John Adams Complete Works

[Florian Peitz]

JohnCoolidge Adams (born February 15, 1947) is an American composer and conductor whose music is rooted in minimalism. Among the most regularly performed composers of contemporary classical music, he is particularly noted for his operas, which are often centered around recent historical events.[1][2] Apart from opera, his oeuvre includes orchestral, concertante, vocal, choral, chamber, electroacoustic and piano music.

Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Adams grew up in a musical family, being regularly exposed to classical music, jazz, musical theatre and rock music. He attended Harvard University, studying with Kirchner, Sessions and Del Tredici among others. Though his earliest work was aligned with modernist music, he began to disagree with its tenets upon reading John Cage's Silence: Lectures and Writings. Teaching at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Adams developed his own minimalist aesthetic, which was first fully realized in Phrygian Gates (1977) and later in the string septet Shaker Loops. Increasingly active in the contemporary music scene of San Francisco, his large-scale orchestral works Harmonium and Harmonielehre (1985) first gained him national attention.[3] Other popular works from this time include the fanfare Short Ride in a Fast Machine (1986) and the orchestral work El Dorado (1991).[4]

In many ways, Adams's music is developed from the minimalist tradition of Steve Reich and Philip Glass; however, he tends to more readily engage in the immense orchestral textures and climaxes of late Romanticism in the vein of Wagner and Mahler. His style is to a considerable extent a reaction against the modernist serialism promoted by the Second Viennese and Darmstadt School. In addition to the Pulitzer, Adams has received the Erasmus Prize, a Grawemeyer Award, five Grammy Awards, the Harvard Arts Medal, France's Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and six honorary doctorates.

John Coolidge Adams was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on February 15, 1947.[5] As an adolescent, he lived in Woodstock, Vermont for five years before moving to East Concord, New Hampshire,[6] and his family spent summers on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee, where his grandfather ran a dance hall. Adams' family did not own a television, and did not have a record player until he was ten. However, both his parents were musicians; his mother was a singer with big bands, and his father was a clarinetist.[7] He grew up with jazz, Americana, and Broadway musicals, once meeting Duke Ellington at his grandfather's dance hall.[8] Adams also played baseball as a boy.[9]

In the third grade, Adams took up the clarinet, initially taking lessons from his father, Carl Adams, and later with Boston Symphony Orchestra bass clarinetist Felix Viscuglia. He also played in various local orchestras, concert bands, and marching bands while a student.[10][11] Adams began composing at the age of ten and first heard his music performed as a teenager.[12] He graduated from Concord High School in 1965.[13]

Adams next enrolled in Harvard University, where he earned a bachelor of arts, magna cum laude, in 1969 and a master of arts in 1971, studying composition under Leon Kirchner, Roger Sessions, Earl Kim, Harold Shapero, and David Del Tredici.[5][3] As an undergraduate, he conducted Harvard's student ensemble, the Bach Society Orchestra, for a year and a half; his ambitious programming drew criticism in the student newspaper, where one of his concerts was called "the major disappointment of last week's musical offerings".[14][15] Adams also became engrossed by the strict modernism of the twentieth century (such as that of Boulez) while at Harvard, and believed that music had to continue progressing, to the extent that he once wrote a letter to Leonard Bernstein criticizing the supposed stylistic reactionism of Chichester Psalms.[16] By night, however, Adams enjoyed listening to The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and Bob Dylan,[8][17] and has relayed he once stood in line at eight in the morning to purchase a copy of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.[11]

Adams was the first student at Harvard to be allowed to write a musical composition for his senior thesis.[18][19] For his thesis, he wrote The Electric Wake for "electric" (i.e. amplified) soprano accompanied by an ensemble of "electric" strings, keyboards, harp, and percussion.[20] However, a performance could not be put together at the time, and Adams has never heard the piece performed.[18]

After graduating, Adams received a copy of John Cage's book Silence: Lectures and Writings from his mother. Largely shaken of his loyalty to modernism, he was inspired to move to San Francisco,[16] where he taught at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music from 1972 until 1982,[19] teaching classes and directing the school's New Music Ensemble. In the early 1970s, Adams wrote several pieces of electronic music for a homemade modular synthesizer he called the "Studebaker".[21] He also wrote American Standard, composed of three movements, a march, a hymn, and a jazz ballad, which was recorded and released on Obscure Records in 1975.[22]

In 1977, Adams wrote the half-hour-long solo piano piece Phrygian Gates, which he later called "my first mature composition, my official 'opus one'",[23] as well as its much shorter companion piece, China Gates. The next year, he finished Shaker Loops, a string septet based on an earlier, unsuccessful string quartet called Wavemaker.[24] In 1979, he finished his first orchestral work, Common Tones in Simple Time, which was premiered by the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Orchestra under Adams' baton.[25]

From 1985 to 1987, Adams composed his first opera, Nixon in China, with libretto by Alice Goodman, based on Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China. The opera marked the first collaboration between Adams and theatre director Peter Sellars, who had proposed it to Adams in 1983. Adams has subsequently worked with Sellars on all of his operas.[32]

During this time, Adams also wrote The Chairman Dances (1985), which he described as an "'out-take' of Act III of Nixon in China", to fulfill a long-delayed commission for the Milwaukee Symphony.[33] He also wrote the short orchestral fanfare Short Ride in a Fast Machine (1986).[34]

During this time, Adams established an international career as a conductor. From 1988 to 1990, he served as conductor and music advisor for the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.[3] He has also served as artistic director and conductor of the Ojai and Cabrillo Music Festivals in California.[3] He has conducted orchestras around the world, including the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the London Symphony Orchestra, and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra,[3] performing pieces by composers as diverse as Debussy, Copland, Stravinsky, Haydn, Reich, Zappa, and Wagner, as well as his own works.[35]

He completed his second opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, in 1991, again working with librettist Alice Goodman and director Peter Sellars. The opera is based on the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro by Palestinian terrorists and details the murder of passenger Leon Klinghoffer, a retired, physically disabled American Jew. The opera has generated controversy, including allegations that it is antisemitic and glorifies terrorism.[36]

Adams' next piece, Chamber Symphony (1992), is for a 15-member chamber orchestra. Written in three movements, the work is inspired by an unlikely combination of sources: Arnold Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony No. 1, Op. 9 (which Adams was studying at the time) and the "hyperactive, insistently aggressive and acrobatic" music of the cartoons his young son was watching.[37]

The next year, he composed his Violin Concerto for American violinist Jorja Fleezanis. Lasting a little more than half an hour, this work is also in three movements: a "long extended rhapsody for the violin" is followed by a slow chaconne (titled "Body through which the dream flows", a phrase from a poem by Robert Haas), and the piece ends with an energetic toccare.[38] Adams received the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition for his violin concerto.[39]

In 1995, he completed I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, a stage piece with libretto by poet June Jordan and staging by Peter Sellars. Inspired by musicals, Adams referred to the piece as a "songplay in two acts".[40] The main characters are seven young Americans from different social and ethnic backgrounds, all living in Los Angeles, with stories that take place around the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

Hallelujah Junction (1996) is a three-movement composition for two piano, which employs variations of a repeated two-note rhythm. The intervals between the notes remain the same through much of the piece. Adams used the same phrase for the title of his 2008 memoir.

Written to celebrate the millennium, El Nio (2000) is an "oratorio about birth in general and about the Nativity in specific".[41] The piece incorporates a wide range of texts, including biblical texts as well as poems by Hispanic poets like Rosario Castellanos, Sor Juana Ins de la Cruz, Gabriela Mistral, Vicente Huidobro, and Rubn Daro,

After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the New York Philharmonic commissioned Adams to write a memorial piece for the victims of the attacks. The resulting piece, On the Transmigration of Souls, was premiered around the first anniversary of the attacks. On the Transmigration of Souls is scored for orchestra, chorus, and children's choir, accompanied by taped readings of the names of the victims mixed with the sounds of the city.[42][43] It won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Music[44] as well as the 2005 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Composition.

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