12430 .dropcap { color: #838078; float: left; font-size: 82px; line-height: 60px; padding: 5px 8px 0 0; } One day in 1974 John Luther Adams was walking through a forest outside of Atlanta when he heard a sound that would change his life forever: the song of a Wood Thrush. Adams was 21 and working as a librarian, farmhand, and organic gardener, plotting his next steps after studying composition at the California Institute of the Arts near Los Angeles. Consumed by what he has described as the bird’s “silvery, limpid phrases,” he began decamping to the woods before dawn or at dusk, when the thrushes are most vocal, with a three-by-five music notepad, doing his best to capture the sound in musical notation. “I began to understand in my body, my ears, and my spirit that here was my life’s work,” he recalls. “Here was my home. Here was my religion. Here was my doorway into a musical world that was worthy of a lifetime of devotion—because it...