How to Plunge into an Arctic Sound Bath
INWARD SOUND | 11.28.20
In today’s New York Times I revisit the music of John Luther Adams. I first met him six years ago after he won the Pulitzer Prize in music for “Become Ocean,” a mesmerizing 40-minute orchestral piece that plunges the listener into the churn, swell and roar of the sea.
It’s music that doesn’t go anywhere. Yet it’s a total trip.
My excuse for writing about him this time was a new book, “Silences so Deep: Music, Solitude, Alaska,” as well as a box set of recordings that includes “Become Ocean” alongside two companion pieces, “Become River” and “Become Desert.” The memoir is about how Adams became an environmental activist and composer in Alaska, a state he (by his own admission) “loves with a passion that is almost erotic.”
The music is partly about the coming into being of geological features. “Become Ocean” and “Become Desert” are also obliquely about climate change. But Adams says his titles are above all meant as an invitation to the listener to temporarily climb into a kind of geological state of being. To discover rivers and oceans and deserts within.
Adams’s compositions are incredibly sophisticated, built on elegant fractal-like structures, orchestrated with extreme sensitivity to sound color. But their effect on me, when I listen eyes closed, in a comfortable position, is not unlike that of a sound bath.
Have you come across sound baths? They were starting to become all the rage in New York City, with waitlists for classes and dedicated studios with chic furnishings. Then the pandemic hit and sound baths turned virtual. Either way, the experience invites participants to relax deeply while a practitioner creates immersive soundscapes, typically with gongs, chimes and crystal bowls.
The first one I attended – in Ojai, in February – was an elaborate affair presided over by an elderly Danish yoga teacher wielding rain sticks and other Native American ceremonial implements. Stretched out on the floor under a blanket, I was at first slightly scornful. Skeptical. Then, I got pulled under.
I imagine hypnosis must feel like this. The sounds activated deep layers of memory, or rather something even deeper where memory blends with the collective consciousness. In the days and nights after that sound bath, I had nightmares, but also one very peaceful out-of-body experience in which I felt temporarily inhabited by the spirit of a particular crow I had watched earlier that morning.
The music of the “Become” trilogy exerts a similar psychoacoustic power over me. (The only other work of art that had this effect was Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a documentary about the paintings in the Chauvet cave in Southern France. Others have told me they also had crazy dreams after watching that film.)
If this all sounds a bit woo-woo to you, I’m not the least bit offended. But I’m emboldened to share my reaction by a passage from John Luther Adams’s first book, “Wintermusic,” in which he describes listening to the silence of the Alaskan wilderness in terms that resonate with my own experience.
Straining, you can almost hear the reverberations of the earth stirring in sleep, the movements of mountains, the passing of a cosmic storm – sounds so profound that you hear them not with your ears but in the oldest, darkest core of your being. And other sounds, faint and distant, suspended in air like the remembered sunlight of a summer afternoon ten thousand years past.
Here’s a playlist with the three “Become” pieces as well as a shorter one – if you’re looking to get hypnotized in a hurry -- consisting of one drawn out swell and dwindle of sound created on a single gong. (Bring your own bubbles.)
Bonus: if you haven’t already seen it, watch the entrancing documentary My Octopus Teacher on Netflix for a visual companion to “Become Ocean.”