John Luther Adams

John Luther Adams is a contemporary American composer and Pulitzer Prize and Grammy Award winner known for his Alaskan wilderness-inspired music. He is also an educator, author, percussionist, and a passionate environmental activist. He was born in 1953 in Meridian, Mississippi, into a non-musical family. His father worked as an accountant for AT&T and was later transferred to an office in Manhattan. Adams then moved with his family to New York and began his musical explorations as a drummer in rock bands with his friends. He became interested in the writings and music of Frank Zappa, which led him to explore composers such as Edgard Varese, Igor Stravinsky, and Morton Feldman. A few years later in 1968, his father was transferred to Macon, Georgia -- the move proved to be stressful for the whole family. His parents sank into alcoholism and Adams became rebellious and eventually dropped out of high school. He managed to get accepted into the music program at the California Institute of the Arts under the guidance of James Tenney and Leonard Stein. Although his father didn’t see the value in a music education and refused to help financially, Adams persisted and completed his degree in only two years. After his graduation in 1973, he returned briefly to Georgia, and then worked on a farm in Idaho for a few years. He visited Alaska in 1975 and moved there permanently in 1978. He worked as an environmental activist, served as the executive director of the Northern Alaska Environmental Center, and was active in the campaign for the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. He returned to music in the '80s as the timpanist with the Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra and as the principal percussionist with the Arctic Chamber Orchestra; he resumed composing. It was around this time he wrote How the Sun Came to the Forest, The Far Country of Sleep, and Earth and the Great Weather. Each of these works were inspired by the Alaskan Tundra, with the presence of sparse textures, bird-like melodic figures, and meditative soundscapes. He continued exploring this musical realm in the '90s and composed In the White Silence and Dream in White on White, which was featured on the album John Luther Adams: The Far Country in 1993. That same year, Adams received a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He taught composition at Oberlin Conservatory from 1998 to 2002, published the book Winter Music in 2004, and in 2006 he received the United States Artist Fellowship. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 2014 for Become Ocean for orchestra, and in 2015 he won a Grammy Award for the same composition. Since 2014, Adams has divided his time between New York and undisclosed locations in the deserts of the Southwestern U.S., Central America, and Chile. He remains very active as a composer and his music has recently been featured on the albums Sila: The Breath of the World, Houses of the Wind, and Darkness and Scattered Light.
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