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John Adams: Biography
Biography
“John Adams...may be the most vital and eloquent composer in America.”
– THE NEW YORKER
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John Adams: Biography
Hallelujah Junction
“An American artist’s Wanderjahre for our time... John Adams is a superb writer.”
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The Bad Boy of Music & The Most Beautiful Woman in the World

Jan 12, 2012

Like many Hollywood stories, this one is encrusted with the usual legendary bons mots and self-serving anecdotes, but Louis B. Mayer, who had seen “Ecstasy,” would be quoted as saying, “You’re lovely, but . . . I don’t like what people would think about a girl who flits bare-assed around the screen.”

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Mahler: The World as Will and Idea

Jan 08, 2012

For all its professional, emotional and physical crises, Mahler’s life was exemplary for an artist who, no matter how loud the outside world might pound on the walls of his concentration, vigilantly maintained an unobstructed direct line to his creative self, keeping it uncorrupted and unblocked to the end.

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The "Son" is Father to the Man

May 30, 2011

What drew me to the Austrian composer’s eponymous Opus 9 Chamber Symphony of 1906 were its explosive energy and the staggering, acrobatic virtuosity of its instrumental writing. Schoenberg’s bounding, fast moving themes weren’t so much “stated” as they were launched like some daredevil circus performer shot out of a canon. The hyperlyricism of its melodies sounded as if all of “Tristan” had been compressed into a tiny plutonium sphere, just one neutron short of going super-critical.

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Commencement Speech

May 22, 2011

Being a composer invited into a public gathering is always an anxiety-producing experience. There is always that little homunculus sitting on your shoulder, muttering cryptic and often insulting remarks and reminding you that, no matter how much you’ve composed or now matter how grand the honor you may be receiving, “you’ll never be as good as Bach.”

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Recent Works

City Noir

The Dharma at Big Sur

Doctor Atomic Symphony

Popular Works

Doctor Atomic

Nixon in China

Short Ride in a Fast Machine

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The Photography of Deborah O’Grady

John Adams as Conductor

The John Adams Reader

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