John Luther Adams Composes Music Glaciers Would Like

The composer John Luther Adams writes majestic music that unfolds at a glacial pace. That makes sense when you hear Adams’s story. He dropped out of graduate school in musical composition in the seventies — dropped out all the way, moving to a cabin in Alaska where the closest road was a mile away. He lived out what he now calls a “Thoreau fantasy,” remaining without running water until he was almost 40. While the other composer named John Adams went to San Francisco, becoming widely admired and performed by major orchestras, John Luther Adams never wanted to give up his front-row seat to the icy northern landscape. “I don’t think there are too many living composers that have had the kind of experiences I’ve had in wild country,” he tells Kurt Andersen.

But Adams has gained recognition over the years, and this year won the Pulitzer Prize for Become Ocean, a sweeping composition for three orchestras playing together. Although he wrote Become Ocean in Mexico, he was watching the Pacific Ocean and thinking about melting polar ice while he wrote it. It’s easy to see Become Ocean as a political statement about climate change, especially from a former environmental activist living near the Arctic. But Adams is skeptical about art carrying overt messages. “I’ve indulged from time to time in political art,” he says, “and so often it seems that political art fails both as politics and as art.” He hopes the work would be seen as beautiful even without the looming global disaster. Adams and his wife sold their Alaskan home this year and moved to New York City. Oddly, he insists that it’s not as big a shift as it seems. “I am drawn to extremes,” he says, and the city is as extreme in its way as Alaska is in its.

Adams has published his working journals, and they are rife with comparisons between composition and painting. He talks about putting sounds down in brushstrokes or sculpting a piece — the critic Kyle Gann calls it Adams’ “painter envy.” He envies the physical relationship visual artists have with their materials, getting paint on their overalls and clay under their fingernails. “I’ve insisted for years that an artist is not an intellectual; an artist is a working person whose work happens to be art,” says Adams.

→ Listen to John Luther Adams on Meet the Composer