"John’s music is about promise and progress," Julia Bullock writes in her note in the new 40-disc box set John Adams Collected Works. "It comments on the inherent threat of exploiting power while embodying it. There’s fire and fragility, placed alongside organized form and frequency. I love John’s music. I love singing it, learning from it. And I love listening to it." You can read her complete note from the box set here.

"My friendship is with the private John," Nonesuch’s longtime President and current Chairman Emeritus Bob Hurwitz writes in the new 40-disc box set John Adams Collected Works, "but it is never far from my mind that I am with the man who wrote Doctor Atomic and Nixon in China, Harmonielehre and Naive and Sentimental Music, Scheherazade.2 and Shaker Loops." You can read his complete note from the box set here.

The forty-disc John Adams Collected Works, a box set of recordings spanning more than four decades of the composer’s career with the label, is out now on Nonesuch. It includes two extensive booklets with new essays and notes by Timo Andres, Julia Bullock, Robert Hurwitz, Nico Muhly, and Jake Wilder-Smith. You can take a look inside in an unboxing video here. Since 1985, when Adams signed exclusively to Nonesuch, the label has released forty-two first recordings and thirty-one all-Adams albums. Collected Works includes thirty-five discs of Nonesuch recordings and five from other labels.

"For a generation of listeners born in the last two decades of the 20th century, the music of John Adams sounded as if it had always been there, a fixed point in a vast musical landscape," Jake Wilder-Smith writes in his note in the new 40-disc box set John Adams Collected Works. "Having already arrived in concert halls and on compact discs before our musical sensibilities began to take shape, this music colored our first impressions of a musical world. But as we grew older, Adams’s music continued to shift and expand. Listening as his work stretched in new directions, we found we had encountered the work of a significant composer in medias res: the narrative firmly established, but still in motion." You can read his complete note from the box set here.

"John’s music has been such a constant in my life that it’s reached a base level of my consciousness—it’s part of the way I hear all music now," Timo Andres (pictured here with John Adams in 2007) writes in his note in the new 40-disc box set John Adams Collected Works. "But in this case, it goes beyond the music. John showed me a model for life as an artist, one in which being communicative, permeable, and all-embracing can coexist with good craftsmanship, strongly held opinions, and the pursuit of one’s life’s work with single-minded intensity." You can read his complete note from the box set here.

"It would be difficult to make an account of all the ways John Adams’s music has influenced me and my work," Nico Muhly writes in his note in the upcoming 40-disc box set John Adams Collected Works, "but in the spirit of writing something personal, I’d like to offer a few perhaps impersonal observations about his work in a more circular, even crabwise, fashion. There are specific places in John’s music where there is a rhyme hidden across decades, relating to an elusive sense of 'meaning' in his music which radiates across his body of work." You can read his complete note from the box set here.

Nonesuch Records releases the forty-disc John Adams Collected Works, a box set of recordings spanning more than four decades of the composer’s career with the label, on July 1, 2022. It includes two extensive booklets with new essays and notes by Timo Andres, Julia Bullock, Robert Hurwitz, Nico Muhly, and Jake Wilder-Smith. Nonesuch made its first record with John Adams in 1985; he was signed exclusively to the label that year, and since then the company has released forty-two first recordings and thirty-one all-Adams albums. “John Adams coming to the label was one of the central events in our company’s history,” says Robert Hurwitz, Nonesuch’s longtime President and current Chairman Emeritus. “The recordings were done in real time, mostly within a few months of a piece’s first performance. Every recording was either conducted by John, or made under close supervision of the composer, who was in the control booth for every album—when he wasn’t on the podium.” Collected Works includes thirty-five discs of Nonesuch recordings and five from other labels.

The 75th Ojai Music Festival takes place this week, September 16–19, with events led by 2021 Music Director John Adams, the Ojai debuts of Rhiannon Giddens and Attacca Quartet, and the return of Timo Andres all streaming for free live from the Libbey Bowl in Ojai, California.

Ojai Music Festival has announced details for the 75th Festival, September 16–19, 2021, with 2021 Music Director John Adams; the Ojai debuts of Rhiannon Giddens and Attacca Quartet; the return of Timo Andres; and works by Andres, Giddens, Laurie Anderson, Donnacha Dennehy, Philip Glass, Ingram Marshall, Brad Mehldau, Nico Muhly, Caroline Shaw, and others. The festival events will also stream live. 

John Adams, the 2021 Music Director and conductor for the Ojai Music Festival, has announced featured artists for the 75th festival, June 10–13, 2021, including composer/pianist Timo Andres, who returns to Ojai to give the first live public performance of I Still Play, and Attacca Quartet, which makes its Ojai debut performing works by Caroline Shaw and others. Adams will conduct two concerts with works by Steve Reich, among others; his own work will be on programs by the LA Phil New Music Group and pianist Víkingur Ólafsson.

We Are Who We Are, a new series from Luca Guadagnino, the director of Call Me By Your Name and I Am Love, premieres on HBO and HBO Max tonight. As with many of Guadagnino's projects, the new show features several recordings by composer John Adams, starting with a selection from his 1995 song play I Was Looking At the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky on tonight's episode, and more in the weeks ahead.

John Adams's 2007 piece Doctor Atomic Symphony was given a live score reading with conductor David Robertson and other members of the Juilliard faculty and musicians, hosted by Adams's publisher, Boosey & Hawkes. The participants commented in real time as pages from the score went by, set to a 2018 live concert recording of the Juilliard Orchestra conducted by the composer himself. You can watch it here. Nonesuch released the premiere recording of Doctor Atomic Symphony in 2009, performed by Robertson and the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra.