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Composer captures essence of today
by Pierre Ruhe, Atlanta Journal Constitution, May 25, 2003
CONCERT PREVIEW
Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus
Performing "El Nino" by John Adams. 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday. $19-$52.
Symphony Hall, 1280 Peachtree St. N.E., Atlanta. 404-733-5000,
www.atlantasymphony.org
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America's most esteemed, popular and populist composer since Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein is coming to town this week, a man with an all-American name: John Coolidge Adams.
From the beginning, the John Adams story reads like our national archetype, like the creation of The Great American Composer. Small-town New England upbringing, elite education, was on a predictable path. Then came the inevitable psychic break: "In the summer of 1971," writes Adams, "I packed everything I owned into a Volkswagen bug and drove across the continent to California."
These words, which open an autobiographical essay, have a self-conscious, Melville-meets-Kerouac cadence, suggesting that a coming-of-age story is about to begin. It never seems to run out of gas, this most recycled mythology found in American literature: Go west, young man. Follow your imagination.
And it worked. Adams discovered his own style and, in 1987, a measure of celebrity with his opera "Nixon in China" --- a novel approach to a centuries-old art form, and an effort, as Shakespeare did in his history plays, to turn politics into legend.
One London critic put his finger on it: Adams' music "exists in that halfway house between the heavyweight rigor of the Old World and the feel-good freedom of the New."
At 56, Adams is a soft-voiced speaker, eloquent and observant, quick to find humor, with a graying beard and the bemused air of an academic. Friends confide that he's an emotional man, sensitive, genuine and never naive. A long-term collaborator explains, "John appears to be mellow, but he's very often a bundle of nerves."
Adams' music seems driven by an ambition to speak for America's diversity --- to create an American musical sound as surely as Copland created an optimistic, open-prairie style of music. The United States has changed since Copland's heyday in the 1940s; Adams is finding the essence of today.
In conversation, Adams shuns such talk. "It's better to do your thing unconsciously," he says, "because if you start wondering 'does this C-sharp break new ground?' or, worse, your place in history, it becomes unhealthy for the act of composing. It's just poison."
Yet Adams continues his journey in confident steps. "El Nino," a hauntingly beautiful, dramatic oratorio on the Nativity, has quickly become his most celebrated work. With the composer in attendance, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra will play it this week, Thursday through Saturday.
Premiered in Paris in 2000, "El Nino" ("The Little Boy") is Adams hitting his stride. When preparing a new version of the birth-of-Christ story, with Handel's "Messiah" as a model, he says, "I knew from the start it had to be told simply, directly, with a genuine sincerity to it," adding, with a mild chuckle, "and not be an essay in stylistic irony."
In this work, the composer says, he "wanted to go back to the feeling of an artist being a servant and a craftsman. Someone who uses his gift to lift the audience's spirit." With vocal soloists, chorus and orchestra, he tells the story in a mosaic of sources, including the Gospels, apocryphal tales that didn't make it into the Bible, and poems by Latin American women writers on the miracle of childbirth.
ASO Music Director Robert Spano, who has conducted most of Adams' orchestral works, says, "When I first heard 'El Nino,' I flipped out. It just towers over the others."
Joni and Pink Floyd
Adams' story begins in the tiny town of East Concord, N.H., where he was a precocious musician. Like his father, he played clarinet, but he also dabbled in composing and conducted a small orchestra whose members were patients at the local mental hospital. His mother sang in an Episcopal church choir and took along young John to services. "I thought deeply about spiritual matters," he remembers, "but when I was a teenager I bounced very forcefully between the Christian message and agnosticism. I haven't been a follower of any religion since."
Composer David Del Tredici, whose music was performed by the ASO last month, taught briefly at Harvard in the late 1960s, where Adams was a student. "Even in those days," Del Tredici remembers, "John gave off a visceral feeling about music, it was all so alive to him, and it inspired rather remarkable allegiance in people. He was very ambitious, too; he really wanted to be a success at composing."
Still, Del Tredici continues, "there was no way to guess that he'd become John Adams" --- the older composer is here using the name like an icon, as if Adams were our Composer Laureate --- "as others in the class were more developed, but they've fallen away. John's just gotten stronger."
Throughout his youth, Adams listened about equally to pop and classical music, with the Beatles, Joni Mitchell and Pink Floyd spinning on his turntable with the symphonies of Sibelius.
After moving west, he worked as a fork-lift operator and, eventually, at the San Francisco Conservatory. Composing in his beachside cottage, he experimented with then-fashionable styles. Most enduring is a 1973 spoken-word-and-electronic sound collage called "Christian Zeal and Activity," where a synthesized hymn tune is mixed with repeated snatches from a fiery Sunday sermon. The composer, at 26, already had an ear for catchy phrases and an unpretentious use of everyday ideas and language --- a pop sensibility steering his classical techniques.
By the mid '70s, he had been introduced to the spare, clean lines of minimalism, where "cells" of notes repeat and repeat, so that when the harmonies shift even a little, it feels like a major event. The orchestral "Shaker Loops" (1978) hints at what would lead into Adams' adult voice, where pulsating, intricate rhythms underscore flowing melodies. Using the repeated cell technique --- loops of music --- Adams envisioned how the New England Shakers worked themselves into a frenzy during religious ceremonies.
As we hear in his fully mature "El Nino," Adams often finds musical inspiration in earnest, unquestioning beliefs --- not organized religious doctrine, but simple, pure, emotional faith.
'Singing terrorists'
Next came an altogether higher level of fame: "Nixon in China" smashed all boundaries for what classical music was about and for whom it was written. In Alice Goodman's artful libretto, the president is not the crook of Watergate, but, as Adams says, "an Everyman" who "articulates a vision of American life."
Then there's the ongoing outrage over Adams' second opera, "The Death of Klinghoffer." In another collaboration with poet Goodman and director Peter Sellars, he here explored the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, focusing on the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship by Palestinian commandos and their murder of a wheelchair-bound American Jewish passenger. Goodman, who is Jewish, gave voice to the hijackers, and Adams' music gave all the characters dignity --- as symbols of spiraling confrontation and violence.
"While our opera honors the memory of Leon Klinghoffer," says Adams, "we tried to look at the circumstances that came about to make this happen. That's the source of the criticism --- people run around saying 'the opera with singing terrorists,' which is, of course, impossible to refute. What we're trying to say is that if someone does perpetrate some brutal, arbitrary act, they must have a reason."
Other commentators dismiss this attempt at operatic evenhandedness. The distinguished musicologist Richard Taruskin argues that in portraying hijackers onstage and giving them beautiful music to sing, Adams and Goodman are glorifying their actions.
The opera was picketed at its 1981 world premiere in Brussels, Belgium, and again in Brooklyn a year later. Other co-commissioning opera houses, for unconvincing reasons, later chose not to perform it at all.
Then, for a November 2001 guest-conducting gig with the Boston Symphony, Spano scheduled excerpts from "Klinghoffer," including "The Chorus of the Exiled Palestinians" and "The Chorus of the Exiled Jews." The conductor felt it was time to return to this seminal score.
But then Sept. 11 happened, and a chorus member's husband died in one of the hijacked planes. In fierce, often nasty debate --- on the meaning of this opera specifically, and more generally on censorship and the role of the arts in society --- the orchestra canceled the "Klinghoffer" music. At the time, Spano said, "I think it would have been unfair to everyone to perform it then and there, because we were just presenting the provocative part, not the whole opera, and we would have just been pushing buttons."
Now "The Death of Klinghoffer" has been made into a film by British director Penny Woolcock (available soon on DVD), and Spano is scheduled to conduct the complete opera in Brooklyn in December. "The work is inherently about really volatile issues," Spano says now, "but to be an enduring piece of art --- and we're the only people who cannot judge this category --- it must having meaning and appeal outside that volatility."
For his part, Adams says, "I know that deep down inside, although [Spano] never said anything to me, that he was humiliated about what happened with the Boston cancellation. Doing it complete is his way of answering that."
That too-close-to-judge issue is also the case with Adams' "On the Transmigration of Souls," which earned him the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for composition. Commissioned by the New York Philharmonic as its musical memorial to the Sept. 11 tragedy, its premiere, a year after the terrorist attacks, held everyone in the Lincoln Center audience frozen in their seats, engrossed in the music, and for moments in the middle, weeping.
With future projects, including another real-life opera --- a Faustian tale on the making of the atom bomb, again with Goodman and Sellars, for 2005 --- Adams has found his niche as one of America's most vital and appreciated artists.
It all makes for a rare catch: the composer of the moment and the one most likely to endure. As David DelTredici puts it, with only mild irritation in his voice: "What composer wouldn't want to be John Adams right now?"
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