![]() ![]() In Georgia, Adams ’ growing concern for birds and the environment spurred him to go well beyond compositional exercises. “The music grows from that and not the other way around.” “To assess John’s real impact, you have to imagine him as a young person who left the centers of musical accomplishment because he cared about the planet, and wanted to be close to it in its rawest form,” says percussionist and conductor Steven Schick, one of Adams’ close collaborators and friends. But it was by engaging with the natural world that he found his own musical voice. At CalArts he studied the music of influential America n experimental composers like Morton Feldman, John Cage, and Lou Harrison. In the West Village, he bought weird records and weirder mind-altering substances and caught as many concerts as he could. “There was a lot more to discover.”Īdams got his first taste of avant-garde rock, jazz, and classical music as a teenage aspiring drummer by sneaking into Manhattan from his home in the New Jersey suburbs. “I didn’t want to become the American bird guy.”Īnd yet, throughout decades of creative exploration, Adams always figured he’d eventually return to his musical roots, that birds would continue to sustain and inspire him. “I didn’t want it to become a shtick or a gimmick,” he says. But at points in his musical evolution, especially in the 1990s, Adams shied away from birdsong. Looking back, the avian influence was clearly integral to several of his most large-scale works. While Adams has no intention of retiring anytime soon, he recently reflected on his journey so far while writing a memoir, Silences So Deep, published this month. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2014, as well as a Grammy for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. His best-known work is Become Ocean, a churning orchestral piece that emulates the natural movements of bodies of water as polar ice melts and sea levels rise. His works engage with environmental issues, evoking stunning natural locales, both real and invented. He has written for symphony orchestra, staged music theater, built immersive sound environments for museums, and mounted thunderous percussion performances in outdoor locations across the globe. Since then, Adams has built a reputation as one of the most visionary living composers in American classical music. Years later Adams integrated translations of the Wood Thrush and other avian species into what he considers to be his first finished work, songbirdsongs, written between 19 for two piccolos and three percussionists. “Inuksuit 2” from Inuksuit (via Bandcamp) “Beginning” from In the White Silence (via Spotify) “Wood Thrush” from songbirdsongs (via Bandcamp) These are the John Luther Adams compositions you can listen to throughout this story: “It delighted me because something else was gained-something else was distilled out of the failing.” “I had this idea that I still adhere to, that there was an unattainability in it that made it feel right,” he tells me over the phone from his home in the Chihuahuan Desert of New Mexico. But to Adams, that inherent futility was central to its appeal. Reproducing the thrush’s song was an exercise in the impossible: Using a vocal organ called the syrinx, birds can sound two unrelated notes at once and sing complex patterns. Here was my doorway into a musical world that was worthy of a lifetime of devotion-because it wasn’t about me.” “I began to understand in my body, my ears, and my spirit that here was my life’s work,” he recalls. Consumed by what he has described as the bird’s “silvery, limpid phrases,” he began decamping to the woods before dawn or at dusk, when the thrushes are most vocal, with a three-by-five music notepad, doing his best to capture the sound in musical notation. One day in 1974 John Luther Adams was walking through a forest outside of Atlanta when he heard a sound that would change his life forever: the song of a Wood Thrush.Īdams was 21 and working as a librarian, farmhand, and organic gardener, plotting his next steps after studying composition at the California Institute of the Arts near Los Angeles.
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