John Luther Adams (born January 23, 1953) is an American composer whose music is inspired by nature, especially the landscapes of Alaska, where he lived from 1978 to 2014. [1] His orchestral work Become Ocean was awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music. [2]
Born in Meridian, Mississippi, Adams began playing music as a teenager as a drummer in rock bands. He attended the California Institute of the Arts as an undergraduate in the early 1970s, studying with James Tenney and Leonard Stein, and graduated in 1973. [3] After graduating, Adams began work in environmental protection, and through this work Adams first travelled to Alaska in 1975. Adams moved to Alaska in 1978 and lived there until 2014. He now splits his time between New York and the Sonoran desert in Mexico, [4] though his time in Alaska continues to be a prominent influence in his music. [1] From 1982 to 1989, he performed as timpanist and principal percussionist with the Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra and the Arctic Chamber Orchestra. [3]
Adams's composition work spans many genres and media. He has composed for television, film, children's theater, voice, acoustic instruments, orchestra, and electronics. Early in his career, Adams was influenced by the music and writings of Frank Zappa, whose enthusiasm for Edgard Varèse intrigued Adams. Through his careful listening to Varèse, Adams developed an interest in and was influenced by the music of John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, among others. [5] From 1998 to 2002, Adams served as associate professor of composition at Oberlin Conservatory of Music.
Adams has described his music as, "... profoundly influenced by the natural world and a strong sense of place. Through sustained listening to the subtle resonances of the northern soundscape, I hope to explore the territory of sonic geography—that region between place and culture...between environment and imagination". [6]
His love of nature, concern for the environment and interest in the resonance of specific places led him to pursue the concept of sonic geography. Early examples of this idea include two works written during Adams's sojourn in rural Georgia: Songbirdsongs (1974–80), a collection of indeterminate miniature pieces for piccolos and percussion based on free translations of bird songs, and Night Peace (1977), a vocal work capturing the nocturnal soundscape of the Okefenokee Swamp through slow-changing and sparse sonic textures. [7]
His work, Sila: The Breath of the World, represents the "air element", following the representation of water in Become Ocean and the "earth element" in Inuksuit, an outdoor percussion piece. [8] His music, he says, is "our awareness of the world in which we live and the world's awareness of us". [9]
His more recent works include, Across the Distance, for a large number of horns, was premiered on the 5th of July, 2015 at the Cambo estate in Fife, Scotland as part of the East Neuk Festival. His recording of Ilimaq ("spirit journeys"), a solo work for percussion, played by art-music percussionist, composer, and Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche, was released in October 2015. [10] A combination of contemporary classical music, Alaskan field recordings, and found sounds from the natural world, it evokes the travels of a shaman riding the sound of a drum to and from the spirit world. [11]
In 2014 Adams won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for his orchestral piece Become Ocean , which Alex Ross of The New Yorker called "the loveliest apocalypse in musical history". [12] It was premiered in 2013 by Ludovic Morlot and the Seattle Symphony and performed by the same conductor and orchestra at the 2014 Spring For Music music festival at Carnegie Hall. Adams had never been to Carnegie Hall before hearing his work played there to a sold-out house. [13] The surround-sound recording of Become Ocean on Cantaloupe Music debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Traditional Classical Chart, stayed there for two straight weeks, and went on to win the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. [14] All his works are published by Taiga Press (BMI) and available from Theodore Front Musical Literature n.d..
In October 2015, Adams received the William Schuman Award from Columbia University. The events surrounding the award included a series of concerts of his music at the Miller Theater, including Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing, For Lou Harrison, and In the White Silence. [15]
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Evan Ziporyn is an American composer of post-minimalist music with a cross-cultural orientation, drawing equally from classical music, avant-garde, various world music traditions, and jazz. Ziporyn has composed for a wide range of ensembles, including symphony orchestras, wind ensembles, many types of chamber groups, and solo works, sometimes involving electronics. Balinese gamelan, for which he has composed numerous works, has compositions. He is known for his solo performances on clarinet and bass clarinet; additionally, Ziporyn plays gender wayang and other Balinese instruments, saxophones, piano & keyboards, EWI, and Shona mbira.
Julia Wolfe is an American composer and professor of music at New York University. According to The Wall Street Journal, Wolfe's music has "long inhabited a terrain of its own, a place where classical forms are recharged by the repetitive patterns of minimalism and the driving energy of rock". Her work Anthracite Fields, an oratorio for chorus and instruments, was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Music. She has also received the Herb Alpert Award (2015) and was named a MacArthur Fellow (2016).
Gloria Coates was an American composer who lived in Munich from 1969 until her death. She trained and worked also as actress, stage director, singer, author and painter. She is known for her many symphonies, and also wrote chamber music, and vocal music for large and small ensembles. Her compositions have been performed internationally and recorded by notable orchestras. She ran a concert series for new music in Munich. Her First Symphony "Music on Open Strings" was played at the 1978 Warsaw Autumn and was the first composition by a woman in the musica viva series of Bayerischer Rundfunk.
Nicolas Oreste Flagello was an American composer and conductor of classical music. He was one of the last American composers to develop a distinctive mode of expression based wholly on the principles and techniques of late romanticism.
Michael Harrison is an American contemporary classical music composer and pianist living in New York City. He was a Guggenheim Fellow for the academic year 2018–2019.
Miguel del Águila is a prolific Uruguay-born American composer of contemporary classical music. He has been nominated three times for Grammys and has received numerous other awards.
Frank Corcoran is an Irish composer. His output includes chamber, symphonic, choral and electro-acoustic music, through which he often explores Irish mythology and history.
Dylan Mattingly is an American composer from Berkeley, California.
James Harley is a Canadian composer, author, and professor of music born in Vernon, British Columbia. His creative output consists of orchestral, chamber, solo, electroacoustic, and vocal music.
Thierry Joseph-Louis Escaich is a French organist and composer.
Become Ocean is an orchestral composition by American composer John Luther Adams. The Seattle Symphony Orchestra commissioned the work and premiered it at Benaroya Hall, Seattle, on 20 and 22 June 2013. The work won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music and the 2015 Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition. In 2019, writers of The Guardian ranked it the 10th greatest work of art music since 2000.
Sebastian Fagerlund is a Finnish composer. He is described as “a post-modern impressionist whose sound landscapes can be heard as ecstatic nature images which, however, are always inner images, landscapes of the mind”. Echoes of Western culture, Asian musical traditions, and heavy metal have all been detected in his music.
Andrea Clearfield is an American composer of contemporary classical music. Regularly commissioned and performed by ensembles in the United States and abroad, her works include music for orchestra, chorus, soloists, chamber ensembles, dance, opera, film, and multimedia collaborations.
Scott Wollschleger is an American composer based in New York City.
Dark Waves is a 2007 musical composition in one movement by the American composer John Luther Adams. It was commissioned by Musica Nova for the Anchorage Symphony Orchestra, who premiered the composition in 2007. The piece is dedicated to the Alaskan conductor Gordon Wright, who died a few days before the world premiere.
Dani Howard is a British composer.
Nicole Lizée is a Canadian composer of contemporary music. She was born in Gravelbourg, Saskatchewan and received a MMus from McGill University. She lives in Montreal, Quebec. At one time, she was a member of The Besnard Lakes, an indie rock band from Montreal.
The Concerto for Violin and Orchestra "Eleven Eleven" is the first violin concerto written by American composer Danny Elfman. Co-commissioned by the Czech National Symphony Orchestra, Stanford Live at Stanford University, and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the piece premiered at Smetana Hall in Prague, on June 21, 2017, with Sandy Cameron on violin and John Mauceri conducting the Czech National Symphony Orchestra. In 2019, the premiere recording of the concerto featured Cameron with Mauceri conducting the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.
Become Desert is a composition for choir and orchestra written in 2017 by the American composer John Luther Adams. The work was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and the Seattle Symphony with co-commissions from the San Diego Symphony and the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra. Its world premiere was given by the Seattle Symphony conducted by Ludovic Morlot on March 29, 2018. Become Desert is the third part of a musical trilogy, following Adams's Become River (2010) and the Pulitzer Prize for Music-winning Become Ocean (2014).
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