John Luther Adams, 73, Leaves the U.S. and Settles in Australia's Red Center

John Luther Adams, the 73-year-old American composer long drawn to extreme environments, left the United States in 2024 and has now settled in Australia's Red Center, the arid heart of the continent.

The move has already changed his work. Adams's musical notebooks, he said in a video interview, are full of new transcriptions of Australian birdsong. "They're so colorful, they're so vocal, and they are truly so different from any birds that I've encountered anyplace else," he said. "It's pure pleasure."

Adams is not a composer who imitates nature so much as one who becomes it. His singular sound, built over decades, draws on oceans, ice storms, birds and bullfrogs. He listens with what admirers describe as unflappable wonder and care, then conjures what he hears.

The violinist Richard Tognetti put it this way: "He's not painting the mountain; he's making you feel as though you're looking at it, or even on it."

How did the composer get to the Red Center?

The relocation caps a long pattern of choosing the most awe-inspiring landscapes available. For several decades, Adams and his wife, Cynthia, both environmentalists, lived in the middle of Alaska. They then bought an isolated house in the New Mexico desert.

In 2024, they decided to leave the United States entirely. They traveled to Australia by boat, tested out different regions and recently settled in the heart of the continent — the Red Center, an arid expanse with an Aboriginal history reaching back tens of thousands of years.

The choice of a place with that depth of human history is not incidental to a composer whose work has always been inseparable from its environment. Adams, 73, has repeatedly said that the more extreme and awe-inspiring a landscape, the better it nourishes his music.

What does the move change for his music?

By his own account, everything and nothing. Not long ago, Adams recalled, someone asked him what had changed in his move across hemispheres.

"Well, I'm in Australia, not in Alaska," he said he replied. "I'm in my mid-70s, not in my mid-30s. And the world is on fire."

Yet the composer insists his essential task is unchanged. "Music matters more than ever," Adams said, "but I'm also just trying to do what I've always tried to do, which is follow it wherever it wants to lead me next. I often say it's my only shot at some kind of redemption for my own human failings."

That remark carries weight for a composer who has spent a career translating environmental crisis and natural splendor into sound. The new Australian material — birdsong unlike anything he has encountered elsewhere — suggests the notebooks will keep filling. Whether the Red Center produces a major new work on the scale of his earlier landscape pieces remains unstated; no new compositions are announced in the interview.

What is certain is the direction. A composer who has followed music from Alaska to the New Mexico desert has now crossed hemispheres to keep following it, in his mid-70s, in one of the driest places on earth.