Music can also be a form of contemplation: the sensual reaching for the spiritual.
–John Luther Adams, “Winter Music,” 140
John Luther Adams
Earlier this year, I was researching Arvo Pärt, the contemporary Estonian composer (often considered a holy minimalist, and known for his “tintinnabular music” including Tabula Rasa and Fratres), and was struck by his singular artistic vision. In interviews and writings, he describes how his intense religious devotion manifests in his music, directing compositional process, form, and meaning. Though he uses few words, he speaks with a clarity and precision that reminds me of his music.
A few weeks later, I came across John Luther Adams’ Winter Music, a collection of essays and journal entries published in 2004. Adams, like Pärt, is considered a minimalist (though he has preferred the term “totalist”) and is now most known for his 2014 Pulitzer Prize winning composition Become Ocean. His music is imbued with the sounds, place, and sense of nature as experienced by Adams, and these writings reveal his deep admiration and respect for the natural world. He now lives in the Alaskan wilderness with his wife.
It struck me how similar these two composers are, even beyond the apparent musical similarities of intense, subdued sounds. Both have found serenity by separating themselves (and their style of music) from the mainstream contemporary culture, and both have turned to an all-encompassing idea or concept to inform their music. Above all, though, both are intensely spiritual beings: Pärt through religion in Estonian Orthodoxy, and Adams in the oneness and divinity of nature. When they write or speak, the language of one could easily be confused for the other.
Arvo Pärt achieves “oneness” in music through tintinnabulation, a guiding principle of composition that fuses two voices into one. One voice moves stepwise, while the other arpeggiates a single triad. (An excellent description of its use in Fratres can be found here.) He has described this method as “1 + 1 = 1.” Though cryptic and oxymoronic, it separates Pärt’s music from contrapuntal music (1 + 1 = 2) and instead embraces the synthesis of two voices working together to create a singular unit. Here is one of Pärt’s earliest composition in this style, Fur Alina.
I work with simple numbers that are easy to see and hear, I look for a common denominator. I strive for music that I might call universal, in which many dialects are blended together.
–Arvo Pärt, “Arvo Pärt in Conversation,” 58
Adams music is filled with separate textures moving at different tempi, often in canon. Like Pärt’s music, it is slow to change, evolving subtly over time. Adams seeks to create a “place” to inhabit with each piece, something he has called “sonic geography.” These places are expansive and enveloping, suggesting massive spaces of untouched wilderness. He writes that “the places we live in resonate with us. The sounds around us…all echo in the music of a place.” For Adams, that place is Alaska. Here he is speaking about how place finds itself in his music.
John Luther Adams: The Music of a True Place from NewMusicBox on Vimeo.
In one piece, Canticles of the Sky for cello ensemble, it sounds as if a natural landscape is emerging into existence. Subtle hues and textures evoke the infinite gradations of a sunrise or sunset, the sparkling brilliance of ice crystals reflecting in an Alaskan sky.
Estonian Orthodoxy informs Pärt’s music, and though this music is non-liturgical, most of it has a sacred inspiration. Religion has shaped Pärt’s evolution, and Pärt scholar Paul Hillier links Russian Orthodoxy’s “mysticism” with “contemplation.” Ritual and repetition are central to this faith, as too it is central to understanding Pärt’s music. By focusing intently, and meditating on a single thought, one can become closer to the divine. The music, focused on a single triad, forces the listener to do the same.
In the section of Winter Music titled “Credo,” Adams reveals his faith, one that is remarkably similar in devotion to Pärt’s. “I have faith. But it has no name. My faith is grounded in the earth, in the relationships between all beings and all things, and in the practice of music as a spiritual discipline.” His mindfulness for the environment centers his music, most recently in Become Ocean, a work that calls attention to the natural world and how humans may shape it.
If you stop and think about the oceanic dimension of music, there’s this implication of immersion. We came from the ocean, and we’re going back to the ocean, right? We’re made up mostly of water, and life on earth first emerged from the seas. And with the melting of the polar ice caps and the rising sea levels, we may become ocean sooner than we imagine.
Eventually we begin to realize that we’re part of something much larger than ourselves.
–John Luther Adams, on the making of Become Ocean
The artistic images of the two composers are also similar. Both can be seen as hermits, detached from capitalistic pressures and metropolitan urgency. In the photography from Pärt’s ECM recordings, he is portrayed as a monkish, bearded, pious man. This aligns with his spiritual influences, and he looks almost saint-like in some photos, with a soft halo of light around his head. Adams is often photographed in Alaska, a solitary artist amid the immeasurable space of untouched wilderness.
John Luther Adams explains that a goal of his music is to have “both formal rigor and visceral impact” and this is easily applied to the music of Arvo Pärt, too. Ritual becomes an essential element, and each moment exists with a sense of inevitability, maintaining a connection to the present. Both composers’ music is profound, beautiful, and elegant, with an apparent simplicity guided by technique, a technique that naturally spawns from a personal connection with the divine.
Art has the power to take us beyond ourselves, to remind us of the larger, deeper miracles of the world. We need to remember these miracles in everything we do.
–John Luther Adams, “Winter Music,” 128
John Luther Adams | Photo by: Evan Hurd
