John Luther Adams (born January 23, 1953) is an American composer whose music is inspired by nature

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 Born in Meridian, Mississippi, Adams began playing music as a teenager as a drummer in rock bands. He attended Cal Arts as an undergraduate in the early 1970s, where he studied with James Tenney and Leonard Stein, and graduated in 1973 (Kosman 2001). After graduating from Cal Arts, Adams began work in environmental protection. This work first brought him to Alaska in 1975. His deep love for the location led to his permanent migration there in 1978. It continues to be a prominent influence in his music (Garland 2007). From 1982 to 1989, he performed as timpanist and principal percussionist with the Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra and the Arctic Chamber Orchestra (Kosman 2001). In 2006, Adams was named one of the first United States Artists Fellows. Previously, he received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Rasmuson Foundation, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (Garland 2007). Adams's musical work spans many genres and media. He has composed for television, film, children's theater, voice, acoustic instruments, orchestra, and electronics.

John Adams’s ‘Death of Klinghoffer’ at the Metropolitan Opera

One of the most wrenching moments in “The Death of Klinghoffer,” the 1991 opera by the composer John Adams and the librettist Alice Goodman, occurs during the final monologue by Marilyn Klinghoffer, which brings this raw, penetrating, strangely mystical work to its conclusion.
NYTimes
"The Death of Klinghoffer'' is about the murder of a disabled Jewish man by Palestinian extremist. The Metropolitan Opera House’s opening night of 1991 opera The Death of Klinghoffer received a standing ovation in New York City Monday. But the noise made by crowds outside of Lincoln Center before the curtain rose may have rivaled the cheers inside the opera house.
Performance Protests
 The Death of Klinghoffer is an American opera, with music by John Adams to an English-language libretto by Alice Goodman. First produced in Brussels and New York in 1991, the opera is based on the hijacking of the passenger liner Achille Lauro by the Palestine Liberation Front in 1985, and the hijackers' murder of wheelchair-bound Jewish-American passenger Leon Klinghoffer.
WIKIPEDIA
The concept of the opera originated with theatre director Peter Sellars, who was a major collaborator, as was the choreographer Mark Morris. It was commissioned by five American and European opera companies, as well as the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The opera has drawn controversy, including allegations that the opera is antisemitic, by the Klinghoffer family and others, while its creators and some others have disputed certain of the criticisms of it.

 

JOHN ADAMS 1947

John Coolidge Adams (born February 15, 1947) is an American composer with strong roots in minimalism. His best-known works include Short Ride in a Fast Machine (1986), On the Transmigration of Souls (2002), a choral piece commemorating the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks (for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003), and Shaker Loops (1978), a minimalist four-movement work for strings. His well-known operas include Nixon in China (1987), which recounts Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China, and Doctor Atomic (2005), which covers Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project, and the building of the first atomic bomb. wikipedia

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