busoni proposed the notion of “Ur-Musik.” It is an elemental realm of absolute music in which composers have approached the “true nature of music” by discarding traditional templates. Sonata form, since the times of Haydn and Mo…
The American arts are receding and blurring. Cultural memory—a prerequisite—is fast disappearing. American orchestras, espousing the new, privilege a surfeit of makeshift eclectic music dangerously eschewing lineage. American opera companies flaunt new American operas that are here today and gone tomorrow. What is needed is an informed quest for orientation, for future direction.
The Italian-born composer-pianist Ferruccio Busoni was a clairvoyant who will never cease to magnetize a coterie of adherents. In his Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music (1907), Busoni proposed the notion of “Ur-Musik.” It is an elemental realm of absolute music in which composers have approached the “true nature of music” by discarding traditional templates. Sonata form, since the times of Haydn and Mozart a basic organizing principle governed by goal-directed harmonies, would be no more.
Half a century ago, Ur-Musik could be written off as a faint footnote to twin seminal 20th-century currents: Igor Stravinsky’s neoclassicism and Arnold Schoenberg’s serial rigor. But no longer. John Luther Adams, among the most esteemed present-day American composers for orchestra, embraces something like it. And his forebears include composers of renewed consequence: Jean Sibelius in his primordial tone poem Tapiola (1926) and Charles Ives in his unfinished Universe Symphony (begun in 1915).
Around the same time, before locking on his 12-tone rows, Schoenberg experimented with an unmoored nontonal style. He was concurrently corresponding with Busoni, who also conferred with Sibelius. In an email exchange, I learned from Adams that, while composing his Pulitzer Prize–winning Become Ocean (2013), “the only music I was listening to was Tapiola.” I brought up Ives’s Universe Symphony and suggested that Adams was “post-Ivesian.” He readily agreed. So there are dots—big ones—to connect.
Might there not be lineage here?
The story of John Luther Adams will become increasingly familiar as his music continues to penetrate our recalcitrant concert halls. Now more than 70 years old, he is very much a phenomenon of the present day—and yet anchored in sediments ages older than academia or the concert hall.
Born in Mississippi, he was a rock drummer who habituated Greenwich Village as a teenager. He graduated from the California Institute for the Arts and became a farmhand in Georgia. He moved to Alaska in 1978 and worked for the Northern Alaska Environmental Center before turning exclusively to music. As timpanist for the Fairbanks Symphony, he was privileged to inhabit the symphonic canon—but only after his creative bearings were fixed. The tragedy of Alaska wildfires drove him to the southwestern United States, where he now resides.
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. The ocean Adams supplies is equally physical and metaphysical. Its tides heave and recede. In place of tunes, it proposes shifting modulations of texture, pulse, and harmony. The harmonies are triadic but barely directional; they shimmer atop anchoring brass choirs. Two listening planes are volunteered: The grateful ear can track harmony and structure or relax into near stasis, but the stasis is not decorative or sybaritic. This water has teeth. Art conceals art. The latent organization (I have read) invokes fractals, chaos theory, waveforms. The entire 45-minute span describes a palindrome. A composer’s note explains the title: “Life on this earth first emerged from the sea. And 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.” There is also this preliminary instruction marked in the score: “inexorable.”
In the excitement of discovery, the listener asks, From where does Become Ocean arise? And where might it lead? Is Adams an inspired epiphenomenon? The question nags because we have lost our musical bearings in a flood as superficial as Adams is not.
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Joseph Horowitz’s forthcoming book is a novel about Anton Seidl and Wagnerism in America, * The Disciple: A Wagnerian Tale of the Gilded Age. * His books-in-progress are * Bearing Witness: The American Odyssey of Leonard Bernstein * and * Why Ives? A Celebration of Cultural Memory. *