The other John Adams gets a $50,000 award

The other John Adams gets a $50,000 award

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norman lebrecht

January 08, 2015

John 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.

john luther adams

Comments

  • Mark Stratford says:

    ==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 !

  • Mark Stratford says:

    Enter your comment here…

  • Svend Brown says:

    Fantastic – a new commission from him for massed horns is in the pipeline for East Neuk Festival, Southbank and Glasgow Concert Halls.

  • MWnyc says:

    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.

  • Eric says:

    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.

  • Ks. Christopher Robson says:

    Fab composer 🙂
    John Luther Adams.
    Yes!!! 🙂

  • JAMA11 says:

    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.

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