John Luther Adams.
In the January 9 Saturday Paper (Melbourne, Australia), American composer John Luther Adams writes, “I never felt at home in the country where I was born. When I was young, I fled the sprawling suburbs and relentless hustle of life in ‘the Lower 48’ and migrated to Alaska. There I found my true home and the full shape of my life’s work. Fifty years later I set out again, in search of a new home, a new refuge at the other end of the Earth. Lately I find myself thinking a lot about Schoenberg, Bartók, Weill, Stravinsky and other composers and artists, who fled Europe in the 1930s and ’40s…. Although the political turmoil those artists escaped was more extreme, the current situation in the United States was a major element in my decision to leave. Yet the real reason I’ve left is deeper than politics: it’s the culture. The culture creates the politics … The relentless commercialization, rising tides of xenophobia, the strident acrimony of social discourse, the violence, and the increasingly hysterical tenor of life in the USA have simply worn us down…. When we were young, my wife and I were well-known environmental activists. The time came when I had to make a choice between life as an activist and life as a composer. I chose music in the belief that in its own way a life in art could matter every bit as much as a life in politics. In the years since, I’ve come to believe that ultimately art does more than politics to change the world.”
