Composer John Luther Adams, photographed in his outdoor studio in Baja California Sur, Mexico, in 2017. Cynthia Adams hide caption toggle caption Cynthia Adams American composer John Luther Adams doesn't recommend following the path he took in music. Yet he wouldn't have it any other way. "I never studied with the right people at the right schools," he told me in April 2014, a few hours after he learned he had won the Pulitzer Prize for his orchestral piece Become Ocean . "It seems that every time I had the opportunity to make the right career choice, I made the wrong career choice, which in the long run turned out to be the right artistic choice." Today, Adams (not to be confused with the California-based John Adams ) is recognized as one of our most original composers. He follows in a long line of visionary musical tinkerers — from Charles Ives and Henry Cowell to John Cage and Morton Feldman — who challenge our perceptions of what music is and how we experience it.…