Visionary American composer John Luther Adams has been awarded the coveted Columbia University School of the Arts William Schuman Award.
The William Schuman Award is a recognition which has been given over the past three decades. The award is named for the first recipient of the prize and offers a $50,000 unrestricted grant to its recipients. According to Columbia, the goal of the award is to recognize lifetime achievements of an American composer whose works have been widely performed and generally acknowledged to be of lasting significance.
“John Luther Adams's work anticipates a complex yet poetic intertwining of music and space. Whether he is writing for nontraditional sites or evoking the expansiveness of outdoor landscapes inside the concert hall, his writing radically redefines the relationship between sound and locality. We are thrilled to honor him with the Schuman Award,” says Carol Becker, dean of the Columbia School of the Arts.
Adams is a composer who uses the natural world as inspiration for his life and work. He has won the Heinz Award for his contributions to raising environmental awareness. He also received the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Become Ocean, an orchestral work that evokes thoughts of melting polar ice and rising sea levels. The piece was performed at Carnegie Hall and recorded by the Seattle Symphony and has been nominated for a 2015 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition.
The award will be presented at a three-night tribute concert in October at Miller Theatre at Columbia University in New York. The premiere features three major Adams works performed by the JACK Quartet and the International Contemporary Ensemble with long-time Adams collaborator Steven Schick conducting. The works, titled “Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing" and "In the White Silence and for Lou Harrison," were written in memory of Adams's mother, father and friend and mentor Lou Harrison.
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