The Farthest Place: The Music of John Luther Adams

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments I would like to thank upne (in particular Richard Pult) for giving me and us the opportunity to work on this labor of love for John Luther Adams, and all those wonderful people who contributed to this volume—it has been a pleasure! Most of all I would like to thank John himself for support, encouragement, and practical help—highly appreciated! While working on this book project, two important and life-changing things happened to me: in the summer, our little daughter Janna was born . . . she’s our cute little clinamen, the tiny little thing that makes life swerve into unforeseen directions. And in the early morning hours of Christmas Eve, my beloved little brother Frank died, after more than four years of living under the shadow of an incurable, malignant brain tumor. I can only now, in retrospect, see how brave he had been all those years. Frank now has gone farther than the farthest place, and my only hope is that this turns out to be the closest place as well. It is to Janna and Frank that I dedicate this book. Some of the essays in this book already had a previous life: Alex Ross’s “Song of the Earth” was published in The New Yorker, May 12, 2008. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_ ross, reprinted with kind permission of the author. Peter Garland’s “For Lou Harrison” is reprinted from the liner notes for John Luther Adams—For Lou Harrison (New World Records 80669-2).© 2007 Anthology of Recorded Music, Inc. Used by permission. Part of Bernd Herzogenrath’s “Introduction” and “The ‘Weather of Music’: From Ives to Adams” was already published as “The ‘Weather of Music’: Sounding Nature in the 20th and 21st Centuries.” Deleuze|Guattari & Ecology. ed. Bernd Herzogenrath. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 216–32. Reprinted with kind permission. All illustrations are reprinted with kind permission of John Luther Adams, and Taiga Press, with the exception of figure 5.2, which is copyright 2008 Lisa Tolentino Esler and is reprinted with kind permission. ...