September 18, 2011 | Read Time: 2 minutes
The award: The Heinz Awards, annually given to honor significant contributions in a number of fields; this year’s focus was the environment.
Who give the award: The Heinz Family Foundation, in Pittsburgh
How much the award offers: $100,000 to each winner
The winner: Among the recipients this year is John Luther Adams, an Alaskan composer whose works are influenced by his natural surroundings.
About the winner: Mr. Adams, who went to Alaska in the mid-1970s, when he was in his early 20s, worked early on as an environmental activist but eventually realized he didn’t have the makeup for politics. He left the environmental movement in the 1980s to dedicate himself full time to making music. In recent years he has composed pieces that are intended to be performed outdoors and are influenced by their setting. He is probably most well known for a piece called “The Place Where You Go to Listen,” which Mr. Adams describes as a “musical composition in the form of a room.” Listeners who enter the room “experience an ecosystem of sounds and light.” A virtual orchestra on a computer plays music based on real-time streams of geophysical data, including weather, earthquake, and geomagnetic data.
Why he was chosen: Kim O’Dell, director of the Heinz Awards, says Mr. Adams appealed to jurors of the award because “his work as an artist and a composer has the potential to reach people who might not be reached in any other way and to get them thinking about the environment and the natural world.”
How he will use the money: To continue working. Mr. Adams is an independent artist, not affiliated with any college or university. “I don’t have a regular paycheck, so I’m never quite sure where money is coming from,” he says. “This is like manna from heaven.”
