John Luther Adams: Become Ocean

Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra Performs Become Ocean

John Luther Adams’ Become Ocean has won a Pulitzer Prize and mesmerized audiences. “Like the sea at dawn, it presents a gorgeous surface, yet its heaving motion conveys overwhelming force…tonally centered, almost to the point of lushness,” wrote Alex Ross in The New Yorker. “Its three huge crescendos suggest a tidal surge washing over all barriers. It may be the loveliest apocalypse in musical history...Whether orchestras will be playing it a century hence is impossible to say, but I went away reeling.”