He never finished high school, took demanding work outside of music, moved to a cabin in Alaska, etc. Can you really win a Pulitzer Prize this way? Well, yes. . .
I was an undergraduate at Oberlin Conservatory when John came for a two year residency about 25 years ago. Imagine how mind-expanding it was to play In the White Silence at age 19! Thanks for this insightful feature, i learned a lot.
Always good to be reminded that it's possible to achieve "success" by simply following your own heart. The world would often have us believe otherwise.
Lovely tribute to Adams, I was not aware of his work.
This reminds me of the writer Wendell Berry,who spent his early life in rural Kentucky. However, he also spent time in New York City, where he attended graduate school. However, he found that the city's culture was not for him, despite a bustling literary scene, and the recommendation from mentors that he stay. He eventually returned to rural Kentucky to live a simpler and more sustainable life.
In both cases, Adams and Berry were initially drawn to the "opportunity" of urban life, but eventually found themselves called elsewhere. And the world is a better place because of their decisions and subsequent art and reflections upon the places they found themselves.
You teach me something I never heard of every time I read one of your posts. That's what I love about your Substack. Thank you. A fascinating read about a fascinating human.
As someone who came to know John first as the environmentalist leading the environmental center in Alaska, I have enjoyed and appreciated your description of his musical journey, complete with musical excerpts. I haven’t been close enough to all the steps to understand quite how this happened to my friend.
In the 1970s and 1980s in Alaska, he had to carve out his solitary time and space to answer his creative force, and some of us were baffled at first by his insistence in living separately from the woman he loved and her child. But she understood him from the beginning, and evolved with him, and their relationships thrived, along with his music. She is an important part of this path. I respect now much more what I didn’t understand at first. Most of us don’t know how to design a life that makes such creative achievement possible.
Ted writes, "I have long been interested in the relationship between music and trance, one of the oldest connections in human history, but rarely acknowledged within music conservatories or symphony halls. Adams has changed that." I agree...but would suggest Terry Riley and Steve Reich (not Philip Glass) had already changed that—and John Luther Adams built and expanded on what Reich and Riley did. (While I love John Luther Adams' works...I think "Music For Eighteen Musicians" and "Drumming" by Reich are both as equally groundbreaking and monumental as any of JLA's work.
I'm not fond of the drone music of John Luther Adams, and coined a term for it:
Stuck car-horn music.
Someone suggested that this would gain international traction if I made that into one of those absurdly long German portmanteau words, so I came up with
Ted, I don't know if you know the work of Mark Hemingway, longtime writer in Washington DC on policy topics. Your piece puts me in mind of a profile he wrote some years ago on Ken Schaffer, the inventor of the Schaffer-Vega Diversity System, "the first (and many still say the best) wireless electric guitar signal transmitter." it is a great piece on someone you may not know about, though i doubt it!
I love his music. If you get a chance I highly recommend attending a live performance of Inuksuit (2009). The one I heard (at the Big Ears festival) had a few dozen percussionists arrayed in a large outdoor space. There was a continually shifting experience as you walked around in the space: immersive and amazing, but in a quiet, low-key way.
Adams makes me think of Paul Bowles. Not an exact analogy, obviously; just the shift, the against-career move. In Bowles's case it was dropping one thing at which he was already successful, making a hard geographical move, and taking up another thing at which he was also successful.
There is a strong connection between what Adams is doing with the seismographs and electromagnetic sensors and what the British cyberneticians attempted in the 60s and 70s with the musicolour machine and with various attempts to connect cybernetic devices with ponds and other natural phenomena. For a full treatment of the British cyberneticians (especially Ashby, Beer, and Pask) see Andrew Pickering’s The Cybernetic Brain.
Thank you for asking. Adam's music bores me to tears. It just sits there, then moves incrementally towards nothing. I love listening to music that goes somewhere. I don't find it meditative, just annoying. Conversely, I enjoy Morton Feldman, whom Adam's also likes. Feldman works with sound and silence, Adams never stops talking. His music sounds, to me, like being in a room with a lot of people and there's a low hum that goes on from the multiple conversations and there's nothing that can be identified as anything in particular. I realize that some people find this type of music soothing, and this type of music aggravates me to no end. I find Coltrane's Naima soothing.
Great piece Ted. But missing from the story is that John Luther Adams had to eventually MOVE to New York and get to know all the muckety-mucks before he got that Pulitzer Prize. At some point, he decided his wilderness sojourn was done. And after a few years in the big city, he moved to the desert, to start a new nature chapter in his life and work. But being in New York for a time was also essential to his success.
I was an undergraduate at Oberlin Conservatory when John came for a two year residency about 25 years ago. Imagine how mind-expanding it was to play In the White Silence at age 19! Thanks for this insightful feature, i learned a lot.
What lovely and insightful writing. Such an enjoyable read. I never knew this about Adams. Thank you!
Always good to be reminded that it's possible to achieve "success" by simply following your own heart. The world would often have us believe otherwise.
Lovely tribute to Adams, I was not aware of his work.
This reminds me of the writer Wendell Berry,who spent his early life in rural Kentucky. However, he also spent time in New York City, where he attended graduate school. However, he found that the city's culture was not for him, despite a bustling literary scene, and the recommendation from mentors that he stay. He eventually returned to rural Kentucky to live a simpler and more sustainable life.
In both cases, Adams and Berry were initially drawn to the "opportunity" of urban life, but eventually found themselves called elsewhere. And the world is a better place because of their decisions and subsequent art and reflections upon the places they found themselves.
I really wanted to like this music. But it makes me want to break things. For the antidote I listened to Sonny Rollins, Newk's Time.
You teach me something I never heard of every time I read one of your posts. That's what I love about your Substack. Thank you. A fascinating read about a fascinating human.
As someone who came to know John first as the environmentalist leading the environmental center in Alaska, I have enjoyed and appreciated your description of his musical journey, complete with musical excerpts. I haven’t been close enough to all the steps to understand quite how this happened to my friend.
In the 1970s and 1980s in Alaska, he had to carve out his solitary time and space to answer his creative force, and some of us were baffled at first by his insistence in living separately from the woman he loved and her child. But she understood him from the beginning, and evolved with him, and their relationships thrived, along with his music. She is an important part of this path. I respect now much more what I didn’t understand at first. Most of us don’t know how to design a life that makes such creative achievement possible.
Ted writes, "I have long been interested in the relationship between music and trance, one of the oldest connections in human history, but rarely acknowledged within music conservatories or symphony halls. Adams has changed that." I agree...but would suggest Terry Riley and Steve Reich (not Philip Glass) had already changed that—and John Luther Adams built and expanded on what Reich and Riley did. (While I love John Luther Adams' works...I think "Music For Eighteen Musicians" and "Drumming" by Reich are both as equally groundbreaking and monumental as any of JLA's work.
I have spent time in a place where the Aurora Borealis can be heard....would be nice to have its living sound put to an audio canvas.
I'm not fond of the drone music of John Luther Adams, and coined a term for it:
Stuck car-horn music.
Someone suggested that this would gain international traction if I made that into one of those absurdly long German portmanteau words, so I came up with
Gestüke Autogehonkenschlafhaubemusik.
Ted, I don't know if you know the work of Mark Hemingway, longtime writer in Washington DC on policy topics. Your piece puts me in mind of a profile he wrote some years ago on Ken Schaffer, the inventor of the Schaffer-Vega Diversity System, "the first (and many still say the best) wireless electric guitar signal transmitter." it is a great piece on someone you may not know about, though i doubt it!
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-most-interesting-man-in-the-world
I love his music. If you get a chance I highly recommend attending a live performance of Inuksuit (2009). The one I heard (at the Big Ears festival) had a few dozen percussionists arrayed in a large outdoor space. There was a continually shifting experience as you walked around in the space: immersive and amazing, but in a quiet, low-key way.
Adams makes me think of Paul Bowles. Not an exact analogy, obviously; just the shift, the against-career move. In Bowles's case it was dropping one thing at which he was already successful, making a hard geographical move, and taking up another thing at which he was also successful.
There is a strong connection between what Adams is doing with the seismographs and electromagnetic sensors and what the British cyberneticians attempted in the 60s and 70s with the musicolour machine and with various attempts to connect cybernetic devices with ponds and other natural phenomena. For a full treatment of the British cyberneticians (especially Ashby, Beer, and Pask) see Andrew Pickering’s The Cybernetic Brain.
Thank you for asking. Adam's music bores me to tears. It just sits there, then moves incrementally towards nothing. I love listening to music that goes somewhere. I don't find it meditative, just annoying. Conversely, I enjoy Morton Feldman, whom Adam's also likes. Feldman works with sound and silence, Adams never stops talking. His music sounds, to me, like being in a room with a lot of people and there's a low hum that goes on from the multiple conversations and there's nothing that can be identified as anything in particular. I realize that some people find this type of music soothing, and this type of music aggravates me to no end. I find Coltrane's Naima soothing.
Great piece Ted. But missing from the story is that John Luther Adams had to eventually MOVE to New York and get to know all the muckety-mucks before he got that Pulitzer Prize. At some point, he decided his wilderness sojourn was done. And after a few years in the big city, he moved to the desert, to start a new nature chapter in his life and work. But being in New York for a time was also essential to his success.