norman lebrecht
January 11, 2026
The eminent and successful composer John Luther Adams, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for his widely performed orchestral work Become Ocean, has resettled with his wife in Australia.
Here, he tells his new compatriots why:
I never felt at home in the country where I was born. When I was young, I fled the sprawling suburbs and relentless hustle of life in “the Lower 48” and migrated to Alaska. There I found my true home and the full shape of my life’s work. Fifty years later I set out again, in search of a new home, a new refuge at the other end of the Earth.
Lately I find myself thinking a lot about Schoenberg, Bartók, Weill, Stravinsky and other composers and artists, who fled Europe in the 1930s and ’40s. It’s no small irony that they found refuge in the country that, almost a century later, I’ve felt compelled to leave. Although the political turmoil those artists escaped was more extreme, the current situation in the United States was a major element in my decision to leave. Yet the real reason I’ve left is deeper than politics: it’s the culture.
The culture creates the politics and, with tongue lightly in cheek, I’ve taken to referring to my wife and myself as “cultural refugees”. The relentless commercialisation, rising tides of xenophobia, the strident acrimony of social discourse, the violence, and the increasingly hysterical tenor of life in the USA have simply worn us down. We are among the few privileged enough to be able to leave….
Continues here.