“John Adams...may be the most vital and eloquent composer in America.”
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“An American artist’s Wanderjahre for our time... John Adams is a superb writer.”
Watch NEA Awards Video Tribute.
The Bad Boy of Music & The Most Beautiful Woman in the World
Jan 12, 2012Like 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.”
1 Comments Continue ReadingMahler: The World as Will and Idea
Jan 08, 2012For 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.
3 Comments Continue ReadingThe "Son" is Father to the Man
May 30, 2011What 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.
14 Comments Continue ReadingCommencement Speech
May 22, 2011Being 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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