Silences So Deep

The true story of a composer's life in the Alaskan wilderness and a meditation on making art in a landscape acutely threatened by climate change.

In the summer of 1975, composer John Luther Adams, then a twenty-two-year-old graduate of CalArts, boarded a flight to Alaska, beginning a journey into the mountains, forests, and tundra of the far north-and across distinctive mental and aural terrain-that would last for the next forty years.

Silences So Deep is Adams's account of these formative decades-and of what it's like to live alone in the frozen woods, composing music by day and spending one's evenings with a raucous crew of poets, philosophers, and fishermen. From adolescent loves-Edgard Varèse and Frank Zappa-to mature preoccupations with the natural world that inform such works as The Wind in High Places, Adams details the influences that saw him recognized with the Pulitzer Prize for music. It is also a memoir of solitude enriched by friendships with conductor Gordon Wright and poet John Haines, both of whom had a singular impact on Adams's life. Whether describing the travails of environmental activism in the midst of an oil boom or midwinter conversations in a communal sauna, Adams' playful and meditative voice evokes the particular beauty of the Alaskan landscape and the people who call it home.

Ultimately, this book is also the story of Adams's difficult decision to leave a rapidly warming Alaska and to strike out for new topographies and sources of inspiration. In its attentiveness to the challenges of life in the wilderness, to the demands of making art in an age of climate crisis, and to the pleasures of intellectual fellowship, Silences So Deep is a singularly rich account of a creative life.