Adams won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2003 for his 9/11 memorial piece, "On the Transmigration of Souls". Response to his output as a whole has been more divided, and Adams's works have been described as both brilliant and boring in reviews that stretch across both ends of the rating spectrum. "Shaker Loops" has been described as "hauntingly ethereal", while 1999's "Naïve and Sentimental Music" has been called "an exploration of a marvelously extended spinning melody". "The New York Times" called 1996's "Hallelujah Junction" "a two-piano work played with appealingly sharp edges", and 2001's "American Berserk" "a short, volatile solo piano work".