Music

Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Luther Adams to revisit Alaska

Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Luther Adams, who built an international reputation among fans of contemporary music while living in Fairbanks for 40 years, will be back in the state in September.

Adams' big piece for three orchestras, "Become Ocean," won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2014. A recording by the Seattle Symphony, which commissioned the piece, received the Grammy Award for "Best Contemporary Classical Composition" in 2015, the same year he moved to New York City.

In an interview in the September issue of Runners World magazine, the 63 year-old talked about how the move had reawakened his love of running. It had been hard to run in Alaska, he said.

He also linked the sport with music. "I've never run a marathon," he said, "but it's a beautiful thing. It's a collective performance, an orchestral music, when you see all these bodies moving together."

Adams will make two appearances in Anchorage. At 6 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 1, he will read from his new book "Silences So Deep: A Memoir of Music and Alaska" at Cyrano's.  At 7 p.m. on Sept. 2 he will give an artist's talk at the Anchorage Museum, talking about "Music in the Anthropocene," "Anthropocene" being the name some have suggested for the present geological era. The talk will be broadcast live at the Museum of the North at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, site of his installation "The Place Where You Go to Listen."

From 6 p.m. to midnight on Sept. 2 and 3 the Museum will present the six-hour-long "Veils and Vesper," a series of electronic pieces composed by Adams in 2005. The Alaska Humanities Forum, which is helping to sponsor Adams' visit, says that when the several individual pieces are "installed together, listeners are able to create their own 'mix' and experience the music by moving through an immersive environment."

"Veils and Vesper" will be presented in the museum's atrium while Adams is speaking in the auditorium on Sept. 2 and when the speaking event moves on to a reception in the atrium at 8 p.m. or so.

All events are free and open to the public.

 
 
 
 

Mike Dunham

Mike Dunham was a longtime ADN reporter, mainly writing about culture, arts and Alaska history. He worked in radio for 20 years before switching to print. He retired from the ADN in 2017.

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