In a five-decade-long career, John Luther Adams has always chosen to forge his own way, carving out a singular lane for himself as one of America’s best-known composers.

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After getting kicked out of an exclusive boarding school in Atlanta as a teenager, he cobbled together a portfolio of amateur recordings and send it off to the newly-opened California Institute of the Arts on the advice of a friend, photographer Dennis Keeley (“I never listened to Dennis and I still don’t, but somehow, I knew he was right about this”). To his surprise, he was accepted and ended up being in the first graduating class at CalArts in 1973.

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