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John Luther Adams’ “Becoming Ocean” (2014)

 

The story Adams tells within this opera definitely gives you the chills. As stated in the announcement beforehand, the music feels like waves rising and falling. Hence, if I try to describe what it makes me feel it overwhelms me but I will try to describe how the music is translated within my mind as I am visual thinker.

When I close my eyes, I picture an empty glass vase formed like a human body with an ocean within – a restless sea and big waves rolling, filling up the fragile glass skin. When the music gets calmer and more peaceful, I also begin to associate and imagine a smoother water surface. Water slowly running through blue veins. A capillary system over the transparent glass body. The formation kind of looks like a natural water ecosystem; however, I also see a “steampunky” industrial touch to it as depending on the sounds there is steam coming out of supposedly vents. Although the glass body stands still, there is a whole restless universe within it. Those lighter tones, in my mind, are transformed to bubbles of oxygen that slowly ascend. Especially the harp, I think, evokes ways of tumbling emotions within myself which are visually turned into circles on the water. Circles like a stone would make if you would let it skip and jump over the blue sea. But there is no stone just the tones on which the water reacts and respons.

I am a visual thinker; therefore, it might be quiet interesting what I imagine listening to this artistically piece and how the sounds are translated into illustrations and images for me. I feel like my mind tries to process the waves of sounds with what I can imagine. If I would be hired to create visual support in form of an animation what I described is probably what I would do.

30 minutes into the music, I also would not wonder if Adams’ “Becoming Ocean” would have been the movie picture soundtrack of James Cameron’s “Avatar – The Way of Water.” I just watched the movie recently and both, the opera as well as the movie, were able to highlight how majestic the world – mother earth and her power – actually is. The two of them, each in their own way, are able to catch and portray feelings that are incomprehensible.

 

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