| Composer John Luther Adams prepares for his talk Thursday at BGSU (Photo: David Dupont/Sentinel-Tribune) |
John Luther Adams finds music all around him.
He finds in bird calls, traffic, the hum of circuitry, earthquakes, in light and silence and mathematics.
And while he celebrates music’s sensual side, the possibilities for "ravishing beauty," he
believes it can have a deeper purpose.
Adams sees it connected to ecology. "The central truth in ecology is that everything in this world
is connected to everything else. The great challenge facing the human species is to live by this truth.
We face a choice: We can reintegrate our fragmented consciousness and learn to live in harmony with the
larger patterns of life on this earth or we can risk our own extinction. … As a composer I believe
music can contribute to the reawakening of our ecological understanding by deepening our awareness of
our connections to the earth. Music can provide a sounding model for the renewal human consciousness and
culture."
Adams was delivering the composer talk for the New Music Festival now underway at Bowling Green State
University. The festival’s theme is "Music in the Physical World."
Adams said composing is matter of asking the right questions. Some questions are strictly musical
regarding rhythms, form, instrumentation.
Some questions probe deeper. "What is the value of art in a world that’s quite literally
melting?"
It is impossible to separate from the world, the composer said. "Music is how I understand the
world."
"For me music is a kind of applied physics. As a student I was always more interested more in
acoustics the physical nature of sound, than in music theory, our ideas about how to control
sound."
Composing requires the musician both to stand aside and analyze the work, as well as become immersed in
its beauties. This is akin to the relation of science and art.
Those endeavors share more than often recognized. The best scientists are every bit as creative as
artists, Adams said. "Artists, on the other hand, speak with similar clarity and force about the
centrality of observation and analytical thinking on our work."
Still reductionism in science has made people think of themselves as "apart from the world not a
part of the world" leading to a domination over nature that threatens human existence. And, he
said: "Art grounded exclusively in self-expression can indulge our conceit that somehow we stand
over and beyond the rest of life it can exacerbate our sense of alienation from the earth and other
species. … Perhaps the ultimate manifestation of this alienation is human caused climate change.
"Still art and science can teach us to transcend ourselves and guide us beyond our anthropocentric
obsessions to a more complete and integrated relationship with the world," he said.
"Science examines the way things are art imagines they way things might be," Adams said.
"Science and art heighten our sense wonder at the strange beauty, the astonishing complexity and
miraculous unity of creation.
"Listening to the multiplicity of sounds all around us we learn to hear the marvelous harmony they
create … hearing this harmony we come to understand our own place within it, how our own voices fit
into the larger, and endless music of the world."
