John Adams's earliest musical memory is of sitting in the living room of his New England home and listening to recordings. As he has pointedly observed, "I grew up in a household where Benny Goodman and Mozart were not separated." Four decades later, it is still that open-ness to every variety of music - American and European, old and new, "high" art and "low" pop - that makes John Adams's compositions so distinctive.

Born in Worcester, Massachusetts on 15 February 1947, Adams grew up in the rural isolation of East Concord, New Hampshire. As a child he studied clarinet with his father, played in a marching band, con-ducted a community orchestra, and wrote his first compositions. He accepted a scholarship to Harvard University, initially intending to focus on conducting and the clarinet. In time, he gravitated toward composition. Although he admired his composition teacher, Leon Kirchner, Adams found the atmosphere of academic music altogether too confining.

As a graduation present his parents gave him a copy of John Cage's Silence, which "dropped into my psyche like a time bomb." Sensing that there were viable alternatives to serialism, Adams looked to the West Coast in search of the freedom to explore those options. In 1971, Adams drove to San Francisco; to this day, he continues to live in the Bay Area. From 1972 to 1982, he taught at the San Francisco Con-servatory of Music, and it was there that he found his voice as a composer. At first, he turned to a Cage-inspired investigation of unconventional sound-sources; next, he explored electronic instru-ments, going so far as to build his own synthesizer. (Technology has remained an active concern: nearly all of his later works use synthesizer or sampler, including Hoodoo Zephyr, a 1993 album composed entirely on digital instruments and recorded using the MIDI system.) However, it was not until his first encounter with minimalism, in the early 1970's, that he found a solution to his creative dilemma. Even today, he speaks of minimalism as "the only really interesting, important stylistic development in the past 30 years."

Almost immediately it became apparent that Adams would take minimalism in a direction very different from either Steve Reich or Philip Glass. Less involved than Reich or Glass with non-Western music, Adams turned minimalist techniques to the service of a much more emotional, climactic, and directionalized musical language. He rejected the mechanistic impersonality of early minimalism, demanded a more rapid degree of change, and reveled in an "impure" range of stylistic possibilities. "I'm trying to embrace the tragic aspects of life in my work," he said in 1985. "That's something that minimalism has not really succeeded in doing yet."

All these elements are apparent in Adams's first two minimalist essays, the piano piece Phrygian Gates (1977-78) and the string septet Shaker Loops (1978). The former allowed eruptive modulations to disrupt minimalism's steady state, while the latter introduced a fluid, long-limbed lyricism. Already it was clear that Adams's "post-minimalism" would embrace the full range of expression available to a late-20th-century composer.

In 1978, Adams became new-music advisor to the San Francisco Symphony; from 1982 to 1985, his position was formalized as composer-in-residence. During those years, he composed Grand Pianola Music (1982), as antic and parodistic a score as he had ever penned. For the San Francisco Symphony, he wrote two orchestral scores: Harmonium (1981), a three-movement work for large chorus and orchestra, and Harmonielehre (1985). Harmonielehre's central section ("The Anfortas Wound") embraced a new, sinuous chro-maticism that would be of immense consequence for Adams's sub-sequent compositions.

* * *

In 1983 Adams met the director Peter Sellars, who suggested the creation of an opera based on Richard Nixon's historic 1972 meeting with Mao Tse-Tung. At first Adams reacted with skepticism. But eventually he realized that opera, which had always dealt with myths and archetypes, had found in Nixon and Mao the genuinely mythic characters of our own time. Most people assumed that Nixon in China would be a broad satire, but Adams, Sellars, and their librettist Alice Goodman were adamant that it should not be a political hatchet-job. Instead, they crafted a sympathetic, almost heroic opera framed in elegant rhyming couplets. By the time of the premiere of Nixon in China in October 1987, the critic Michael Steinberg could state, without exaggeration: "No American opera has ever been awaited with such excitement."

The first two acts of Nixon in China are filled with events that seem to leap off the front page and onto the opera stage: the landing of Nixon's plane in Beijing, his breathless aria about the power of television, his meeting with Mao in the Chairman's study, the elaborate formal banquet. But during the last act, the mood turns melancholy and introspective. The principal characters each lie on a narrow bed and ruminate on their failures and accomplishments. For them, Adams wrote some of the most achingly poignant music he had ever composed.

After the premiere of Nixon in China, Adams attempted to return to the spirit of Nixon's last act. However, as Adams once wrote, "Along with every dark, introspective, 'serious' piece, there must come the Trickster - the garish, ironic wild card." The result was Fearful Symmetries (1988), maniacally kinetic and filled with the rhythms of American popular culture. The propulsive energy of Fearful Symmetries has led to its becoming the composer's most frequently choreo-graphed score, with eight settings to date by choreographers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Typically for Adams, the extroversion of Fearful Symmetries was balanced by the introversion of The Wound-Dresser (1989). A setting for baritone and chamber orchestra of Walt Whitman's recollections of nursing injured Civil War soldiers, The Wound-Dresser mines the vein of extraordinary eloquence that emerged in the last act of Nixon; this mood of quiet acceptance is as "sweet and sad" as Whitman's text.

By now Adams was already at work on his second opera, The Death of Klinghoffer (1990). Inspired by the 1985 hijacking by Palestinian terrorists of the cruise ship Achille Lauro, and the murder of a wheelchair-bound Jewish-American passenger, Leon Klinghoffer, The Death of Klinghoffer went beyond this one incident to examine the tragic, timeless clash of two peoples, Arabs and Jews. This time, the Adams/Goodman/Sellars team wisely avoided the realism of Nixon in China; for Nixon's exuberant narrative, Klinghoffer substitutes a ritualistic sobriety, consisting more of reflection than action. Adams admitted that he found his model in the Bach Passions, and indeed the emotional core of the opera is the chorus, which stands outside the narrative and meditates on its meaning. Pervasively dark and dissonant, surprisingly contrapuntal, and capable of shattering emo-tional impact, Klinghoffer's florid chromaticism is far removed from the burbling post-minimalist repetition of Nixon in China.

Klinghoffer, which opened at the height of the 1991 Gulf War, took an immense personal toll on Adams, and for several years he avoided the opera world altogether. His next orchestral work, El Dorado (1991), focused on yet another contemporary issue, environmental despoil-ation. Cast in two strikingly divergent movements, El Dorado turns from the harrowing, chromatically ascending crescendo of the first to the serene, unblemished modality of the second. The Chamber Symphony (1992), scored like Schoenberg's score of 1906 for 15 instruments, combines the contrapuntal, chromatic language of Klinghoffer with the hyperactive energy of cartoon music. Fearsomely virtuosic, its linear textures and insistent pulsation occasionally recall Stravinsky. Adams's turbulent, bittersweet Violin Concerto (1993) is similarly contrapuntal. Its first movement places the free-floating solo part high above a pervasively chromatic orchestral accompaniment; its second movement, more clearly tonal, is a chaconne built upon a six-measure ground bass; and its whirlwind finale is a perpetual-motion toccata. For the Violin Concerto, Adams received the 1995 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition.

After this series of orchestral works, Adams turned to the intimate scale of John's Book of Alleged Dances (1994). Despite their witty titles and Adams's humorous description of them as a set of dances "for which the steps have yet to be invented," these are anything but light occasional pieces. Scored for string quartet and a foot-controlled sampler [Editor note: The foot-controlled sampler has been replaced by audio compact disc playback] (which lays down a distinctive rhythm track to underpin six of the movements), the ten Alleged Dances show no slackening of Adams's chromatic astringency or contrapuntal virtuosity.

By 1994, Adams was ready to return to music-theater, if not to the mainstream opera world. Seeking an alternative to the complexity and expense of large-scale opera production, he composed I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky (1995), a collaboration with Peter Sellars and the poet June Jordan. By turning to non-operatic voices, an onstage band, and a gritty inner-city setting, Adams hoped that this portable "song play" would, like the Brecht/Weill Three-Penny Opera, reach a larger and more diverse audience. The musical language, rich in allusions to American popular idioms, is simpler as well. "A sense of minimalist pulsation and repetition is in all my music, but there's none of the complexity, contrapuntal density, and drift towards atonality that you can find in the string quartet and the violin concerto," he admits.

Today, it has become clear that minimalism is only one side of Adams's multi-faceted musical personality. More than any other composer of his generation, Adams has achieved an accessible and genuinely American synthesis of serious classical ambition with the vernacular touch. That sort of populism has hardly been heard in this country since the heyday of Copland in the 1940s and Bernstein in the 1950s, and it is rich in promise for rebuilding an audience for American concert music.

K. Robert Schwarz, 1995

Questions or Technical Support please mail:

Mark Grey

John Adams' Engineer
Boosey & Hawkes Synthesizer Technician