John Luther Adams Interview with Bruce Duffie . . . . . . . . .

Composer John Luther Adams

A Conversation with Bruce Duffie

John Luther Adams (born January 23, 1953) is an American composer whose music is inspired by nature, especially the landscapes of Alaska, where he lived from 1978 to 2014. His orchestral work Become Ocean was awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music.

Born in Meridian, Mississippi, Adams began playing music as a teenager as a drummer in rock bands. He attended the California Institute of the Arts as an undergraduate in the early 1970s, studying with James Tenney and Leonard Stein, and graduated in 1973. After graduating, Adams began work in environmental protection, and through this work Adams first traveled to Alaska in 1975.

Adams moved to Alaska in 1978 and lived there until 2014. From 1982 to 1989, he performed as timpanist and principal percussionist with the Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra and the Arctic Chamber Orchestra. He now splits his time between New York and the Sonoran Desert in Mexico, though his time in Alaska continues to be a prominent influence in his music.

Just as we have two presidents, John Adams and John Quincy Adams, we have two very prominent composers — John Adams and John Luther Adams. Both are winners of the Pulitzer Prize, and both have gained wide-ranging fame for their music. My guest in this interview is the one with three names, and, as he mentions near the end of our conversation, he would have rather just been known as ‘John’. Fate and circumstance have denied him that luxury. However, we are fortunate to have his music in performance and on recordings.

As always, links on this page refer to my interviews elsewhere on this website, and the one above takes you to ‘the other guy’.

This conversation took place just as Adams was emerging as a major figure. At the beginning of 1989, he was gaining knowledge and experience, and yet had formulated many of his most mature thoughts about both music and its place in society. When we met, he gladly told me about what he was doing and how he was thinking, and his resolutions then have expanded into the solid figure we know today, thirty years later.

Back then, his life included travel to arrange for performances of his music, and on a visit to Chicago he stopped for a chat, which is presented here . . . . . . . . .

Bruce Duffie:   Are you able to travel as much as you would like to get to performances of your works?

John Luther Adams:   Yes and no. In some ways I’m traveling more than I like. I travel a great deal, and I wish there were more performances of my works so that I could have that reason to travel more. I’ve been in Alaska, now, for almost a dozen years, and one of the reasons that I’m able to stay is that I am traveling more these days. I’m able to get out and work with other musicians besides those in Alaska, and meet them and hear works by other composers, and generally get the kind of musical stimulation that I don’t get there. That’s very satisfying to me, although sometimes it’s pretty exhausting to travel as much as I do. But it does allow me to stay there, and I’m happy with that. I stay in Alaska because it’s my spiritual home.

BD:   You’ve composed in various places. Is Alaska a special place for you to create your music?

JLA:   Oh, absolutely.

BD:   Why? Tell me about it.

JLA:   You’ve been to Alaska yourself, so you already know that it’s one of the most special places on the face of the Earth. It’s special to me for a number of reasons. Like many people of my generation — middle-class Americans in a post-war era — I grew up in many different places around the country, and in a certain sense, all the different places in which I grew up were more or less interchangeable. There was a certain suburban homogenous quality to them, and in a very deep sense I don’t think I had a home until I found Alaska.

BD:   Being uprooted, didn’t the sameness lend a certain amount of stability?

JLA:   I suppose, but a rather bland stability, somewhat devoid of a spiritual foundation. Maybe for the very reason that I grew up in so many different places in peripatetic way, a sense of place is very, very important to me, both as an individual human being and as a creative artist. My relationship with place, and particularly with the place in which I’ve chosen to live, is a very deep source for me.

BD:   This is reflected in the mental process as the music is going through you onto the paper. Is it also reflected in the sounds we hear that are going to the listener’s ear?

JLA:   Certainly some would be. It is reflected in the sound of the music. Not always! There are some of my pieces, for instance, A Northern Suite or The Far Country of Sleep, or a more recent orchestral work in which the actual sound of the music can someway echo the sounds of the environment in which I live. There are other pieces that are much more abstract in the usual sense of the word, and in which the sounds of the music are not necessarily influenced audibly by the sounds of the place in which I live. But still, there’s a certain attitude that comes across in the music.

BD:   Can they tell when your music is particularly Alaskan?

JLA:   I don’t know. I like to think in the best sense of that word ‘Alaskan’ that, yes, people can tell.

BD:   Is it Alaskan, or is it just northern? Could it be Finland, or Iceland, or northern Siberia?

JLA:   I suppose it could. I’ve been to northern Scandinavia, and there’s a great similarity. I’ve not been to Siberia, although this year I may get to go. There is a certain similarity all the way around the circumpolar region, and not only environmentally. There’s a great deal of cultural similarity in the indigenous peoples of the north all the way around the globe.

BD:   So it could be kind of a polar music?

JLA:   Oh, sure. That’s possible. It’s an intriguing prospect. It has a lot to do with the purity, the austerity, the starkness, the emptiness, and the vastness of the open spaces in the north, as well as that pristine quality, that sublime quality. That is very, very important to me, and I don’t think it’s necessarily unique to the north. That’s where I experience it most directly and most deeply, but some of those very same qualities can be experienced in other landscapes — the desert landscapes, or, to use John Cage’s term from the wonderful title of a wonderful piece of his from fifty or so years ago, in Imaginary Landscapes, or the landscapes of the mind... Varèse’s Déserts, for instance. [According to Varèse, the title of the piece regards “not only physical deserts of sand, sea, mountains, and snow, outer space, deserted city streets… but also distant inner space… where man is alone in a world of mystery and essential solitude.”]

BD:   Now you’re thinking of various composers, and you’re mentioning some. Do you feel you are part of a lineage of composers, both American and international?

JLA:   [Sighs] That’s a very complex question for me to answer right now. [Remember, this interview was done in 1989, when Adams was just emerging as an important force in music.] I’ve been doing a lot of thinking in the last couple of years about my relationship to Western culture. We live in a very odd time in history. We’re living in the midst of a culture in serious decline, perhaps even at the stage of decadence. The culture to which I’m referring is the North American variation of Western European culture. So what does it mean to be a composer, especially one so far removed from the cultural capitals of that technological society as we approach the Millennium? Those are questions that I’m dealing with constantly in my own work, and in my thinking about my work. There are certainly composers of the European classical tradition who have had very profound influences on me. The most profound influences have been composers who have been working in that tradition in this country in this century, Twentieth Century American composers such as Varèse, for instance, or John Cage, or Morton Feldman, who is a very, very profound influence on me, and on many other younger composers. Also, there is Lou Harrison, who as one of my very favorite people, as well as one of my very favorite composers. Lou is a great master in the same sense that an Aaron Copland is a great master of American music, and I think people are beginning to understand that now.

BD: Are you becoming a great master of American music?

JLA:   [Laughs] Oh, it’s too early to tell that. I’m just enjoying myself. I just had my thirty-sixth birthday in Mexico last week, and I feel as though I’m just now on the verge of beginning to compose mature works, and that’s a very, very exciting prospect.

BD:   Does that mean you’re setting aside The Northern Suite and all the other early works?

JLA:   Oh no, no! I’m not renouncing anything. The Northern Suite is a problematical piece. The earliest sketches for that piece date from 1975, and I’m still not finished with it. There are other pieces of mine that come the first time, and they never change. The Northern Suite is a particularly difficult one for me, and in certain ways the recording that you have of it on the Opus One record no longer satisfies me.

BD:   Then what you do way when someone comes up to you and says the recording is wonderful?

JLA:   I love it, and I say, “Thank you. I’m glad it reached you,” because that, after all, was the most important thing.

BD:   Should you still be tinkering with that piece, or should you put it aside and do something new?

JLA:   That one I’m only tinkering with because it won’t die. People perform it, and it seems that every time someone decides to perform it, I want to do something else with it. All I’ve got to do now is to get one final movement right. The fifth movement, Rivers of Ice, has been the most worrisome for me, and I’m on the verge of getting that right. It’s a very difficult piece because it’s so simple, because it so austere, and because it has so many of the qualities that we were talking about just a moment ago that are inherent in the Northern landscape. It’s very difficult to write music that is that spare, that is so stripped down, because every single sound that every player in the orchestra makes, counts, and every single note that I write on the page, counts. Of course, every single note that every composer writes on the page, counts, but in the context of a piece like that, it’s even more difficult. It’s difficult to get something like that right.

BD:   Would it actually be easier to write a big bombastic Bruckner symphony?

JLA:   I don’t know whether it would be or not. I’ve written some noisy, notesy pieces in my time, and in a certain way, yes, they are easier. But those are not the kinds of pieces generally that interest me. It’s not what I’m about.

* * * * *

JLA:   You were asking about influences, or feeling part of a certain lineage. I mentioned a few composers who’ve been very, very important to me, and I could add a few others to that list, certainly Harry Partch, and my principal teacher, James Tenney, who is known as the best-known obscure composer in the North America [laughs]. He was a very strong influence on me, and also a number of other younger composers.

BD:   Now, wherever you are, you’re writing music. You’ve always got the music in your head, and it’s filtering down. So, even if you write a few lines in Mexico, it’s still Alaskan music?

JLA:   Yes, and no. Speaking of influences, maybe the greatest influence in my musical life has been not so much the music of other composers, but the music of the natural world, and indigenous music, particularly music of the Americas. For the last several years — for fifteen years or more, actually — without being aware of it I’ve been working towards some sort of an idea of a new indigenous music. That sounds a little presumptuous, and a little bit self-conscious, but what I mean by that is music that really grows out of a particular place, out of the cultural and the natural environment of a particular place. It is music that evolves slowly, through long and intimate association with a certain place, and the cultural and natural life of that place. That began for me with the songbirdsongs back in the early ’70s. The first of those dates from 1974, and it has been a concern that has occupied me in various ways ever since. So yes, in a certain sense, no matter where I’m sketching, my music is Alaskan. But in another real sense, if I’m working, say, with the bird song in Chiapas, Mexico, then I hope that the music I make from that bird song really does belong to that place, does belong to Chiapas, and really does spring directly out of the sources of that place, and my creative response to those sources and to that place.

BD:   If you want a piece to be really Alaskan, do you hold off and wait until you get home?

JLA:   Sometimes I do, but Alaska is so much a part of me, and is my home in such a deep way, that I carry it with me wherever I am. So it’s not always necessary for me to wait. The Alaskan-ness is an inescapable part of who I am and what I do now. This coming summer I’m very much looking forward to spending the entire summer, brief though it may be, out in the mountains, and on the rivers, and the glaciers, and back out in the bush in Alaska. I’m beginning a new set of pieces with the working title Earth and the Great Weather. It will be a series of instrumental pieces, with occasionally perhaps some texts and some vocalizing, composed in direct response to the soundscape, as Canadian composer Murray Schafer calls it. That is, the sounds of the natural environment. So, I will be out there listening in a very deep way, and writing in response to that.

BD:   You, more than others, seem to be affected by the environment in your sounds and what goes onto the paper. When you’re holding the pencil, are you in control of it, or is that pencil really controlling you?

JLA:   Sometimes the pencil controls me, and sometimes I control the pencil. With each piece it’s a little bit different, but generally speaking, I’m beginning to think that when I’m controlling the pencil, what comes out is generally not the good stuff, and when the good stuff comes out, it’s when the pencil is controlling me. The music that writes itself generally tends to be the real music. If I’m working too hard on something, and if it’s too much like pulling teeth or performing brain surgery, then generally it’s lacking in that essence.

BD:   Is writing music as important as brain surgery?

JLA:   Oh, every bit as important as brain surgery. Writing music is absolutely vital.

BD:   Let me ask the big philosophical question then. What is the purpose of music in society?

JLA:   That is the biggest question, isn’t it? We were talking earlier about my feelings as to where we are in history, and in the evolution or the decline of what’s been culture. My preoccupation of these questions is to ask what I am doing at this stage in history, devoting my life to this archaic art or craft of writing music. Incidentally, I believe there are more developments, said I used to say that the questions were far more important than the answers. I love the questions, but part of my tentative answer to that very, very large question of what am I doing, is that I’m trying to search for the roots, or the beginnings — the seeds, if you will — of a new culture, which again sounds very grandiose and very presumptuous, and I don’t mean it that way. It’s really a very humble and very small thing that I do, and there are many, many, many other people out there who are working in the same way, trying to search for some way to vitalize, or recreate our culture.

BD:   Is it a new culture, or is it a new spring in the old culture?

JLA:   I don’t know. Only history will tell us that. But what we’re trying to do — as best we know how, and to the extent that we’re aware of it — is to reconnect with the most ancient, deepest sources. I believe that the natural world, and our relationship with the natural world — as inescapably we are part of the natural world — is in a very real way at the absolute foundation. It’s the bedrock of civilization. My friend, Barry Lopez, made a remark in a conversation that stuck with me for years. He said that, “Landscape is the culture that contains all human cultures.” That’s a very profound statement, and it encapsulates very eloquently for me what it is that I’m doing in my work as a composer, in my very small way. [Barry Holstun Lopez (born January 6, 1945) is an American author, essayist, and fiction writer whose work is known for its humanitarian and environmental concerns. He won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for Arctic Dreams (1986) and his Of Wolves and Men (1978) was a National Book Award finalist.]

* * * * *

BD:   You brought up the idea that there are many others working in the same kind of field. Are there perhaps too many composers writing music today?

JLA:   Yes, but not me! [Both laugh] I’ve heard a lot of music over the last several years, going around to different cities and taking part in different performances, festivals, and so on. I’ve also been on a few panels, reviewing scores and tapes for programs, or for prizes. I’ve seen and heard a lot of music, and I’ve been absolutely astounded at the shear fecundity and technical brilliance of composers working out there today. There are so many composers out there who have so much more technique, in a strict musical sense, than I will ever have, and I stand in awe of that. And yet, a lot of that music is strangely devoid of real spiritual content. I don’t want to say that there are too many composers writing out there, and these half a dozen, or dozen, should stop writing, [both laugh] but maybe we do have a little bit of art pollution. You also asked about the purpose of music, and I’ve recently come back to a little saying from India, by way of John Cage, that has meant a lot to me, and applies very directly to the work that I do. It is very, very profound, and addresses very directly the question. Cage asked an Indian musician about the purpose of music, and the answer that he received was, “To quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences.” I like that very much. There’s another thing that Cage relates, which is not an original thought with him, at least his own words, and that is, “To imitate nature in her manner of operation.” That doesn’t necessarily mean to write program music, and it doesn’t mean that everyone should be out writing songbirdsongs. But there is a vast territory described by that simple statement. After all, we are part of nature too, and the human mind, and the human imagination is as much a part of nature as the physical eco-system of Baffin Island. But that is a very elegant, and a very enormous statement about the purpose of music that I like very much. I’m not sure I understand it, but I love it.

BD:   You’re working on the understanding?

JLA:   Yes.

BD:   Where’s the balance between the artistic achievement and a potential entertainment value?

JLA:   That’s another very, very difficult question. I’m not sure I understand what the word ‘entertainment’ means, and maybe no one really does. We have a mass-market understanding of entertainment... Michael Jackson is entertainment.

BD:   The Chicago Bears are entertainment?

JLA:   The Chicago Bears are great entertainment.

BD:   Is an Alaskan sunrise entertainment?

JLA:   It certainly entertains me.

BD:   Let me change it a little. Is watching whales playing in the bay entertainment?

JLA:   Oh, that’s great fun! Maybe you just hit on the key to the concept, the notion of entertainment. Maybe it’s not so much sitting back and watching something, as it is participating in something, or playing with something. That word ‘play’ is very, very important, and certainly, in any creative act — whether it is the act of writing a piece of music, or the act of watching whales play, or the act of creatively listening to a piece of music — any act like that which engages a person in a direct authentic experience in which they are participating, is of the essence of both creativity in the deepest sense, and entertainment. It’s fun. It’s play. You’re playing with the universe. You’re paying with creation, and that’s entertaining.

BD:   What do you expect of the audience that comes to hear a piece of your music?

JLA:   That’s another big, big question. I think of the audience constantly, and I try to forget them constantly, and most composers would probably give you some personal version of that kind of answer. I care very, very much about the individual listener, and I want very, very much to touch you as an individual. I don’t subscribe to the notion that I am a composer, and I have these things that I must do, or that I must say, or that I must compose and let the chips fall where they may. The world can come to me, or the world can go to hell... I don’t have that kind of attitude. I care very, very deeply about the individual listener, and I keep the individual listener in mind. I don’t think so much in terms of the larger mass audience, but rather that one-to-one communication, that direct experience of sharing with another person. Schafer says that sound is a way of touching at a distance, and I like that very much. It’s a very beautiful capsulation of what it is to share music with someone. I love it when I learn something from a listener, from someone who tells me — after they’ve heard a piece of mine in a concert or on a recording — something I didn’t know about it. That’s what completes the circle.

BD:   Is your first communication with the performer, as opposed to the listener?

JLA:   No, my first communication is with the music, and what that is, exactly, I can’t tell you. But that initial impulse, the source of which the music originally springs, is removed from the listener and from the performer, and, in its purest stage, even for myself. After all that’s what Cage is talking about, and it’s certainly what Zen Buddhism and other great disciplines are about. It’s ultimately what the creative act is about — transcending ourselves, and losing ourselves in that larger participation with the act of creation and with creation as a whole. We are playing with the universe again.

BD:   Is composing fun?

JLA:   Oh, it’s great fun! It’s also hard, hard work. There’s a lot of grunt involved in composing, especially in the old-fashioned way in which I compose — that is, notes on paper. There’s a lot of drudgery.

BD:   There’s a lot of composers now doing it on computer.

JLA:   Yes, but I haven’t done it yet. It’s not so much of any philosophical objection, but I haven’t yet found the right system. I’m not really interested in synthesizer sounds. They really don’t have the richness and the complexity of acoustical sounds. They don’t satisfy my ear. But I am interested in finding a note-processor — software and a machine to run it that will allow me to not go through each successive draft of a piece. God knows how many drafts The Northern Suite has been through in long-hand!

BD:   So, once the sounds are there, then it is just the mechanics?

JLA:   Just to be able to move things around, and edit, and then spit out parts, and put my poor copyist out of business. That part of it I’m very much interested in, and I haven’t taken the plunge yet. But it’s just because I haven’t found the right system, and also there’s a certain investment of time to learn how to run the new equipment.

BD:   Cecil Effinger is working on that with IBM. When he was in Chicago, he showed me some of the stuff that the machine is printing out. It’s just beautiful. It’s like it’s engraved.

JLA:   Yes. In just the last six months I’ve gotten six or seven different fliers from companies that have come out with a new generation of more sophisticated software, and it’s really quite impressive.

* * * * *

BD:   Have you basically been pleased with the performances you’ve heard of your music over the years?

JLA:   [Sighs] You are asking the tough questions, aren’t you? [Laughs] I certainly don’t want to slight anyone, but by virtue of the fact that I have chosen to live and work where I do, I have made certain compromises or sacrifices. One of those is that I’m not living in a large metropolitan area where there are umpteen thousand fabulous musicians hungry to play new music. So, quite often I’m dealing with amateur musicians of limited technical abilities. Quite often that doesn’t matter, because many of my pieces are rather simple technically. Some of my performances, and some of my recorded performances have been very, very satisfying to me. There are things that I have on tape that are ten years old, and that I still think are just fine. Other things haven’t aged so well, and there are certain pieces of mine that I’m still waiting to hear for the first time, or that have been performed but haven’t satisfied me.

BD:   Do you write mostly on commission?

JLA:   I write mostly on commission, or for occasions, yes. I haven’t in years written a piece in the abstract, and just put it on the shelf, or sent it out in the mail trying to find someone to perform it. I’ve been very fortunate in that sense. I have an abundance of sketches and ideas for pieces, and those have always seemed to find a match with a performing group, and an occasion, and quite often a commission. That is the best of circumstances.

BD:   Have you ever turned down a commission?

JLA:   I gave one back last year simply because I was too overloaded. I had too many things going, and I was embarrassed to have to do that, but I felt great after I did it. It was a wonderful feeling.

BD:   Do you work on one piece at a time, or several pieces at a time?

JLA:   Generally, when I’m in the stage of writing lots of notes on paper, I limit it to one piece at a time. The earlier stages — sketching, or the broader conceptual stages of pieces — I can be working on several different things at once. For instance, just this last month when I’ve been traveling in Mexico, I’ve been sketching the preliminary stages on three or four or five different pieces. Some ideas came along on the trip, and, at the same time, I was writing notes on paper for one piece. But generally I’m not actively engaged in intensive composing on more than piece at a time.

BD:   When you start out working on a piece, are you conscious of how long it will take to perform, even when you’re just doing the sketches?

JLA:   Yes, generally I am. In the new set of pieces that I’m going to begin working on this summer, Earth and the Great Weather, I’m going to make an attempt to be less pre-occupied with that notion of temporal framing. In fact, I may be writing this piece so that there will be a possibility of a given section being done in several different versions with several different durations. But generally, yes, I set out and I know that this is going to be a six-minute piece, or this is going to be a ten- to fifteen-minute piece. Sometimes the music runs out before I thought it would, and other times it goes on a little bit longer than I thought it would. But just now, as I’m beginning to work on Earth and the Great Weather, I really am beginning to think in terms of a temporal scale, and that’s something I’ve been concerned with for a long time. Recently, at the New Music America Festival in Miami, I heard several of the late works of Morton Feldman, which, as you know, are of very, very long duration. His second string quartet goes on for five and a half hours, and he wrote a series of three trios that run from forty minutes to four and a half hours. That was a very profound experience for me as a listener as well as a composer, and that experience, coupled with the experience of conducting a performance of Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra, have gotten me thinking again about the notion of how we frame pieces of music in terms of time, and how time flows within those frames, and really how limited, and almost formulaic the tempo of Western music is. Generally speaking, your average piece of contemporary music is ten to twenty minutes long, and it has a beginning, a middle and an end. All that’s great and wonderful, but maybe there are other ways of dealing with musical time. That’s one of the very profound things that listening to the sounds of the natural world can do for us, for human music. This can alter our sense of time and time perception, because so many of the sounds in the natural world are so much longer, or so much shorter than the universe of durations that we deal with in concert music. Another wonderful thing about the sounds of the natural world, in terms and their implications for my musical semantics, is that most of our Western music is based on the notion of relationships — this sound to that sound, an interval, a linear development, a recurring theme. But in the natural world, although there are certainly recurring themes, each sound generally tends to have its own independent life, and the relationships between the sounds are certainly more spontaneous, but they’re also more complex. These are all very abstract ideas, but it’s just to tell you a little bit about why I am working with the sources that I am. It’s not just my love for the mountains, and the birds, and the wild places. It’s also that I really believe in terms, strictly of the semantics of our musical language, that we have a great deal to learn from imitating nature in her manner of operation.

BD:   It gives us an idea in the working mind of the musician.

JLA:   I think it’s really at the root of so many of our artistic forms and energies.

BD:   [Noting the natural stopping point of the conversation] Let me get you do a station break for us. [Hands him a card which read, “Hello. This is ______, and you are listening to WNIB, Classical 97, in Chicago.”] Just insert your name, and read that, please.

JLA:   Sure. I guess I should use all three names?

BD:   I was going to ask how you prefer to be called.

JLA:   I prefer to be called John! [Laughs]

BD: [In an exceptionally highfalutin announcer-type voice] Next, we have some music by John! [Both laugh]

JLA: Professionally, I would like to be John Adams, but I have gotten used to using my middle name in the last several years just out of sheer necessity. [Reads the station break, using all three names]

BD:   Thank you. It has been a pleasure to speak with you today, and I wish you continued success in your career. We certainly will hear a lot more from you.

JLA: I hope so. Thank you very much.

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This conversation was recorded in Chicago on January 27, 1989. Portions were broadcast on WNIB in 1993 and 1998. The unedited audio was also placed in the Oral History of American Music Archive at Yale University. This transcription was made in 2020, and posted on this website at that time. My thanks to British soprano Una Barry for her help in preparing this website presentation.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here.

Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001. His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.

You are invited to visit his website for more information about his work, including selected transcripts of other interviews, plus a full list of his guests. He would also like to call your attention to the photos and information about his grandfather, who was a pioneer in the automotive field more than a century ago. You may also send him E-Mail with comments, questions and suggestions.