In the summer of 1975, the composer John Luther Adams, then a twenty-two-year-old graduate of CalArts, boarded a flight to Alaska. So began a journey into the mountains, forests, and tundra of the far north - and across distinctive mental and aural terrain - that would last for the next forty years. Silences So Deep is a memoir of a composer’s life in the Alaskan wilderness and a meditation on making art in a landscape acutely threatened by climate change.
Winter Music is a collection of essays, journals and other writings by John Luther Adams. The book includes a CD with three previously unrecorded works.
Did Alaska create the music of John Luther Adams, or did the music create his Alaska? For the past thirty years, the vastness of Alaska has swept through the distant reaches of the composer's imagination and every corner of his compositions. In this new book Adams proposes an ideal of musical ecology, the philosophical foundation on which his largest, most complex musical work is based. This installation, also called The Place Where You Go to Listen, is a sound and light environment that gives voice to the cycles of sunlight and darkness, the phases of the moon, the seismic rhythms of the earth, and the dance of the aurora borealis. Adams describes this work as "a place for hearing the unheard music of the world around us." The book includes two seminal essays, the composer's journal telling the story of the day-to-day emergence of The Place, as well as musical notations, graphs and illustrations of geophysical phenomena.
Chamber Music Northwest and the Oregon Bach Festival present the world premiere of a new work for percussion ensemble by one of the most lauded living American composers.
He never finished high school, took demanding work outside of music, moved to a cabin in Alaska, etc. Can you really win a Pulitzer Prize this way? Well, yes. . .
The American Academy of Arts and Letters presented a reading of tributes on Tuesday, April 11, 2023 at 6 p.m. EST.
Long known as America’s “eco-composer,” John Luther Adams goes to the depths of the Grand Canyon and into the Colorado River in his new piece, Vespers of the Blessed Earth, with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Crossing choir in tow.
At the end of March, the Philadelphia Orchestra premiered “Vespers of the Blessed Earth,” the most recent work of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Luther Adams. Critics have described “Vespers” as a marked, climate change-inspired departure from Adams’ previous compositions — ”direct and message-driven”; a score that “mourns and damns, and declares where in the past Adams might have simply observed.” But Adams is surprised that reception to “Vespers” has invoked so much politics.
The composer has long been inspired by nature without sending an explicit political message. But his latest work takes on a newly urgent tone.
In the summer of 1975, the composer John Luther Adams, then a twenty-two-year-old graduate of CalArts, boarded a flight to Alaska. So began a journey into the mountains, forests, and tundra of the far north - and across distinctive mental and aural terrain - that would last for the next forty years. Silences So Deep is a memoir of a composer’s life in the Alaskan wilderness and a meditation on making art in a landscape acutely threatened by climate change.
The Pulitzer-winning composer explains why he chose music over activism, and how his concern over the future only raises the stakes.
The Guardian, October 30, 2018.
Los Angeles Times, May 3, 2018
In these nine brief prose poems by John Luther Adams, each read by a different employee of New York Public Radio and scored to his music, we see a different side of Adams’s creativity, but one, like his music, still potent and full of myriad variations.
New Sounds, September 24, 2018.
“For me, as for so many others, Alaska had been the geography of hope. Now it’s become one of the most threatened parts of this increasingly threatened Earth.”
The New Yorker, March 27, 2018.
After almost 40 years, I left Alaska. In barrenness, I found new music.
Slate, March 1, 2018.
JLA discusses the inspiration behind his August 11, 2018, Mostly Mozart world premiere.
Did Alaska create the music of John Luther Adams, or did the music create his Alaska? For the past thirty years, the vastness of Alaska has swept through the distant reaches of the composer's imagination and every corner of his compositions. In this new book Adams proposes an ideal of musical ecology, the philosophical foundation on which his largest, most complex musical work is based. This installation, also called The Place Where You Go to Listen, is a sound and light environment that gives voice to the cycles of sunlight and darkness, the phases of the moon, the seismic rhythms of the earth, and the dance of the aurora borealis. Adams describes this work as "a place for hearing the unheard music of the world around us." The book includes two seminal essays, the composer's journal telling the story of the day-to-day emergence of The Place, as well as musical notations, graphs and illustrations of geophysical phenomena.
“…music can provide a sounding model for the renewal of human consciousness and culture.”