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- John Luther Adams
Become Ocean (2013)
- Taiga Press (BMI) (World)
- 3.3(ca).3(bcl).3(cbn)/4331/timp.3perc/2hp[+2hp].cel.pf/str
- 42 min
- 4th November 2023, Charlotte, NC, United States of America
Programme Note
Over the years my orchestral music has become simpler and more expansive.
Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing (1991-95) contains four different musical textures. In the White Silence (1998) has three. For Lou Harrison (2002) reduces this to just two.
In Dark Waves (2007), I finally got to one. When I first heard that piece I began to wonder if I could sustain a similar sound for a longer span of time. The result is Become Ocean, a meditation on the vast, deep and mysterious tides of existence.
The title is borrowed from a mesostic verse that John Cage wrote in honor of Lou Harrison's birthday. Likening Harrison's music to a river in delta, Cage writes:
LiStening to it
we becOme
oceaN.
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.
John Luther Adams
Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing (1991-95) contains four different musical textures. In the White Silence (1998) has three. For Lou Harrison (2002) reduces this to just two.
In Dark Waves (2007), I finally got to one. When I first heard that piece I began to wonder if I could sustain a similar sound for a longer span of time. The result is Become Ocean, a meditation on the vast, deep and mysterious tides of existence.
The title is borrowed from a mesostic verse that John Cage wrote in honor of Lou Harrison's birthday. Likening Harrison's music to a river in delta, Cage writes:
LiStening to it
we becOme
oceaN.
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.
John Luther Adams
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- International Wise Music Composers on our APAC stages
- 1st August 2023
- The works of well-respected composers, John Luther Adams, Hans Abrahamsen, Nico Muhly and Samuel Barber feature on stages in Australia, New Zealand and Singapore.