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Listening Report 11 John Luther Addams Become Ocean

 

Maria Alighourchi

7489718

The Future of American Music

 

Listening Report 11

John Luther Addams

Become Ocean

 

The orchestral composition “Become Ocean” (2014) by John Luther Adams is an extraordinary experience to listen to. I am utterly mesmerized by the hypnotic waves of sound that clash together to create a thunderstorm of emotions while becoming ocean. 

The orchestra is divided into three groups that play simultaneously but separately. These three groups represent to me three fairly enormous waves, which float in the vast ocean. The clash or climax of these three groups happens three times throughout the composition. While they reach a climax, I imagine how these three sound waves are purely water waves finding each other, clashing and becoming one, then drifting apart and turning into completely new waves reminiscent of their old self. However, the piano and the harp are not included as part of the water, in my opinion, they are the light reflected on the surface of the ocean, dancing in the never-ending washing waves, never tired, always staying afloat and alive. 

Water always changes as well as this composition does, never the same chord, but similar. Generally, water can be used as a metaphor for change, that change is inevitable and happens naturally. This composition, too, sounds like a natural phenomenon since the string instruments caress your body like small currents. 

I am getting carried away while the chords of the piano and harp help me stay afloat, I feel how the sunshine tickles my face in the afternoon light. I lay in the vast ocean, not knowing where I will end up but being sure it will be the right place, wherever it might be. The ocean might be a scary thought or even a fear to some, but letting the waves decide your way is taking a weight off my shoulder, turning my lighter. I have no sorrows while listening to the waves carrying me away, even if they crescent, it only becomes more exciting. 

The inner peace I sense while listening to Becoming Ocean, transcends me to a high meditational level, where I am compatible with myself, with the world. It even transcends me to a state where I believe to become the ocean, the waves, the sunlight’s dancing. How can these 42 minutes perfectly encapsulate the process of becoming something natural? How can instruments, or the harmony of many instruments convey such totality of one element alone? 

All of my being wants to write poems about becoming ocean now – that is what this constellation of harmonic instruments has done to me. I never want to write about something else now. The waves have become a small obsession that I dread to let loose. Right now, all I can see, smell, hear and experience are waves. Waves that carry me, waves that determine my way in life, waves that hug and smother me until the end. Does the ocean really end?

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