Silences so deep Music, solitude, Alaska

Composer Adams, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a Grammy Award for his orchestral work, Become Ocean, has crafted a joyous paean to friendship and Alaska in this radiant memoir. From his early days, when he was drawn to the environmental movement in the forty-ninth state, Adams details his years living in a cabin in the woods, his work with the Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra, and the companionship he enjoyed with his closest friends, poet John Haines and conductor Gordon Wright. Inspired by Walden and the works of his good friend, Barry Lopez, Adams embraced the starkness of Fairbanks winters and the beauty and severity of its woods while carving out a burgeoning musical career that took him to orchestras near and far. An eclectic observer of both the natural and the philosophical, he writes as eloquently of the Aurora Borealis as of lively evenings as a member of the oddball Ace Lake Sauna Society. Witty and boisterous, yet also profoundly heartfelt and poignant, Adams' memoir is a record of great creativity and determined work that is bolstered by deep love of the wilderness. A singular title that should inspire and enchant in equal measure.

Pulitzer Prize--winning composer Adams (Winter Music: Composing the North) delivers a colorful memoir of finding his artistic voice. He was born in 1953 Mississippi and had a childhood marked by frequent moves and his parents' alcoholism. He found refuge in the music of John Cage, John Coltrane, and Edgard Varèse, and after graduating from the California Institute for the Arts in 1973, he moved to Alaska--inspired by pianist Glenn Gould's radio documentary The Idea of North and Henry David Thoreau's Walden. He eventually settled in Fairbanks, where he became an environmental activist; met his future wife, Cindy Marquette; and grew close with fellow composer Gordon Wright and poet John Haines. After realizing "someone else could take my place in politics, but no one else could make the music I imagined but me," Adams wrote Strange and Sacred Noise, a piece informed by fractals and chaos theory, which he discusses in great depth. The deaths of Wright in 2006 and Haines in 2011 compelled Adams and Marquette to relocate to New York City and Mexico in 2014. "Wherever my wife is, that's home. And the music itself has become a kind of home for me," he writes. Classical music aficionados will most appreciate Adams's thoughtful recollections. (Sept.)