American composer John Luther Adams doesn't recommend following the path he took in music. Yet he wouldn't have it any other way.
"I never studied with the right people at the right schools," he told me in April 2014, a few hours after he learned he had won the Pulitzer Prize for his orchestral piece Become Ocean. "It seems that every time I had the opportunity to make the right career choice, I made the wrong career choice, which in the long run turned out to be the right artistic choice."
Today, Adams (not to be confused with the California-based John Adams) is recognized as one of our most original composers. He follows in a long line of visionary musical tinkerers — from Charles Ives and Henry Cowell to John Cage and Morton Feldman — who challenge our perceptions of what music is and how we experience it. For his piece Sila: The Breath of the World, Adams spreads out five ensembles of 16 musicians in an outdoor setting where the audience is free to move among them. Houses of the Wind is sculpted from field recordings of wind singing through an aeolian harp in the Arctic.
His new work, Horizon, borrows its title from a book by the nature writer Barry Lopez, and its two 20-minute sections offer musical views of the place where the sky meets earth or sea. The combined piece receives its world premiere by the Australian Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall on April 22.
At age 22, Adams left behind an unsatisfying childhood, and the lower 48, and landed in Alaska, where he lived for four decades. He took odd jobs to make ends meet, including a stint in public radio. As an environmental conservationist, his efforts led him to help draft legislation to pass the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, protecting over 100 million acres of wild landscapes.
The natural world and Adams' art are as inextricably tied as his life and music. "Music is not what I do; music is how I understand the world," he told writer Molly Sheridan. Since leaving Alaska in 2014, Adams has moved around a lot, preferring deserts. After some time in New York City, he moved to Mexico's Sonoran Desert, the Chihuahuan Desert of the Southwest U.S. and Chile's Atacama Desert.
From his newest home, in the red desert of central Australia, the 73-year-old composer joined a video chat to talk about why he prefers to live in rugged landscapes, his youthful garage band Sloth, and how he uses math in his music to protect it from his "bad taste."
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tom Huizenga: The last time we spoke was in April of 2014, the day you won the Pulitzer Prize for your piece Become Ocean. You told me then that the piece kind of wrote itself because you were living near the Pacific Ocean: "All I had to do is sleep with the windows open at night, let the sound of the sea seep into my subconscious mind and get up in the morning and write it down." Your music is firmly connected to place, and now that you've moved to the desert of central Australia, I'm curious if anything you hear is making it into your music.
John Luther Adams: I think all of it makes it into the music, but in ways that even the composer might not immediately recognize. Early on, I worked with bird songs and I painted, if you will, landscapes in music. But at a certain point, I came to dream of a music that felt more like a place in and of itself — and to offer to you as a listener the invitation to come into that place, a strange, beautiful, perhaps frightening or disorienting place, and find your own way through it without my telling you a story or giving you a guided tour.
Your new piece Horizon was written mostly in Australia. How do the music and the landscape intersect?
I worked on Horizon for over two years. [My wife] Cynthia and I left the United States at the crack of January in 2024, and we took a boat. We didn't want to get into a steel tube and, 14 hours later, step off into Sydney: We wanted to know where we were going, how we got there. So we took a 28-day journey across the Pacific, and I began work on Horizon during that voyage. I continued work in the tropical savanna of northern Australia, in the red deserts of Central Australia — where I now live — in the forests and the grasslands, the hills of southern continental Australia and on the shores of the Tasman Sea, in Tasmania. And I think somehow, if not the music, at least the composer and the composer's work on the piece, were informed by my experience of all those places.
Horizon is in two 20-minute sections — "Visible Horizon" and "True Horizon." I notice the two begin and end similarly, almost like the sun rising and setting. It's that "journey" in the middle of the pieces that's different.
Horizon is a diptych. And maybe, to extend the painting analogy, it's like two Rothkos: the same form, one light and one dark. Formally, they're exactly the same. And what you heard is correct, they both rise from a low E-flat and then ascend and fall back down. But the journeys are, I think, very different harmonically, the essence and feeling of the music.
You wrote an essay that goes with Horizon, and in it you say, "My life has been a continuing search to find home." I know that as a young man, you ran away from your upbringing and family and landed in Alaska, where you lived for 40 years. From there, you moved to the Chihuahuan Desert in the Southwest, to Chile and, recently, across the globe to Australia. I'm wondering, with this most recent move, if you are running away again?
I think, in a way, I am. Cynthia and I — we've been together 47 years now — this is how we've always lived. We've always been adventurous, and maybe this is our last great adventure. This could be the place where I do my last work. Novalis said that philosophy is, properly speaking, a kind of homesickness — the desire to be everywhere at home. And that resonates for me. I'm here now at the other end of the earth from the place I think of as my home, but I can step out at night and instead of the aurora borealis, occasionally I see the aurora australis; instead of the Big Dipper, I see the Southern Cross. And I feel at home.
What do you hope to find in the Australian outback?
Something that I can't even anticipate yet. Something that I've never heard before, something I've never experienced before. We're in a place known as Alice Springs, which is the home ground of the Arunta people, who have lived here for 30,000 years. The climate is extreme in a very different way from our home in Alaska, but there's a rough-and-ready quality to life here that feels very familiar to us; we look at one another every now and then and joke, "Oh, this is the Fairbanks of Australia." So we feel at home and off balance, and open to discovery. I think that's maybe what you're getting at with your question: that sense of exploration and possibility and discovery. That is a large part of what keeps me working every day.
Perhaps it's your craving for what you refer to as "beyond the edge of the known."
The title Horizon is borrowed with permission from my beloved friend, the writer Barry Lopez, who died in 2020. Barry speaks of the horizon as the "liminal line" or the "edge of the known." The more closely we pay attention, the more we discover. We live in a world now in which society encourages citizens to constantly not pay attention. Stravinsky said, "Music is the sole domain in which we fully realize the present," and that's important to me. Music is a way for us to step out of time, as we usually experience it, and to pay attention more deeply to right here, right now.
We all experience music differently. When I listen to your music — let's say Become Ocean, Become Desert, The Light that Fills the World, and now Horizon — I frequently have the feeling that I'm a small being in the face of something vast, powerful and ultimately unknowable. And that's mostly a good feeling. It's like looking over the rim of the Grand Canyon, but in music. Is that at all close to the feeling you are trying to achieve for yourself, and for listeners?
Absolutely. That's what I want for myself. And it's what I want for you, in your own way, which is going to be different in ways that I can't even imagine. Nothing makes me happier than when you as a listener hear something, discover something, experience something in the music that the composer had no idea was there.
How do you express that feeling compositionally — without getting too technical — in a piece like Become Ocean or Become Desert? Is there a secret recipe?
I mentioned Rothko. People would always remark about the color in Rothko: "Oh, he's such a brilliant colorist." And Rothko would always insist, "No, I'm a formalist." If you've ever seen his charcoal sketches — pages and pages of black and white rectangles with fuzzy edges — he's trying to find the right proportions, the right weights and balances, the right formal composition that locks in and resonates in a way that doesn't even need color.
For me, the subject of music is its sound. And in my music, I want to be in touch with sound that I haven't heard before, that feels somehow elemental, inevitable. One of the ways I've gone about it is, I use mathematics. My sketchbooks are not unlike Rothko's in that there are shapes and proportions and lots of numbers.
I like the Rothko analogy, especially because there's much more going on in your music than what might first hit the ears.
Take Agnes Martin's paintings. She meticulously, obsessively worked out all these arcane formulas that only Agnes Martin understood. But that allowed her to step outside of herself and to get into this other place, this contact with something that was bigger than she was.
Throughout my life I've used mathematics, the formal construction of my music, as a way to protect the music against my bad taste. Horizon is rigorously formal: Every little dot in that piece is accounted for in some architectural, almost geologic, mathematical way. And yet, I'm finding now, in my mid-70s, that I do have a certain intuition about where the magic is, what the sound wants, how it wants to breathe. So, I'm not renouncing my formalist obsession, but I'm willing to cheat.
I don't hear the math, I hear the "magic." For me, it's the pull of the drone, the sustaining of textures over a long period. It helps suspend time and creates a distinct space, an emotional landscape to confront something of importance within myself. Maybe that's my own form of meditation.
I have a longstanding relationship with the JACK Quartet, and a couple of nights ago at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, they played two of my string quartets in a chapel. Austin Wulliman, one of the violinists, wrote me and said that afterwards, a young man came up to him in tears. He was a great lover of wild spaces, spent a lot of time camping in far-flung places, and he is terminally ill. He fears now that he will never be able to return to those places and experience the feelings we experience in those places — and that the music gave him those feelings.
Whoa. That's what you hope for, for your music.
I've said throughout my life that I just want my work to be of use. And as a still-recovering political activist, I've always imagined that one way I might help would be helping to imagine a different way we can be with one another and with other species on the earth — how we can live differently. But as the state of human affairs continues to devolve into chaos on a scale unprecedented in the history of our species, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to see a clear vision of our collective future. I'm not saying we're doomed; I just can't see it. So more than ever, nothing makes me happier than hearing that the music touches you, or that young man in Knoxville, or one solitary person who I will never know, and somehow makes a difference in their lives.
In Alaska, you spent around a decade living in a cabin without running water, without direct light in the winter months, deep in a spruce bog outside of Fairbanks. In your memoir, Silences So Deep, you look back on it as your "lost decade," but you also write, "Those years in the woods were essential for me as an artist and a man." What about those years shaped you?
If you were telling a young composer how to find their voice and have a brilliant career, you would not have them follow my life path. I've often joked that I made all the wrong career choices, but they turned out to be the right artistic choices.
I was incredibly fortunate to have mentors like James Tenney and Lou Harrison. I remember I was living in the cabin sometime in the 1980s, and I asked Lou to write a letter of recommendation for me. And in his beautiful pen-and-ink calligraphy hand, he wrote this two- or three-paragraph letter. At the time, one phrase jumped out at me. Lou said that my choice to "leave the competitive careerism and chattering of the metropolis" to go to Alaska allowed my music "to grow, as the young people say, in real time." I wasn't trying to please anyone for graduate school or win a competition or do anything other than listen to Alaska, feel the magic of where I was. To be young, to be living my "Thoreau fantasy" in that place at that time, made all the difference in my life.
Many composers throughout history have had strong ties to nature. Beethoven depicted nature in his Sixth Symphony — birds and thunderstorms. But your relationship to nature is on a much deeper, more expansive level. Do you think of yourself as a "naturalist composer?"
No, I don't. We have this conceit that somehow we humans are apart from nature. But of course, we aren't — we are simply a part of nature. So in a way, how could I be anything but a nature composer?
Fifteen years ago now, I composed my first work intended specifically for performance out of doors. For years I had composed music inspired by the "big world," but experienced only in the "small world" of the concert hall. And when we're in a concert hall, or on headphones, we are trying to seal out the world. We regard that somehow as an intrusion on the music. It occurred to me that maybe we could turn that inside out: What would happen if we brought the same kind of attention that we have in a concert hall into the outdoors?
So I composed this piece called Inuksuit, for as many as 99 percussionists, to be performed only outdoors. John Schaefer, the great radio producer, joked that Inuksuit has become my In C — Terry Riley's piece that everybody plays in their communities. Since then, I've done a number of outdoor works, and something similar seems to be happening with the most recent one, Crossing Open Ground — it premiered at the Aspen Festival and it'll be done at Tanglewood this summer. Although some of my orchestral works, like Become Ocean, are perhaps better known, I'm beginning to think that in the long run, perhaps my most enduring contribution to cultural musical renewal may be the outdoor works. In some ways they are the most radical.
At age 18, you attended the newly founded California Institute of the Arts, where you graduated in 1973. Though you were obviously exposed to a lot of music by that time, perhaps none of it was as important as two particular sound experiences you had: the singing of a wood thrush, and the tinkling of meltwater reverberating out of a deep crevasse in an Alaskan glacier. What changed for you after hearing those things?
Wow. Standing on that glacier, this immensity of cobalt-blue compressed ice and these deep crevasses that were just black — you couldn't see bottom — and hearing this delicate tinkling, almost like glass wind chimes, and a very faint trickle of water, was a moment of epiphany for me. It's hard for me to imagine, but that was almost 55 years ago.
What did you learn from that?
I don't know if I would say it was what I learned so much as it was what I dreamed of. Walking through the woods in Georgia, really listening for the first time, to those silver tones of a wood thrush, stirred in me this inarticulate longing, this deep desire to feel that I was somehow part of it all, part of the world. Maybe we're back to the homesickness, but those experiences, out in what I call the "real world," made me desire music that was different than human music. I'm still fumbling for words — I've tried to write about these things, but ultimately I think I compose because the music says it best.
You were a bit of a rebel in your youth, no? Didn't you get kicked out of high school?
I never graduated from high school. I was kicked out of an exclusive boarding school on the north side of Atlanta.
Why?
Because I was a bad boy. I had a bad attitude. There were so many infractions — none of which had any substance, but I didn't belong there, and they knew it. I remember a meeting with my poor parents, who came in to speak with the headmaster of this school that they couldn't afford to send me to, but did anyway. And he said, "We'll write letters of recommendation. John's a good student; he did well on the SATs. We'll get him into Harvard; we'll get him into wherever you want to go. We just can't invite him back."
You played in garage bands when you were growing up in New Jersey, and I read that your band once opened for The Beach Boys. What kinds of music were you playing then?
We were cover bands. We played the three Bs: The Beatles, The Byrds and The Beach Boys. But I kept leaving bands and forming new ones, and each one got a little more out-there. I got bored with the constraints of four-bar phrases and the one-four-five chord progression. My last group was a trio called Sloth. We were young white boys who were influenced by Ornette Coleman, Frank Zappa, Pharoah Sanders and Soft Machine.
Were you writing anything for Sloth at that point?
Yes, and at that point, I wasn't writing things down. After Sloth dissolved was when I started actually putting notes on paper. One of the members of Sloth was also an aspiring composer, and we wrote things for two pianos that we played together. That was the beginning of thinking of myself as a composer.
I've told this story many times, but there was a moment when I went into a record store, plucked this album out of the bin: a hot pink cover with a guy with a cigarette dangling out of his mouth and his legs crossed, sitting on the deck of the Staten Island Ferry with his fedora cocked just so, with a look that said "Go ahead, knock it off, make my day." And the title was Morton Feldman: The Early Years. All I knew about Morton Feldman was that he was a pal of John Cage's. But I bought it for $1.79, brought it home, put it on the turntable. The first track was Piece for Four Pianos, from 1957. And within the first 30 or 40 seconds, I thought, this is it. I've died and gone to heaven. This is someplace that Pink Floyd can't take me. This is what I want to do with my life.
After Sloth and after your schooling, was there any point when you literally thought, "I want to make a living as a composer?"
I don't mean to split semantic hairs, but I never thought in those terms. I've always been kind of oblivious and clueless about money and career and ambition in that sense. I would have said then, and I would say now, I was interested in making a life. And so I did whatever it took. I worked part-time as a librarian in a small town in rural Georgia: If I was there, the library was open, if I wasn't there, it wasn't. I worked as a farmhand, then when we moved out to Idaho, I worked as a ranch hand. I worked in public radio in Alaska after my years as an environmental crusader. I did whatever it took to get by, but I also took Lou Harrison's sage advice to keep it simple and not allow myself to become indebted to what he called "a silly society." I lived in cabins, drove junk cars and lived cheaply.
Was there ever a typical "breakthrough" piece for you? Something that told you, "I've made it as a composer," either on a personal level or as a critical success?
The answer would be no.
Not even Become Ocean? Winning the Pulitzer?
I was 60 by that point. It didn't matter in a sense, right? I had a life. I had a body of work that no one else had. And thank goodness that happened when I was 60, not 30.
Why is that?
I just think it might have just thrown me off my game. I'm very happy that, as Lou said, it all developed slowly, in real time.
I was thinking perhaps, at least on a personal level, a kind of breakthrough piece for you might have been In the White Silence — a gorgeous, 75-minute landscape of the mind from 1998. It's a piece you can wander through and even get lost in. And forgive me, but if I had to make comparisons, it sounds something like Lou Harrison meets Morton Feldman.
You need no forgiveness, that's a lovely comparison and I'm humbled by it — two of my great heroes. I think you're right, I would point to that as a kind of breakthrough piece. Inuksuit, the outdoor percussion piece, that's a kind of breakthrough. And in a strange way — most people don't even know this piece — but I think A Strange and Sacred Noise is one of my best works, this searing 60-minute piece for percussion quartet. It's absolutely relentless, ruthless, uncompromising. That's some kind of milestone.
I think it's safe to say that you've indeed "made it" as a composer. You've won a Pulitzer, and you have people like New Yorker critic Alex Ross calling you "one of the most original thinkers of the new century." And yet, you seem to have spent most of your composing life far removed from the business side of classical music. Now that you are celebrated and visible, you must have to interact with the business side. What's that like for you?
It's not my favorite part of the job. Fortunately, I have several people who insulate me from most of that. I'm just trying to stay focused on the work itself. I get a lot of requests from media constantly, and mostly now I say no. I feel badly about it — not because I think I need it in some way, but because I want to interact with people who genuinely want to know what I think I'm doing. At 73, I'm acutely aware of my own mortality and I've got work to do.
Sometimes I wonder if the classical music infrastructure is really serving the music in the best way. Is it open enough to composers of all backgrounds? Women composers? I just looked at the upcoming season of the New York Philharmonic, and I did the math: It's presenting 52 different composers throughout the season and only six of them are women. That's only 11%.
Wow. That's surprising.
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It's starting to feel like the gains we'd made in recent years are diminishing. Some institutions that had checked off a few progressive, inclusive boxes have now reverted to regularly scheduled programming — a lot of hits by deceased, European, male composers. Do you pay any attention to these kinds of things in the classical music field?
Well, neither the box-checking nor the reversion have much of a future, do they? I have the luxury of not thinking about these things very much because I am removed. And this may sound even more insufferably arrogant, but honestly, I've never really felt like I was part of the classical music world. Obviously, I depend on conservatory-trained musicians and concert halls and presenters and marketing people to bring at least a certain part of my work to listeners, so it's ungrateful in a way for me to suggest that. But, separating the music from the business — the music doesn't feel as though it's part of that.
Near the end of your memoir, you write, "As I've gotten older, I've become more acutely aware of my own failings." What do you see as your failings?
Oh, there are so many. I'm not a very attentive friend. I'm arrogant and self-absorbed. I live in my own world and I begrudgingly interact with the rest of the world. I'm not a people person — like my friend Steven Schick says, I'm a "person person." A one-on-one conversation with someone whose mind engages me is something that I very much enjoy. But I think I'm kind of emotionally removed.
I wasn't exactly looking for a laundry list, but thank you for being frank. Were you at all thinking of any career failings when you wrote that?
Maybe a larger failing for me was that I'm not a Buddhist monk or something — that I've chosen art, or art has chosen me. Is this the highest calling? I believe that, in fact, art, science and the thinnest slice of religion are the greatest hope for humanity.
Your art is your religion?
Absolutely. It's as close to religion as I get.
Which gets me thinking about the future, and returning to Horizon with its "edge of the known," as you call it. I often ask composers this question and it never really works out, but: Do you have any ideas about where music is headed? You've carved out a singular style for yourself — music of, within and surrounding nature, ecology, geography, experimenting with non-Western ideas, tunings, etcetera. Could someone do a similar thing today or in the future?
I have no idea. I don't know what "style" or "originality" is. You know, Henry Cowell said: "Originality. You either have it or you don't. Forget about it." I just have gratitude. Thank goodness I've been given this path in life and given this gift of music, because I shudder to think what might have become of me had I not had it.
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