Adam Larison

UIS Music Instructor

What inspired you to be a musician?

Why am I a musician? Humans have made music for at least 40,000 years. And since then, some subset of our population has always felt the need to engage in organized, and often highly ritualized, production of sound. It’s so ancient I wonder if it’s best to group musicmaking with eating, drinking, and sleeping, those other essentials we spend so much time worrying about!  The reasons are too many to count: to awaken the forest, to teach children about the beginning of the universe, to express anguish, love, and fear, to contact a spirit world, to heal the sick. These facts alone should be enough to keep anyone interested in music and are probably the best answer to the “why” question. I’m just one of those people…

Why am I still a musician? I think it’s probably because music can be so many things. When I was a kid, I took piano lessons. I loved how easy it felt and, equally important, I loved how adults reacted when I showed them how easy it was. But music also moved me. I remember my mom playing Für Elise on the piano and feeling a dull ache in my throat. I was too young to know what that feeling meant or that I was fortunate to have it. When I was a teenager, I heard a professional classical guitarist for the first time. I remember thinking it sounded “perfect” and wanting to be able to do what he did. That launched a phase of my life that spanned from my late teens to my early 30s, fueled in equal parts by a fascination and love for the sound of the classical guitar, a reverence for the canon, and an addiction to the adulation one gets after a successful performance, or a competition prize, or a degree, or whatever. I rode that wave through several states and countries. It gave me life-long spiritual bonds with some of the most incredible people I’ll ever know and allowed me to see a lot more of the world than I would have otherwise. It also taught me what it means to give everything you have to something and that I am someone who can give everything I have to something.

My interest in classical guitar has waned in the last five or six years. There are too many reasons to talk about here, but I think it boils down to trouble with the idea that the best music has already been made, or the idea that some people should make music and others should just shut up and listen, or the idea of a “best” music at all. Recently I have begun making music with my colleagues Brian Stark and Richard Gilman-Opalsky. We get together in VPA 33 every Tuesday and make sounds together without a plan. The only guide we have is our feeling in the moment.

 For someone trained to play from sheet music, and to assume the new is worse than the old, it’s a whole new world to explore! And that’s why I am still a musician. Hank Shocklee of Public Enemy: “This thing you call music is much broader than you think it is.”  

This Friday, April 14th, 2023, at 6:30pm Dr. Adam Larison’s “Freedom Therapy Trio” will perform at the Performing Arts Center Studio Theater as part of the “Date Night” series at the UIS campus. All of the music being played will be created on the spot.

Interviewer: McKenna Vereeke