The other John Adams gets a $50,000 award
mainJohn Luther Adams has announced on social media that he has been given the William Schuman award for lifetime achievement. It makes him $50,000 the richer and means he need no longer be referred to as ‘the other John Adams’.
John Luther Adams, 62 this month, won a Pulitzer and had an orchestral best-seller this past year. Alaska based, he paid his first visit to Carnegie Hall in the spring of 2014.
==the other John Adams
Well I always think of him as ‘The better John Adam’. His music is much more stimulating than old man Nixon/Klinghoffer. Good news for him
PS: these new Captchas in joined-up italics are very hard to read !
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Fantastic – a new commission from him for massed horns is in the pipeline for East Neuk Festival, Southbank and Glasgow Concert Halls.
I dunno, Norman: he’s pretty hot over here (well, as classical composers go, in the greater scheme of things), and it’s getting to the point where JLA is not “the other” anymore. Already some music writers have taken to referring to the composer of Nixon in China as “John (Coolidge) Adams”.
By the way, I know that JLA’s Wikipedia entry still says that he lives in Alaska, but he moved a couple of years ago. (I’d presume that he did it because, as his career was heating up, he decided it would be better to live somewhere less expensive and time-consuming to travel to and from than the woods some miles beyond Fairbanks.) I’m looking for a citation and will post it here when I find it.
Ah, here we are.
JLA didn’t move from Alaska a couple of years ago, he did it just this past spring.
“His day job, as he called it, is composer. One of his scores, “Become Ocean,” won the Pulitzer Prize for music this spring and had its New York debut a few nights earlier by the Seattle Symphony at Carnegie Hall. Now Adams and his wife, Cindy, who had just moved to New York after decades in Alaska, were reveling in their avocation: baseball.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/27/sports/baseball/with-composers-mindset-john-luther-adams-obsesses-over-baseball.html
Considering that William Schuman himself had harboured a youthful ambition to become a baseball player and would later write what is so far the only baseball-based opera (The Mighty Casey), it makes this award all the more appropriate! 🙂
I would love to see a couple citations of music writers using “John Coolidge Adams.”
http://www.therestisnoise.com/2010/05/the-week-in-john-adams-news.html
http://www.willcwhite.com/2011/03/top-10-composers-who-make-you-seem-cool-when-you-tell-other-musicians-you-like-them/
No. 5
http://rainingacorns.blogspot.com/2011/01/slouching-toward-lachenmann-bjorks.html
5th paragraph
http://www.artsjournal.com/2014/12/classical-grammy-nominations-2015-both-john-adamses-seattle-symphony-partch.html
http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/main/2009/10/
2nd paragraph (list)
http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/2010/09/a_couple_of_complaints.html
3rd paragraph
https://www.tumblr.com/search/john+coolidge+adams
There are many here, who because of his recent accomplishments in past years, have stopped referring to him in that regard, but simply call him just John Luther Adams.
Fab composer 🙂
John Luther Adams.
Yes!!! 🙂
This is very strange. Why should this all be built up as though it’s a competition between two composers whose work is so different? “Oh, I MUCH prefer THIS John Adams,” “The OTHER John Adams has no skill or talent,” “THIS John Adams is much more worthy of the name than THAT John Adams,” etc.