John Luther Adams Quotes

As a composer, I believe that music has the power to inspire a renewal of human consciousness, culture, and politics. And yet I refuse to make political art. More often than not political art fails as politics, and all too often it fails as art. To reach its fullest power, to be most moving and most fully useful to us, art must be itself.

Life on this earth first emerged from the sea. As the polar ice melts and sea level rises, we humans find ourselves facing the prospect that once again we may quite literally become ocean.

My hope is that the music creates a strange, beautiful, overwhelming - sometimes even frightening - landscape, and invites you to get lost in it.

Where the eye divides, the ear connects.

I’ve come to believe that, fundamentally, art matters more than politics.