Stuart Collection: John Luther Adams - The Wind Garden

Adams proposes an ideal of musical ecology, the philosophical foundation on which his largest, most complex musical work is based. This installation, also called The Place Where You Go to Listen, is a sound and light environment that gives voice to the cycles of sunlight and darkness, the phases of the moon, the seismic rhythms of the earth, and the dance of the aurora borealis. Adams describes this work as "a place for hearing the unheard music of the world around us."

The artistic heir of sonic artists such as John Cage and James Tenney, John Luther Adams is one of the most significant and highly regarded contemporary American composers. The Farthest Place is the first critical look at the work of the composer whom the New Yorker critic Alex Ross has called "one of the most original musical thinkers of the new century." While often identified with the Alaska that so inspires him, Adams is anything but a regionalist.

Written "score" for composer John Luther Adams' sound installation, The Wind Garden (2017), a permanent public artwork commissioned by the Stuart Collection at the University of California, San Diego. The work's tones are generated by 32 accelerometers that Adams has positioned on tree branches, with a speaker assigned to each, and four subwoofers in steel boxes on the ground.