Image via Lucian Read
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. 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.
But CalArts wasn’t enough for him as a young musician. At the age of 22, Adams picked up and moved 25,000 miles North to Alaska, where he ended up staying for the next four decades (he finally moved to New York in 2014). Ten of those years were spent living alone in a cabin in a black spruce bog. Its minimal furnishings included a beat-up piano and a clock he kept in the refrigerator. While living here, Adams played percussion in the Fairbanks Symphony and the Arctic Chamber Orchestra (timpani was his specialty). This environment helped shape the recurring obsessions of work – remoteness, nature, introspection and the infinite expanse of the universe.
Adams has a very unique approach to composition. His pieces are composed of simple figures (the shimmering harmonics of Become Desert suspended in stillness; the dissonant fifths of Dark Waves), which progress through gradual surges in volume and intensity and often draw inspiration from various different geographical formations – deserts, rivers, the arctic. In fact, Adams probably owes as much to these natural phenomena as he does to composers like Edgar Varése and Morton Feldman. In each piece, a beautiful little world is realized. Listening to one of his compositions is like listening to form emerge from nothingness.
Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Adams’ musical output was sporadic and limited. Then, in the early aughts, he began moving at a much faster clip, putting out a project almost every year. His work was well-received by critics and audiences alike, but Become Ocean was the game-changer. Released in 2014, it won him a Pulitzer Prize and a Grammy Award, and the following year, Columbia University honored him with the William Schuman Lifetime Achievement Award. He was, at this point, in danger of being praised to death.
Structured as a gradual accumulation of crescendos, Become Ocean is steadily ominous, yet seems to rise continuously up, never quite breaking the water’s surface. Instead, the listener is left to imagine a swimmer balancing a few meters below the water, rising and falling with the shifting tones.
Adams can count among his fans David Byrne, Iggy Pop, Oneohtrix Point Never, Thom Yorke, Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche and countless others. His music exerts a strange attraction. In 2015, Taylor Swift donated $50,000 to the Seattle Symphony Orchestra inspired by their recording of Become Ocean.
Unfortunately, the environment Adams sought to capture in his work is fast disappearing. During a return visit to Alaska one year, he discovered that his old cabin was sinking as the permafrost below it melted. In a way though, Adams has made the best of the situation. In recent years, he’s found a new natural environment, surrounding himself with rare species of birds in Australia, a move which calls to mind the first album in his discography – 1981’s songbirdsongs, based on actual bird songs – providing a nice symmetry to his remarkable, one-of-a-kind career.
Adams spoke to me from Australia, where he now lives with Cynthia (his partner of 45 years). During our conversation, he shared recollections of his younger years and detailed his many influences, both in and out of the classical field. At 71, he’s still quite active. For his recent recording with the JACK Quartet, Waves and Particles, he is, once again, up for a Grammy this year. – Jackson Diianni
(This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.)