John Luther Adams - Peaceful and Powerful Waves

American composer John Luther Adams's “Become Ocean” is a Pulitzer Prize for Music and Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition winning orchestral piece that captures the ideas of composing with nature or nature as a composer. It is part of the so-called “Become” trilogy and was followed by “Become River” and “Become Desert” in 2014 and 2018 respectively. 

Imagine sitting at the edge of a cliff or fjord in Alaska facing the sun’s rays which reflect on the Bering sea’s surface which is covered by sheets of floating ice. Waves crawl underneath the floating ice, letting the observer forget that only the powerful strokes of the water underneath could heave those sheets that seem immovable otherwise. Peaceful, right? Sit back, relax and enjoy the majestic and awe-inspiring force of the oceans’ nature. As distant and small as the ocean’s waves may seem, there lurks an ever so slight but noticeable sense of menace underneath its surface. What if the waves crashing with ice and rocks and even mountains made their way towards less resilient objects? What if human-made buildings and constructions meet the might of an unstoppable force? John Luther Adams created a special piece of music that firstly raises those questions and secondly answering them: the glaring harps, percussions including the marimba, vibraphone, and crotales provide for the constant and distant peacefulness and calmness of the ocean, which is used by some people as a means to relax. The chordophones belonging to the violin family create both the illusion of the ocean’s seemingly infinite size as well as mass with their open-ended play style and the steady current and resupply of endless amounts of water. The ocean’s attributes are encapsulated by a group of different instruments. The percussions namely the bass drums as well as the trombones and tubas which now and then appear more loudly although they never fade entirely stress water mass’s vastness and powerfulness, and its possible threat to human-made structures.  John Luther Adam’s “Become Ocean” is an expressive composition that makes a case for climate and its threat to humanity. It perfectly grasps the innocence, peacefulness, and beauty of one of nature’s most powerful forces while asserting its unstoppable force through the skilful arrangement of serene percussions and strings with mighty and striking blasts of bass drums and aerophones.