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Unity from Diversity
by Andrew Clements, BBC Music Magazine, January 2002

Adams has recolonised the music of the old and new worlds to create an utterly distinctive voice, says Andrew Clements

John Adams is fond of categorizing himself as an ‘ethnic’ composer. It is as good a label as any for someone who has created an immediately identifiable musical language from a more diverse collection of sources than any major living composer. The welter of styles and possibilities that has confrontd aspiring composers since the Seventies could easily have daunted a less discriminating personality, but that plurality of references has been turned to positive advantage by Adams.

Now, at the height of his powers, he has at his fingertips a prodigiously adaptable musical language, in which the whole of the Western tradition, from the Baroque to the present day, is contained, and which borrows from rock and jazz as well. This inclusive approach, and his fastidious, imaginative ear for harmony and instrumental colour, makes his music attractive, accessible and rewarding; it is not surprising that he has become the most widely performed of all living American composers.

The evolution of Adams’s music as we know it began after he had settled in San Francisco in 1971. Whatever he had written during his student days at Harvard is now hidden from sight. Even after his arrival on the West Coast his output was at first relatively modest, as he immersed himself in teaching and organising concerts. If he had achieved a geographical break with the modernist tradition, he had yet to find the way of reflecting that new musical environment in his own output. The music he did produce explored unconditional sounds in exuberant Cageian collages as well making forays into electronics. Christian Zeal and Activity, for instance, which he wrote in 1973, deconstructs a well-known hymn tune and combines it with a tape collage made from a Sunday morning radio sermon. The influence of Cage’s collages and his freewheeling attitude to form and content is clear in these pieces, but Adams found he was increasingly getting his real musical experiences from listening to the great established masters, especially Beethoven, and from jazz. Somehow he had to find a way of reconciling the expressive power of tonality and functional harmony with his desire to create a language that andwas nevertheless radical and individual.

The mid-Seventies were the high point of what we would now call the ‘pure’ phase of minimalism. Composers like Terry Riley and Steve Reich had led the way; works like Riley’s In C, not so much a finished work as a musical kit of tiny repeated motifs from which musicians could develop their own versions in performance, and Reich’s far more deterministic Drumming, with its borrowings from the rhythmic complexities of West African music, promised Adams a way into a new musical world. As well as those American composers, whom he encountered in the kind of concerts often taking plain art galleries, he also found much to think about in the work of their British equivalents, Gavin Bryars, Howard Skempton and John White.

But Adams was also quick to realise that ‘straight’ minimalism could be only a partial answer to his particular compositional impasse. Though such music was defiantly tonal and driven with rhythmic energy, it was static harmonically and lacked both expressiveness and the potential for large-scale organic musical structures. Those wider concerns are obvious in the first minimalist works Adams produced, Phrygian Gates (1977) for piano, and Shaker Loops, the string septet he wrote the following year. The music is built out of repeated musical cells in regulation minimalist fashion, but even at this stage he concerned himself with larger issues of form and tonality, for during its 26 minutes ‘Phrygian Gates’ moves through half the circle of keys, modulating in fifths. And despite Shaker Loops’s repetitive procedures–recalling Riley’s minimalism–the melodic ‘loops’ of the title are joined together to generate long, sinuous and expressive melodies, that build to a huge climax in the third part of the work. In Adams’s mind, this connects with the frenzy into which the New England Shakers worked themselves during religious ceremonies. It remains one of his most effective and often-heard works, especially in its string-orchestra version, and was the score that began to establish Adams’s reputation internationally.

Adams’s musical development accelerated after he began his association with the San Francisco Symphony in 1978. Between 1981 and 1985 he produced three major scores, still among his finest achievements, in which he unmistakably found a way of creating the large-scale musical architecture to which he aspired. ‘Harmonium’ (1981) is a setting of poems by john Donne and Emily Dickinson, which creates instrumental and vocal textures of luminous intensity. If many of the techniques used in ‘Harmonium’ can be traced directly back to minimalism–the ways in which the opening initially builds out of a repeated word, for instance, recalls Reich–then ‘Grand Pianola Music’ (1982) for voices, two pianos and wind ensemble, really kicks over the traces. Its building blocks may still be based upon repetition, but overlaid on that matrix are increasingly outrageous, Romantic gestures; the apotheosis of the last movement, ‘On the Dominant Divide’, is a series of increasingly grandiose B flat major arpeggios. As Adams describes it, "Beethoven and Rachmaninoff soak in the same warm bath with Liberace, Wagner, The Supremes, Charles Ives and John Philip Sousa’, and it predictably caused a scandal at its premiere in New York. On one level Grand Pianola Music is a parody of 19th-century rhetoric, but on another it is a clear signal that he was not going to be confined by any dogma or musical prescriptions.

‘Harmonielehre’ (1985) then pushed the debt to Romanticism a step further, into a world of post-Wagnerian grandeur. The title is borrowed from Schoenberg’s treatise on (tonal) harmony, published just before he took the final step into atonality, and in Adams’s bold, sometimes monumental writing, there are echoes of Schoenberg’s early scores as well as of Mahler, Sibelius and Strauss. But there is no sense of the ironic take on the past found in Grand Pianola Music, no feeling of parody. There is an explicit homage to late Romanticism in the second movement, when a gigantic climax alludes to a similar moment in the opening Adagio of Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony. It’s title, ‘The Anfortas Wound’, makes yet another connection (with Wagner’s ‘Parsifal’), while the title of the finale, ‘Meister Eckhardt and Quackie’, relates to a dream Adams had shortly after the birth of his daughter, nick-named Quackie, in which she was riding on the shoulders of the medieval mystic. Adams’s cultural references seemed to have no boundaries.

By the time ‘Harmonielehre’ was performed, however, he was already contemplating an even larger project. In 1983 he had been approached by the stage director Peter Sellars to write an opera; Sellars even had the subject ready made–the historic meeting of Richard Nixon and Mao Tse-Tung in Beijing in 1972–and had a librettist lined up as well, the writer and poet Alice Goodman. Adams was initially chary of the idea, but then realised that these larger-than-life world leaders had an operatic quality to them that was hard to resist. Completed in 1987, ‘Nixon in China’ not only set the seal on Adams’s international reputation, but changed the face of contemporary opera virtually overnight.

Here was an operatic work that dealt in recent history and real people, creating a genre that has been dubbed ‘CNN opera’; several of the protagonists could, had they so wished, actually have attended the premiere in Houston in 1987. ‘Nixon’ was contemporary in its tone, yet it had the scale and scope of a grand opera in the Verdian tradition, which mediated between the public personas of the protagonists and their private anxieties and fears. Like Verdi, too, each act is constructed out of a series of set-piece arias and ensembles, and there is even a ballet. The score showed yet another aspect of Adams’s ability to build originally upon the musical past, as well as revealing his sure knack for dramatic characterisation, whether in the contrasting addresses of Nixon and the Chinese prime minister Chou En-Lai at the banquet in the first act, Madame Mao’s astonishing declamatory aria at the end of the second, or the wistful, introspective number with which Chou ends the opera.

If ‘Nixon in China’ is arguable the most successful opera of the last quarter-century, the stage work with which the same team of composer, librettist and director followed it has had a much more chequered career. ‘The Death of Klinghoffer’ (1991) was built around another piece of contemporary history, the hijacking of the cruse liner Achille Lauro by Palestinian terrorists in the Mediterranean in 1985. It is a sombre, meditative work whose musical language is darker, more chromatic than ‘Nixon’s. The dramatic treatment is less specific: characters are portrayed at one remove, almost as archetypes rather than real figures. ‘Klinghoffer’ uses the hijacking as the springboard for a meditation on the conflict between Arabs and Jews. The first performance took place in the 1991 during the Gulf War, and because Goodman’s libretto painstakingly dealt with the Palestinians and their hostages with total even-handedness the work was widely condemned by Jewish pressure-groups. Controversy has dogged it ever since–only last November the Boston Symphony Orchestra cancelled a performance of the Choruses from ‘Klinghoffer’, claiming that such a work was inappropriate in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 11 September. And this is not the first of Adams’s pieces to fall foul of contemporary events. Ironically, the fanfare ‘Short Ridge in a Fast Machine’–devoid of any current-affairs connection —had to be withdrawn twice from the Last Night of the Proms, prompted first by the death of Princess Diana, then by the 11 September attacks.

After writing two such large-scale works in relatively quick succession, Adams temporarily turned away from opera and concentrated on a series of orchestral works, ‘El Dorado’ (1990) is a portrait of impending environmental catastrophe, cast in two large panels, the first mechanistic and ultimately self-destructive, the second quiet and contemplative, full of unsullied modal scales and harmonies; while the Chamber Symphony (1992) revisits the chromaticism of ‘Klinghoffer’ yet views it through strangely Stravinskian jerky dislocations of cartoon music. The gilded melodic invention and demanding virtuosity of the Violin Concerto (1993) are overlaid on an almost Classical concerto model, with a rhapsodic first movement and moto perpetuo finale separated by a serenely beautiful chaconne coloured by the sound of a sampling keyboard in the orchestra; in the quirky strong quartet, ‘John’s Book of Alleged Dances’ (1994) (‘alleged’ because the dance steps for them had yet to be invented) the live strings are accompanied by pre-recorded piano sounds, a memory, perhaps, of Adams’s enthusiasm for John Cage two decades earlier.

By then, however, he was ready to explore music theater again, but only on an intimate scale: ‘I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky’ (1995) deals with the Los Angeles earthquake of 1994 and its consequences, as seen through the eyes of a group of the city’s inhabitants. Its 24 ‘pop’ songs are arguably the most eclectic that Adams has composed so far, and the work does cohere, partly since the writing is so deft and many of the tunes so memorable.

Adams said two years ago that he does not expect his musical language to change very radically in the future, but that he is going to use the craft he has acquired over the last two decades to create an expressive experience that goes beyond anything that he has done before. And in the works of the late Nineties he has shown how his horizon are continuing to expand, even when the musical language itself has remained more or less the same; there is the fond revisiting of the music of the past, often placing it in an unexpected context, like the little homage to Satie’s Gymnopédies nestling in the slow movement of his piano concerto "Century Rolls’ (1996), or the implicit tribute to Benny Goodman, Sousa and marching bands, all part of his youth, in ‘Gnarly Buttons’, for clarinet and chamber orchestra (also 1996). In ‘Naïve and Sentimental Music’ (1998), he takes a philosophical concept from Schiller as the basis for his most extended and ambitious orchestral work to date, and in ‘El Niño’ (2000), he showed his willingness to cut right across conventional genres. This part oratorio, part stage work retells the Nativity story through extracts from both the familiar gospels and the apocryphal ones, overlaid with a commentary on the mystery of birth and child-bearing in poems by Latin American women writers.

‘El Niño’ exemplifies the kind of multi-cultural assemblage that is characteristic of Adams’s art at its best. His development so far has been a process of integration and absorption, in which the whole history of music is regarded as fair game. Minimalism may been his starting point, and there are still occasionally moments in his recent works when those origins can be detected, but the landscapes that he now inhabits are far richer and totally individual. It is, too, an utterly American music in its polyglot origins and its absolute rejection of preconceptions and dogma. Adams has recolonised musical territory that previous generations had abandoned, yet used the proven power of harmony and melody in a totally new, yet increasingly effective way; he’s a one-off, utterly unclassifiable and remarkable figure in contemporary music.

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