Life

Last year, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer left the United States to settle in Australia. This is the story of why. By John Luther Adams.

‘Always coming home’: Why I moved from the US to Australia

Composer John Luther Adams.

Credit: Kris Serafin

Return with us, return to us,
be always coming home.
– Ursula Le Guin

Behind us, in the distance, the coast of California shimmers in the morning light. Ahead of us, as far as we can see, stretches the unbroken horizon of the Pacific. Our ship is moving steadily away from North America, and I am not looking back. I sit down, open a new sketchbook and write my name. Below that, on the line for my address, I write: “Planet Earth”.

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.

When we were young, my wife and I were well-known environmental activists. The time came when I had to make a choice between life as an activist and life as a composer. I chose music in the belief that in its own way a life in art could matter every bit as much as a life in politics. In the years since, I’ve come to believe that ultimately art does more than politics to change the world.

Music is not what I do, it’s how I understand the world. For me, places become music. Throughout my life I’ve chosen to get away from the familiar, to put myself in new places where I hope to discover music that I’ve never heard before. As Yup’ik subsistence hunters in Alaska say, “Always getting ready.” For me, it’s, “Always coming home.”

For tens of thousands of years before Western societies emerged, Australia’s First Peoples have understood where and who they are through walking, singing, storytelling and dreaming. As an orphan of a culture without such traditions, it occurs to me that throughout my life I’ve been trying to re-imagine and rediscover something of those deeper connections with place. After 40 years in Alaska, my journey led me to the deserts of North and South America. Now I look forward to continuing my life’s work in Australia.

Our friends in Australia are perplexed by the apparent rise of totalitarianism in the United States. People we meet often ask: “What is going on up there? How did this happen?”

I suspect these questions are being asked far and wide. The global dominance of “American” commercial culture – Hollywood movies, pop music, professional sports, mass-market fashion labels, status-symbol tech products and social media – has sold a mythic version of “America” to people all over the world. Now, as they see a reality that doesn’t look at all like Disneyland, Las Vegas or the cinematic version of New York City, they’re feeling confused and even betrayed.

Occasionally some of our Australian interlocutors pursue the matter further and ask earnestly: “Do you think what’s happening up there could happen down here?”

Reluctantly, I find myself answering: “I hope not, but yes. In today’s world, I think it can happen almost anywhere.”

Despite the dark political outlook, I want to believe that change for the better is still possible. I was marching in the streets before I could vote. I believe that the mass movements for civil rights in the US and for the end of the war in Vietnam helped change the course of history. Mass demonstrations may yet again bring about change.

Ultimately, though, I don’t believe that politics will change fundamentally until culture changes. Throughout history the ideas that transform societies have come from writers, painters, novelists, poets, even composers. From scientists, philosophers, theologians and others whose lives are dedicated to asking new questions, to seeking beauty and truth, not power.

Our current overpopulation, overconsumption, overconcentration of wealth, and the relentless pursuit of economic growth, cannot continue without disastrous consequences. At their deepest level, these are ecological problems, and their ultimate manifestation is the heating of the climate all over the Earth. Unless we make fundamental changes to our ways of living, we may soon be overwhelmed by social disruptions and elemental disasters we have not yet allowed ourselves to imagine.

Perhaps it’s wishful thinking, but it seems to me that as an affluent society with a relatively low population, vast expanses of wild lands inhabited by unique plants and animals, and the enduring presence of the world’s oldest cultures, Australia may be in a position to create a new model for a society of people living more in harmony with one another, with all other forms of life and with the Earth itself.

Now in my 70s, what drives me to continue composing every day is my love for and faith in the next generations. I hope that my music may somehow be of use to people I will never know, people who will imagine and bring into being new ways of living, new cultures that I will not live to see.

I remember the words of the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer: “I will build a new culture, fresh as a young animal ... It will take time. It will take time. There will be time.”

It is night. I am looking out on the great Southern Ocean towards the bottom of the world. Low above the horizon floats a broad arc of phosphorescent green light – aurora australis. From a firestorm on the surface of the sun, the solar wind has rolled across 150 million kilometres of space and into Earth’s magnetic field, colliding with ions in the upper atmosphere, releasing energy as light. The arc spans the full sweep of sky from west to east, about 15 degrees above the horizon. Just below its apex stands Achernar – the star at the end of the river – burning bright.

In time, vertical rays drift upwards, adorning the arc like a crown. They begin to glow red and expand, eventually filling the southern sky, transforming the arc into a luminous red curtain edged in green, billowing in the solar wind. At this moment, an asymmetrical reflection of these same forms and colours is dancing somewhere above the Arctic. I smile at how small and beautiful the Earth is. For a moment at least, I feel at home.

My thoughts drift to the continent that I left. To the rough-hewn cabin in the stunted spruce forest that was my own private Walden for 10 years, to the trim one-room cabin in the birch and aspen forest on the hillside that was the centre of my composing life for almost 30 years, to the little green house at the edge of the Pacific where the music rolled in like the waves, to the adobe casita in the solitary desert mountain bowl where I worked for five idyllic years before we left North America.

I think about all the people I know and love who still live there, and the innumerable others who are struggling and fearful amid the growing turmoil. It breaks my heart. Yet there’s nothing that I can do to change it. I cannot look back.

I am grateful to be where I am now, still following the music wherever it may lead me. It is getting late and I have work to do.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on December 20, 2025 as "Always coming home".

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