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Podcast: New Books in Performing Arts
Episode: John Luther Adams, "Silences So Deep: Music, Solitude, Alaska" (FSG, 2020)
Description: John Luther Adams's Silences So Deep: Music, Solitude, Alaska (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020) is a profound, funny, and enlightening memoir from one of our greatest contemporary composers. Adams describes the process of writing music inspired by the wild landscapes of the far north, pieces with titles like Arctic Dreams, In the White Silence, and Become Ocean. But as much as Silences So Deep is a meditation on craft, it is also a masterpiece of nature writing, reminiscent at times of Walden, at other times of Dharma Bums. Adams moved to Alaska as a young man in search of the solit...