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An American classic: John Adams
brings a common touch to the
highbrow symphonic world
by Pierre Ruhe
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In an era when people talk more about the marginalization of classical music than about a hot new work from a living composer, it is perhaps meaningless to rank John Adams as "America's greatest living composer," or "America's composer laureate" or, with a broad sweep, call him "an American pitched somewhere between [Leonard] Bernstein, Bob Dylan, Walt Whitman and Mark Twain."
Yet when Adams' music is on the bill, these sorts of accolades pepper newspaper reviews and are echoed in intermission banter from regular patrons. They also point to the 60-year-old composer's ability to narrow what seems like a vast cultural gulch separating popular entertainment --- and even the other fine arts --- from what goes on in the concert hall and the opera house.
Over the years, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra has kept up with Adams, having performed many of his orchestral scores. This week, for the first time, the California composer will conduct two of his own major works in Symphony Hall: the Violin Concerto and "On the Transmigration of Souls," his Pulitzer Prize-winning memorial for the 9/11 attacks.
Adams is almost unique on our continent. He's written across the genres of classical music, from solo piano to chamber music to grand opera. He long ago shed the "isms" attached to his career-launching early works --- the repetitive chug-chug-chug of minimalism --- and is now simply seen as a bold musical voice who sets his own creative agenda.
Whether by luck or strategy, Adams seems to have found his natural voice in big symphonic music. Thus stable, well-funded orchestras (in San Francisco, Los Angeles, London and Atlanta) are his institutional base --- a key asset for an American composer, in terms of commissions, funding and reputation.
And Adams is certainly the darling of the orchestral world, which means he's the darling of today's classical-music establishment.
Still, Adams comes nowhere near the name recognition of artistic peers --- critical and popular heavyweights like novelist Ian McEwan, architect Frank Gehry, dancer-choreographer Mark Morris --- whose art also operates in three full dimensions, balancing seriousness and charm, and having respect for tradition and whimsy and, above all, a common touch.
A recent book, "The John Adams Reader: Essential Writings on an American Composer," examines his career from many angles, from high-flying praise to moral condemnation. A vital presence who sometimes injects current events into his music, Adams naturally has his share of high-art detractors. (Disclosure: An AJC article from 2003 by this writer is part of the "Reader.")
"If Adams has become America's most prominent and in some ways most respected composer," says the book's editor, Thomas May, "it's because he's found his own voice and his own way beyond the unproductive aesthetic skirmishes of recent decades. He's so past the polarizing arguments of whether music should be tonal or not, or should be easily understood or esoteric, or be 'pop'-sounding or freakishly original."
This elaborates on a much-quoted line from Adams himself: "Whenever serious art loses track of its roots in the vernacular, then it begins to atrophy."
"On the Transmigration of Souls" might be proof of the composer's deeper bond with his culture.
'Composer's challenge'
A few months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Adams was at home in Berkeley, Calif., working on a piece that would become "My Father Knew Charles Ives." Out of the blue, the New York Philharmonic called him with a commission: the orchestra's memorial for the 9/11 tragedy, to be premiered on the one-year anniversary.
"At first I didn't think it was an appropriate thing for me to do," Adams remembers thinking. Among other reasons, he wasn't a New York composer. "But it was a very serious request from the philharmonic, so I had to find a way to be meaningful and not exploitative of the emotions."
With just six months to write what he might usually spend a year or more composing, he had to consciously push aside the images of the attacks and the media chatter then saturating the country.
The composer calls the result a "memory space" for reflection, devoid of cliched patriotism or politics. "I felt I had to find a way to the interior, to cut through what were becoming, through repetition, stock images," he says. "So the piece is about the survivors, about the families and friends and lovers and about their loss."
At the world premiere of "On the Transmigration of Souls," in New York's Avery Fisher Hall, tears flowed from almost everyone in the sold-out audience as the music reached its climax. A subtle, tasteful and mature artist, Adams didn't pile on the grief; he touched on the still-raw emotions, then receded.
"Transmigration" won the Pulitzer Prize for music and was recorded by the commissioning forces for Adams' longtime label, Nonesuch. (Next season, the ASO and Chorus and music director Robert Spano will play it again and make their own recording, for Telarc.)
In performance, it opens with a prerecorded tape of normal street sounds --- traffic, the jostle of pedestrians, a siren in the distance. A boy intones the word "missing" over and over, followed by a recitation of names of the dead. The choir sings a halo of tones, the orchestra slips in, and slowly the music grows and twists, a crescendo of bitterness and anxiety that is finally, cathartically, cleansed by choral cries of "light!"
With family as a guiding theme, Adams recruited his son and daughter to read the names on the tape; his wife, photographer Deborah O'Grady, speaks the last words: "I love you."
Adams now says that when composing "Transmigration," he tried to capture the sensation of walking through a great Gothic cathedral, where "you can be alone with your thoughts but hear a continuum of sound, with other people's footsteps, outside noises, and above all, you feel in the presence of eons of souls all around."
Charles Ives' haunting "The Unanswered Question" provided Adams with a musical model. So did Aaron Copland's "Quiet City," which Adams will conduct in his ASO concert this week. Both of these 20th-century American classics feature a solo trumpet moaning into the darkness.
Adams calls the "quiet, somewhat plaintive" voice of a lone trumpet an "emblematic American sound that we associate with 'Taps' and distant melancholy," and it's a sound heard in his "Transmigration," too, as a sort of benevolent angel of death, hovering close by.
It's this level of resonance with American cultural history, coupled with the growing sense that his every premiere is a likely masterpiece, that helps position Adams as our unofficial composer laureate, a man at the pinnacle of his profession --- a notion about which he feels ambivalent.
Instead, he sees classical music (including his own) as part of a "winnowing process, over a long period of time, so those of us who are alive share what we do with the great works of the past, like having your paintings in a room in a museum with van Goghs and Rembrandts down the hall."
Referring to recent San Francisco performances of his opera "The Flowering Tree," he adds: "It took me 25 years to attain the three sold-out performances; that wasn't the case when I started. I strongly believe that it's the composer's challenge to reach the point where audiences are dying to hear your new piece."
Waving the baton
As an undergraduate at Harvard, Adams often substituted in the Boston Symphony's clarinet section. As a student conductor, he was talented enough that Leonard Bernstein tried to lure him into his high-powered conducting program.
Adams resisted, in part because the composing bug had already taken hold, in part because he didn't feel he was a natural showman --- and the divide continues to rankle him.
"I've always kept up with conducting, mostly my own music a few times a year," he says. "Conducting is a very extroverted behavior that yanks me out of the hermetic, introverted life of being a composer, sometimes violently, especially when I've been immersed in composing for several months at a stretch, then have to get on a plane and stand in front of an orchestra. It's unsettling to make the transition."
Adams conducted his Violin Concerto on Feb. 1 in London, with the Japanese-American virtuoso Midori as soloist. They'll repeat the effort this week with the ASO.
In an e-mail interview, Midori says the concerto requires "a great deal of physical endurance" and calls it, "a true showpiece for the violin's range and character. I love the jauntiness of the rhythm."
The Violin Concerto's most arresting section comes in the middle, where the slow movement is a chaconne, characterized by a slowly repeating bass line that reminds the listener of Pachelbel's ubiquitous Canon in D --- but Adams has a tender, long-melody violin line soaring over the top.
"Midori brought her personality to the piece," Adams recalls, "and she found extraordinary nobility, almost an aristocratic bearing, that I didn't know existed [in the music].
"That's the thing about writing a piece of music," the composer offers. "As soon as interpreters get ahold of it, they'll put themselves into it and find things you didn't know you'd put there."
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