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User:Mscuthbert/John Adams

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For other people named John Adams, see John Adams (disambiguation).
For the Alaska-based postminimalist composer, see John Luther Adams.
John Adams (Photo: Deborah O'Grady)

John (Coolidge) Adams (born February 15 1947) is an American composer with strong roots in minimalism. He is best known for his opera Nixon in China (1985-87), recounting Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China. His choral piece On the Transmigration of Souls (2002), commemorating the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks, won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2003.


Life and career

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Before 1977

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John Adams was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1947. He was raised in various New England states and greatly influenced by New England's musical culture. His father taught him how to play the clarinet, which he played in community ensembles while growing up. He later studied clarinet with Felix Viscuglia, clarinetist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Adams began composing at the age of ten and first heard his music performed around the age of 13 or 14. He matriculated at Harvard University in 1965 and studied composition under Leon Kirchner, Roger Sessions, and Earl Kim. While at Harvard, he conducted the Bach Society Orchestra and was a substitute clarinetist for both the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Opera Company. He performed as the soloist in the famous Carnegie Hall in the world premiere of Walter Piston's Clarinet Concerto. He earned two degrees from Harvard University (BA 1971, MA 1972) and was the first ever to be allowed to submit a musical composition for a Harvard undergraduate thesis.

1977 to Nixon

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Adams not only did his work in the electronic music studio (he also built his own analogue synthesizer), but as conductor of the New Music Ensemble, he had a small but dedicated pool of young and talented musicians occasionally at his disposal.

Some major work composed during this period include Wavemaker (1977), Phrygian Gates for solo piano (1977), Shaker Loops (1978), Common Tones in Simple Time (1979), Harmonium (1980-81), Grand Pianola Music (1982), Light Over Water (1983), Harmonielehre (1984-85), The Chairman Dances (1985), Short Ride in a Fast Machine (1986), and Nixon in China (1985-87).

Shaker Loops (for string septet) (1978): A “modular” composition for three violins, one viola, two cellos, and one bass, with one conductor. It is divided into four distinct movements, each of which grows almost indiscernibly into the next. Adam worked with a group of Conservatory string players, rehearsing and composing simultaneously. At times, the “period” – that is, the number of beats per repeated pattern – of each instrument is different, resulting in a constantly shifting texture of melody and rhythmic emphasis. This piece is a turning point in Adams’s oeuvre, as it marks not only a return to pure instrumental writing, but also a re-engagement with tonality. Adams later arranged this piece for string orchestra.

Harmonium for Large Orchestra and Chorus (1980-81): The piece starts with quietly insistent repetitions of one note – D – and one syllable – “no”. Adams commented about the beginning in a 1984 essay: “(the piece) began with a simple, totally formed mental image: that of a single tone coming out of a vast, empty space and, by means of a gentle unfolding, evolving into a rich, pulsating fabric of sound.” The wildly successful Harmonium premiere was his first performance by a major mainstream organization. Adams became a figure in our musical landscape after this piece.

Grand Pianola Music (1982): Adams commented the piece as “Dueling pianos, cooing sirens, Valhalla brass, thwacking bass drums, gospel triads, and a Niagara of cascading flat keys all learned to cohabit as I wrote the piece.” It is one of the first major works in which he incorporated American vernacular music into the classical symphonic tradition. Adams's use of the repetitive patterns of minimalism within sweeping orchestral gestures is seen throughout the piece.

Light Over Water: The Genesis of Music (1983): This work is a long, unbroken composition with contrasting sections whose boundaries are so subtle as to be almost imperceptible. It is a kind of symphony played by an orchestra of both electric and natural instruments and frozen into its idealized form by means of a multichannel tape recorder. Essentially electronic, the piece still feels as if it was born out of the world of the orchestra. Changes in the piece are evolved gradually. Sudden entrances are rare. It is personal and emotive, though not necessarily romantic, and it has a dance-like feel.

Harmonielehre (1984- 85): Adams commented about this piece: “rich with resonances of my personal musical storehouse. I’m not conservative. I’m conserving. But I’m not just playing around in the outtakes of Gurrelieder or Berg’s Opus 1 Sonata either.” Adams’s hope seems to be that Harmonielehre might be a work of balance, of Harmonie.

The Chairman Dances (Foxtrot for Orchestra) (1985): This is a by-product of Nixon in China, set in the three days of President Nixon’s visit to Beijing in February 1972.

Short Ride in a Fast Machine (Fanfare for Great Woods) (1986): This piece is joyfully exuberant, brilliantly scored for a large orchestra. It begins with a marking of quarter-notes (woodblock, soon joined by the four trumpets) and eighths (clarinets and synthesizers); the woodblock is fortissimo and the other instruments play forte. The work uses many elements of minimalist music.

Nixon in China (1985-87): The opera is based on Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. Main characters in the opera are: the Nixons, Mao Tse-tung, Chou En-lai, Chiang Ch’ing (Madame Mao) and Henry Kissinger. There are 3 acts in the opera. The time covered is five days, February 21-25, 1972, the days of Richard Nixon’s visit to Beijing made in the hope, but no means the certainty, of seeing chairman Mao. It was directed by Peter Sellers, who is as serious and perceptive about dramatic and human issues as he is imaginative and, when need be, iconoclastic. This piece is John Adams’s second major composition on a text, the first being Hamonium (1981) for chorus and orchestra.

Post-Nixon in China

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John Adams is a master of musical expression. He writes that "in almost all cultures other than the European classical one, the real meaning of the music is in between the notes. The slide, the portamento, the “blue note”—all are essential to the emotional expression, whether its a great Indian master improvising on a raga or whether it’s Jimi Hendrix or Johnny Hodges bending a blue note right down to the floor." Adams uses this concept in many of his influential pieces post-Nixon in China.

The Wound-Dresser (1989): John Adams's setting of Walt Whitman's poem, "The Wound-Dresser", which Whitman concocted from his visits to wounded soldiers during the Civil War. The piece is scored for baritone voice, 2 flutes (or 2 piccolos), 2 oboes, clarinet, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, trumpet (or piccolo tpt), timpani, keyboard and strings.

The Death of Klinghoffer (1991): The basis for The Death of Klinghoffer were the Bach Passions: grave, symbolic, narratives supported by a full chorus. The story begins with the 1984 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro by Palestinian terrorists and details the murder of a passenger named Leon Klinghoffer, a retired, wheelchair-bound American Jew. The opera was set to film in 1991, and the stunning visuals enhanced the somber, chilling mood. The piece has only been performed live once.

Chamber Symphony (1992): This piece was commissioned by the Gerbode Foundation of San Francisco for the San Francisco Contemporary Chamber Players. While Chamber Symphony bears a strong resemblance to Arnold Schoenberg’s Opus 9 in its tonality and instrumental arrangement, additional instrumentation includes synthesizer, drum kit, trumpet, and trombone. The piece consists of three movements: "Mongrel Airs," "Aria with Walking Bass" and "Roadrunner." The piece is excited and aggressive, alluding to children’s cartoon music (as evidenced by the titles of the movements). The piece is linear, chromatic, and virtuosic.

I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky (1995): A stage piece with libretto by June Jordan and staging by Peter Sellars. Adams calls the piece “essentially a polyphonic love story in the style of a Shakespeare comedy.” The story takes place in the aftermath of the 1994 earthquake in Los Angeles. The main characters are seven young Americans all living in Los Angeles but from different social and ethnic backgrounds.

Hallelujah Junction (1996): This piece for two pianos employs variations of a repeated two note rhythm. The intervals between the notes remain the same through much of the piece.

On the Transmigration of Souls (2002): This piece commemorates those who lost their lives on the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in New York. It won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Music as well as the 2005 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Composition, the latter of which made Adams the first composer in Grammy history to earn Best Contemporary Composition thrice, having previously won for El Dorado (1998) and Nixon in China (1989).

My Father Knew Charles Ives (2003): Adams writes that "My Father Knew Charles Ives is musical autobiography, an homage and encomium to a composer whose influence on me has been huge." In true Ives style, the piece begins subtly with few instruments and swells to a cacophonous mass of sound in all three movements. The piece ranges from utilizing mysterious harmonies in long tones to full scale march feels.

The Dharma at Big Sur (2003): A piece for solo electric violin and orchestra. The piece calls for some instruments (harp, piano, samplers) to play in just intonation, a tuning system in which the intervals between notes can be expressed as ratios of whole numbers, as opposed to equal temperament, the common Western tuning system, in which intervals are actually detuned. The piece was composed for the opening of Disney Hall in Los Angeles.

Doctor Atomic (2005): An opera in two acts. The libretto of Doctor Atomic by Peter Sellars draws on original source material, including personal memoirs, recorded interviews, technical manuals of nuclear physics, declassified government documents, and the poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, an American poet. It takes place in June and July 1945, mainly over the last few hours before the first atomic bomb explodes at the test site in New Mexico. Characters include Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer and his wife; Edward Teller; General Leslie Groves; and Robert Wilson.

Doctor Atomic Symphony (2007): Based on orchestral music from the opera.

Fellow Traveler (2007): This piece was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by Greg G. Minshall, and was dedicated to opera and theater director Peter Sellars for his 50th birthday. Fellow Traveler inspired the third movement of Adams’s Son of Chamber Symphony.

Musical Style

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The music of John Adams is usually categorized as minimalist or post-minimalist. While Adams employs minimalist techniques, such as repeating patterns, he is not a strict follower of the movement, having been born a generation after Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Most notably, his writing is more developmental and directionalized, containing climaxes and other elements of Romanticism. Comparing Shaker Loops to minimalist composer Terry Riley’s piece In C, Adams says,

“rather than set up small engines of motivic materials and let them run free in a kind of random play of counterpoint, I used the fabric of continually repeating cells to forge large architectonic shapes, creating a web of activity that, even within the course of a single movement, was more detailed, more varied, and knew both light and dark, serenity and turbulence.”

[1]

Many of Adams's ideas in composition are a reaction to the philosophy of serialism and its depictions of "the composer as scientist." The Darmstadt school of twelve tone composition was dominant during the time that Adams was receiving his college education, and he compared class to a "mausoleum where we would sit and count tone-rows in Webern." By the time he graduated, he was disillusioned with the restrained feeling and inaccessibility of serialism. To him the future of the avant-garde was grim and pessimistic, as well as lacking in pleasurable sounds; compositions were becoming more and more like papers to be a delivered at a scientic conference, as serialist proponent Milton Babbitt once described his own music.

Adams experienced a musical awakening after reading John Cage's book Silence (1973), which he claimed "dropped into [his] psyche like a time bomb." Cage's school posed fundamental questions about what music was, and generally accepted all types of sounds to be viable sources of music. This perspective offered to Adams a liberating alternative to the rule-based techniques of serialism. At this point Adams began to experiment with electronic music, and his experiences are reflected in the writing of Phrygian Gates (1977-8), in which the constant shifting between modules in Lydian mode and Phrygian mode refers to activating electronic gates rather than architectural ones. Adams explained that working with synthesizers caused a "diatonic conversion," a reversion to the belief that tonality was a force of nature.

Minimalism offered the final solution to Adams's creative dilemma. Adams was attracted to its pulsating and diatonic sound, which provided an underlying rhetoric on top of which Adams could express what he wanted in his compositions. Although some of his pieces sound similar to those written by minimalist composers, Adams actually rejects the idea of mechanistic procedure-based or process music; what Adams took away from minimalism was tonality and/or modality, and the rhythmic energy from repetition.

The idea of musical composition being personal and expressive was important to Adams. Although Cage was an influential figure in his musical development, he disagreed with the idea that music should be a communal creative process between listeners and performers, where spontaneous sounds should be appreciated for the sake of being sounds. Emotions, climaxes, and direction become more important in his later, more mature works. His heroic opera Nixon in China (1987) uses minimalist motivic elements such as repeated arpeggios but also has an overarching structure, something Adams believes cannot be achieved through music that is atonal, aleatory, or process-based. For comparison, Glass's opera Einstein on the Beach (1976) contained no development, simply tableaux related to and inspired by the scientist Albert Einstein. Adams also uses lyrical and melodic vocal writing attuned to the cadence of speech, whereas Glass treats vocal patterns the same way as those of any other instrument, creating a more fragmented sound.

Some of Adams's compositions are an amalgamation of different styles. One example is Grand Pianola Music (1981-2), a humorous piece that purposely draws its content from musical cliches. Adams professes his love of other genres other than classical music; his parents were jazz musicians, and he also listens to rock music. Adams once claimed that originality wasn't an urgent concern for him the way it was necessary for the minimalists, and compared his position to that of Gustav Mahler, J. S. Bach, and Johannes Brahms, who "were standing at the end of an era and were embracing all of the evolutions that occurred over the previous thirty to fifty years." To some historians, the music of Adams is defined by his ability to integrate different styles, especially elements of Americana, and can thus be more accurately compared to Aaron Copland's style in the 1940s and Leonard Bernstein's in the 1950s rather than to Reich or Glass.

Style and Analysis

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Adams, like other minimalists of his time (e.g. Philip Glass), used a steady pulse that defines and controls the music. The pulse was best known from Terry Riley’s early composition In C, and slowly more and more composers used it as a common practice. Jonathan Bernard highlighted this adoption by comparing Phygian Gates, written in 1977, and Fearful Symmetries written eleven years later in 1988.


Phygian Gates begins in a pulse like fashion, but as the piece progresses, it slowly fades the focus from the pulse to the harmony (not seen as much in the reproduced 20 measures, but definitely later on in the movement). This was common in early minimalist pieces, but quickly composers changed and started to focus more on the pulse as seen in the 6 measures of Fearful Symmetries.


Violin Concerto, Mvt. III "Toccare"

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Adams started to add a new character to his music, something he called “the Trickser”[2]. The Trickster allowed Adams to use the repetitive style and rhythmic drive of minimalism, yet poke fun at it at the same time. When Adams commented on his own characterization of particular minimalist music, he stated that he went joyriding on “those Great Prairies of non-event.” [3]

Oddly enough, his music of the 1990s slowly starts to incorporate it more and more to the point where one critic believes this slowly increasing incorporation of minimalism “represents a coming to terms with minimalism according to a decidedly tonal slant: pulse and repetition have been transmuted, by a kind of reverse-chronological alchemy, into devices of familiar from earlier eras, such as moto perpetuo and ostinato”[4] The third movement of the Violin Concerto, titled “Toccare” portrays this transition.

Adams begins the movement with a repeated, scale-like eight-note melody in the violin and going into the second measure, it appears as if he will continue this, but instead of starting at the bottom again, the violin continues upward. From here, there are fewer instances of repletion and more moving up and down in a pulse like fashion. The piano in the other hand is more repetitive and pulse like: the left hand continually plays the high A and it is not until the 5th measure where another note is added, but the A continues to be played throughout always on the off beat. It is this pulsing A, played as an eighth note as opposed to a sixteenth note, that pokes fun at the minimalist, yet Adams still uses the pulse (i.e. alternating eighth notes between the right and left hand, creating a sixteenth note feeling) as an engine for the movement.


Critical Reception

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The output of John Adams’ musical career has 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.”[5] 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.”[6] Even Pitchfork Media, known for its strong hold on the world of indie rock reviews, awarded the Nonesuch Records release of 2004’s Road Movies a 7.5/10 – a remarkably high score for the site.[7]

The most critically divisive pieces in Adams’ collection are his historical operas. While it is now easy to say that Nixon in China’s influential score spawned a new interest in opera, it was not always met with such laudatory and generous review. At first release, Nixon in China received mostly mixed if not negative press feedback. Donal Henahan, special to The New York Times, called the Houston Grand Opera world premiere of the work “worth a few giggles but hardly a strong candidate for the standard repertory” and “visually striking but coy and insubstantial.”[8] James Wierzbicki for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch described Adams’ score as the weak point in an otherwise well-staged performance, noting the music as “inappropriately placid,” “cliché-ridden in the abstract” and “[trafficked] heavily in Adams’ worn-out Minimalist clichés.”[9] With time, however, the opera has come to be revered as a great and influential production. Robert Hugill for Music and Vision called the production “astonishing … nearly twenty years after its premier,”[10] while City Beat’s Tom McElfresh called Nixon’s score “a character in the drama” and “too intricate, too detailed to qualify as minimalist”.[11]

The attention surrounding The Death of Klinghoffer has been full of controversy, specifically in The New York Times reviews. After the 1991 premiere, reporter Edward Rothstein wrote that “Mr. Adams’s music has a seriously limited range.”[12] Only a few days later, Allan Kozinn wrote an investigative report citing that Leon Klinghoffer’s daughters, Lisa and Ilsa, had “expressed their disapproval” of the opera in a statement saying “We are outraged at the exploitation of our parents and the coldblooded murder of our father as the centerpiece of a production that appears to us to be anti-Semitic.”[13] In response to these accusations of anti-semitism, composer and Oberlin College professor Conrad Cummings wrote a letter to the editor defending “Klinghoffer” as “the closest analogue to the experience of Back’s audience attending his most demanding works,” and noted that, as someone of half-Jewish heritage, he “found nothing anti-Semitic about the work.”[14] After a 2001 cancellation of “Klinghoffer” by the Boston Symphony Orchestra,[15] debate has continued about the opera’s content and social worth. Prominent critic and noted musicologist Richard Taruskin called the work “anti-American, anti-semitic and anti-bourgeous.” Criticism continued when the production was released to DVD. In 2003, Edward Rothstein updated his stage review to a movie critique, writing “the film affirms two ideas now commonplace among radical critics of Israel: that Jews acted like Nazis, and that refugees from the Holocaust were instrumental in the founding of the state, visiting upon Palestinians the sins of others.”[16]

2003’s "The Dharma at Big Sur/ My Father Knew Charles Ives" was well-received, particularly at Adams’ alma mater’s publication, The Harvard Crimson. In a four-star review, Harvard’s newspaper called the electric violin and orchestral concerto “Adams’ best composition of the past ten years.”[17] Most recently, New York Times writer Anthony Tommasini commended Adams for his work conducting the American Composers Orchestra. The concert, which took place in April 2007 at Carnegie Hall, was a celebratory performance of Adams’ work on his sixtieth birthday. Tommasini called Adams a “skilled and dynamic conductor,” and noted that the music “was gravely beautiful yet restless.”[18]

Works List

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Stage

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Orchestra

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Voice and orchestra

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Chamber Music

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Other ensemble works

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Chorus

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Tape and electronic compostions

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Piano

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Film score

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Arrangements and Orchestrations

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Awards and Recognition

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Bibliography

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  • May, Thomas. The John Adams Reader (ISBN 1-57467-132-4)

Further reading

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  • K. Robert Schwarz, “Process vs. Intuition in the Recent Works of Steve Reich and John Adams,” American Music Vol. 8, No. 3 (Autumn 1990), pp. 245-273.
  • Brent Heisinger, “American Minimalism in the 1980s,” American Music Vol. 7, No. 4 (Winter 1989), pp. 430-447.
  • K. Robert Schwartz, Minimalists, Phaidon Press Inc., 2008 ISBN 0-714-84773-9
  • John Richardson, “John Adams: A Poitrait and a Concert of American Music,” American Music Vol. 23, No. 1 (Spring 2005), pp. 131-133. [review]
  • Matthew Daines, “The Death of Klinghoffer by John Adams,” American Music Vol. 16, No. 3 (Autumn 1998), pp. 356-358. [review]
  • J. Thomas Rimer, “Nixon in China by John Adams,” American Music Vol. 12, No. 3 (Autumn 1994), pp. 338-341. [review]
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Interviews

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