Shaker Loops

for string septet

Shaker Loops was composed in the fall of 1978 using fragments from a string quartet, Wavemaker, written earlier in that year. First performance: December, 1978 in Hellman Hall, San Francisco by the New Music Ensemble of the San Francisco Conservatory, conducted by the composer. The version for string orchestra was made in 1983 and first performed in April of that year at Tully Hall, New York, by the American Composers Orchestra conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas.

John Adams on Shaker Loops

Shaker Loops began as a string quartet with the title Wavemaker. At the time, like many a young composer, I was essentially unaware of the nature of those musical materials I had chosen for my tools. Having experienced a few of the seminal pieces of American Minimalism during the early 1970’s, I thought their combination of stripped-down harmonic and rhythmic discourse might be just the ticket for my own unformed yearnings. I gradually developed a scheme for composing that was partly indebted to the repetitive procedures of Minimalism and partly an outgrowth of my interest in waveforms. The “waves” of Wavemaker were to be long sequences of oscillating melodic cells that created a rippling, shimmering complex of patterns like the surface of a slightly agitated pond or lake. But my technique lagged behind my inspiration, and this rippling pond very quickly went dry. Wavemaker crashed and burned at its first performance. The need for a larger, thicker ensemble and for a more flexible, less theory-bound means of composing became very apparent.

JA with LA Phil

Fortunately I had in my students at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music a working laboratory to try out new ideas, and with the original Wavemaker scrapped I worked over the next four months to pick up the pieces and start over. I held on to the idea of the oscillating patterns and made an overall structure that could embrace much more variety and emotional range. Most importantly the quartet became a septet, thereby adding a sonic mass and the potential for more acoustical power. The “loops” idea was a technique from the era of tape music where small lengths of prerecorded tape attached end to end could repeat melodic or rhythmic figures ad infinitum. (Steve Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain is the paradigm of this technique.) The Shakers got into the act partly as a pun on the musical term “to shake”, meaning either to make a tremolo with the bow across the string or else to trill rapidly from one note to another.

The flip side of the pun was suggested by my own childhood memories of growing up not far from a defunct Shaker colony near Canterbury, New Hampshire. Although, as has since been pointed out to me, the term “Shaker” itself is derogatory, it nevertheless summons up the vision of these otherwise pious and industrious souls caught up in the ecstatic frenzy of a dance that culminated in an epiphany of physical and spiritual transcendence. This dynamic, almost electrically charged element, so out of place in the orderly mechanistic universe of Minimalism, gave the music its raison d’être and ultimately led to the full realization of the piece.

Shaker Loops continues to be one of my most performed pieces. There are partisans who favor the clarity and individualism of the solo septet version, and there are those who prefer the orchestral version for its added density and power. The piece has several times been choreographed and even enjoyed a moment of cult status in the movie Barfly, an autobiographical account of the poet Charles Bukowsky’s down and out days on LA’s Skid Row. In a famous scene Bukowsky (Mickey Rourke), having been battered and bloodied by his drunken girlfriend (Faye Dunaway), holes up in a flophouse room, writing poems in a fit of inspiration to the accompaniment of the insistent buzz of “Shaking and Trembling”.

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Score

The original “modular” score, published by Associated Music Publisher, has since been withdrawn and replaced by the 1983 “string orchestra” version. The “string orchestra” version can be played either by a septet of soloists or by a string orchestra of any size.

3 violins, 1 viola, 2 celli, 1 contrabass

I. Shaking and Trembling
II. Hymning Slews
III. Loops and Verses
IV. A Final Shaking

Duration: 24 minutes
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Recordings

 

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Orchestra of St. Luke’s
John Adams, conductor
Nonesuch 79360

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San Francisco Symphony
Edo de Waart, conductor
Philips 412214 2

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Ridge Quartet et al
John Adams, conductor
New Albion NA 014 (original septet version)

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Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra
Marin Alsop, conductor
Naxos 8.559031

Buy Published Score

Shaker Loops score