John Adams | |
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 Adams, sometime before 2008 | |
| Born | (1947-02-15)February 15, 1947 (age 78) Worcester, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Education | Harvard University |
| Occupations |
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| Notable work | List of compositions |
| Spouse | Deborah O'Grady |
| Awards |
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| Website | earbox |
John Coolidge Adams (born February 15, 1947) is an American composer and conductor. Among the most regularly performed composers ofcontemporary classical music, he is particularly noted for hisoperas, many of which center around historical events.[1][2] Apart from opera,his oeuvre includes orchestral,concertante, vocal, choral,chamber,electroacoustic, and piano music.
Born inWorcester, Massachusetts, Adams grew up in a musical family and was exposed toclassical music,jazz,musical theatre, androck music. He attendedHarvard University, studying withLeon Kirchner,Roger Sessions, andDavid Del Tredici, among others. His earliest work was aligned withmodernist music, but he began to disagree with its tenets upon readingJohn Cage'sSilence: Lectures and Writings. Teaching at theSan Francisco Conservatory of Music, Adams developed a minimalist aesthetic first fully realized inPhrygian Gates (1977) and later in the string septetShaker Loops. Adams became increasingly active inSan Francisco's contemporary music scene, and his orchestral worksHarmonium (1980–1981) andHarmonielehre (1985) first gained him national attention.[3] Other popular works from this time include thefanfareShort Ride in a Fast Machine (1986) and the orchestral workEl Dorado (1991).[4]
Adams's first opera wasNixon in China (1987), which recountsRichard Nixon's1972 visit to China and was the first of many collaborations with theatre directorPeter Sellars. Though the work's reception was initially mixed, it has become increasingly respected since its premiere, receiving performances worldwide. Begun soon afterNixon in China, the operaThe Death of Klinghoffer (1991) was based on thePalestinian Liberation Front's1985 hijacking and murder ofLeon Klinghoffer and incited considerable controversy for its subject matter. His next notable works include aChamber Symphony (1992), aViolin Concerto (1993), the opera-oratorioEl Niño (2000), the orchestral pieceMy Father Knew Charles Ives (2003), and the six-stringelectric violin concertoThe Dharma at Big Sur (2003). Adams won aPulitzer Prize for Music forOn the Transmigration of Souls (2002), a piece for orchestra and chorus commemorating the victims of theSeptember 11, 2001 attacks. Continuing with historical subjects, Adams wrote the operaDoctor Atomic (2005), based onJ. Robert Oppenheimer, theManhattan Project, and the building of the firstatomic bomb. Later operas includeA Flowering Tree (2006),Girls of the Golden West (2017), andAntony and Cleopatra (2022).
In many ways, Adams's music is developed from the minimalist tradition ofSteve Reich andPhilip Glass, but he tends to more readily engage in the immense orchestral textures and climaxes of lateRomanticism in the vein ofWagner andMahler. His style is to a considerable extent a reaction against the modernism andserialism of theSecond Viennese andDarmstadt Schools. In addition to the Pulitzer, Adams has received theErasmus Prize, aGrawemeyer Award, fiveGrammy Awards, theHarvard Arts Medal, France'sOrdre des Arts et des Lettres, and six honorary doctorates.
John Coolidge Adams was born inWorcester, Massachusetts, on February 15, 1947.[5] As an adolescent, he lived inWoodstock, Vermont, for five years before moving toEast Concord, New Hampshire,[6] and his family spent summers on the shores ofLake Winnipesaukee, where his grandfather ran a dance hall. Adams's family did not own a television, and did not have a record player until he was ten. But both his parents were musicians, his mother a singer with big bands, and his father a clarinetist.[7] He grew up withjazz, Americana, andBroadway musicals, once meetingDuke Ellington at his grandfather's dance hall.[8] Adams also playedbaseball as a boy.[9]
In the third grade, Adams took up the clarinet, initially taking lessons from his father, Carl Adams, and later withBoston Symphony Orchestra bass clarinetist Felix Viscuglia. He also played in various local orchestras, concert bands, and marching bands while a student.[10][11] Adams began composing at age ten and first heard his music performed as a teenager.[12] He graduated fromConcord High School in 1965.[13]
Adams next enrolled inHarvard University, where he earned a bachelor of arts, magna cum laude, in 1969 and a master of arts in 1971, studying composition withLeon Kirchner,Roger Sessions,Earl Kim,Harold Shapero, andDavid Del Tredici.[5][3] As an undergraduate, he conducted Harvard's student ensemble, theBach Society Orchestra, for a year and a half; his ambitious programming drew criticism in the student newspaper, where one of his concerts was called "the major disappointment of last week's musical offerings".[14][15] Adams also became engrossed by the strictmodernism of the 20th century (such as that ofBoulez) while at Harvard, and believed that music had to continue progressing, to the extent that he once wrote a letter toLeonard Bernstein criticizing the supposed stylistic reactionism ofChichester Psalms.[16] But by night, Adams enjoyed listening toThe Beatles,Jimi Hendrix, andBob Dylan,[8][17] and has said he once stood in line at eight in the morning to purchase a copy ofSgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.[11]
Adams was the first Harvard student to be allowed to write a musical composition for his senior thesis.[18][19] For his thesis, he wroteThe Electric Wake for "electric" (i.e., amplified) soprano accompanied by an ensemble of "electric" strings, keyboards, harp, and percussion.[20] A performance could not be put together at the time, and Adams has never heard the piece performed.[18]
After graduating, Adams received a copy ofJohn Cage's bookSilence: Lectures and Writings from his mother. Largely shaken of his loyalty to modernism, he was inspired to move to San Francisco,[16] where he worked at theSan Francisco Conservatory of Music from 1972 until 1982,[19] teaching classes and directing the school's New Music Ensemble. In the early 1970s, Adams wrote several pieces ofelectronic music for a homemademodular synthesizer he called the "Studebaker".[21] He also wroteAmerican Standard, comprising three movements, amarch, ahymn, and ajazz ballad, which was recorded and released onObscure Records in 1975.[22]
In 1977, Adams wrote the half-hour-long solo piano piecePhrygian Gates, which he later called "my first mature composition, my official 'opus one'",[23] as well as its much shorter companion piece,China Gates. The next year, he finishedShaker Loops, a string septet based on an earlier, unsuccessfulstring quartet calledWavemaker.[24] In 1979, he finished his first orchestral work,Common Tones in Simple Time, which the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Orchestra premiered with Adams conducting.[25]
In 1979, Adams became theSan Francisco Symphony's New Music Adviser and created the symphony's "New and Unusual Music" concerts.[26] A commission from the symphony resulted in Adams's large, three-movementchoral symphonyHarmonium (1980–81), setting texts byJohn Donne andEmily Dickinson. He followed this with the three-movement orchestral piece (withoutstrings)Grand Pianola Music (1982). That summer, he wrote the score forMatter of Heart, a documentary about psychoanalystCarl Jung, a score he later derided as "of stunning mediocrity".[27] In the winter of 1982–83, Adams worked on the electronic score forAvailable Light, a dance choreographed byLucinda Childs with sets by architectFrank Gehry. Without dance, the electronic piece alone is calledLight Over Water.[28]
After an 18-month period ofwriter's block, Adams wrote his orchestral pieceHarmonielehre (1984–85), which he called "a statement of belief in the power oftonality at a time when I was uncertain about its future".[29] Like many of Adams's pieces, it was inspired by a dream, in this case, one in which he was driving across theSan Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge and saw an oil tanker on the surface of the water abruptly turn upright and take off like aSaturn V rocket.[30][31]
From 1985 to 1987, Adams composed his firstopera,Nixon in China, with alibretto byAlice Goodman, based onRichard Nixon's 1972visit to China. The opera marked the first collaboration between Adams andtheatre directorPeter Sellars, who had proposed it to Adams in 1983.[32] Adams worked with Sellars on all his operas untilAntony and Cleopatra (2022).[33]
During this time, Adams also wroteThe Chairman Dances (1985), which he described as an "'out-take' of Act III ofNixon in China", to fulfill a long-delayed commission for theMilwaukee Symphony.[34] He also wrote the short orchestralfanfareShort Ride in a Fast Machine (1986).[35]
Adams wrote two orchestral pieces in 1988:Fearful Symmetries, a 25-minute work in the same style asNixon in China, andThe Wound-Dresser, a setting ofWalt Whitman's 1865 poem of that title, written when Whitman was volunteering at a military hospital during theAmerican Civil War.The Wound-Dresser is scored for baritone voice, two flutes (or two piccolos), two oboes, clarinet, bass clarinet, two bassoons, two horns, trumpet (or piccolo trumpet), timpani, synthesizer, and strings.
During this time, Adams established an international career as a conductor. From 1988 to 1990, he served as conductor and music advisor for theSaint Paul Chamber Orchestra.[3] He has also served as artistic director and conductor of theOjai andCabrillo Music Festivals in California.[3] He has conducted orchestras around the world, including theNew York Philharmonic, theChicago Symphony, theCleveland Orchestra, theLos Angeles Philharmonic, theLondon Symphony Orchestra, and theRoyal Concertgebouw Orchestra,[3] performing pieces byDebussy,Copland,Stravinsky,Haydn,Reich,Zappa,Wagner, and himself.[36]
Adams completed his second opera,The Death of Klinghoffer, in 1991, again working with Goodman and Sellars. It is based on the1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise shipAchille Lauro by Palestinian terrorists and details the murder of passengerLeon Klinghoffer, a retired, physically disabled Jewish American. The opera has generated controversy, including allegations that it isantisemitic and glorifies terrorism.[37]
Adams's next piece,Chamber Symphony (1992), is for a 15-memberchamber orchestra. In three movements, the work is inspired by an unlikely combination of sources:Arnold Schoenberg'sChamber Symphony No. 1, Op. 9 (which Adams was studying at the time) and the "hyperactive, insistently aggressive and acrobatic" music of the cartoons his young son was watching.[38]
The next year, he wrote hisViolin Concerto for American violinistJorja Fleezanis. Lasting a little more than half an hour, it is also in three movements: a "long extended rhapsody for the violin" is followed by a slowchaconne (titled "Body through which the dream flows", a phrase from a poem byRobert Hass), and then an energetictoccare.[39] Adams received theGrawemeyer Award for Music Composition for the concerto.[40]
In 1995, he completedI Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, a stage piece with libretto by poetJune Jordan and staging by Sellars. Inspired by musicals, Adams called the piece a "songplay in two acts".[41] The main characters are seven young Americans from different social and ethnic backgrounds, all living inLos Angeles, with stories that take place around the1994 Northridge earthquake.
Hallelujah Junction (1996) is a three-movement composition for two pianos that employs variations of a repeated two-note rhythm. Theintervals between the notes remain the same for much of the piece. Adams used the same phrase for the title of his 2008 memoir.
Written to celebrate the millennium,El Niño (2000) is an "oratorio about birth in general and about theNativity in specific".[42] The piece incorporates a wide range of texts, including biblical texts as well as poems by Hispanic poets likeRosario Castellanos,Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,Gabriela Mistral,Vicente Huidobro, andRubén Darío,
After theSeptember 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, theNew York Philharmonic commissioned Adams to write a memorial piece for the victims. The result,On the Transmigration of Souls, was premiered around the first anniversary of the attacks.On the Transmigration of Souls is fororchestra,chorus, andchildren's choir, accompanied by taped readings of the names of the victims mixed with the sounds of the city.[43][44] It won the 2003Pulitzer Prize for Music[45] and the 2005Grammy Award forBest Contemporary Composition.
Commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony,[46][47] Adams's orchestral pieceMy Father Knew Charles Ives (2003) has three movements: "Concord", "The Lake", and "The Mountain". Though his father did not actually know American composerCharles Ives, Adams saw many similarities between the two men's lives and between their lives and his own, including their love of small-town New England life and their unfulfilled musical dreams.
Written for theLos Angeles Philharmonic to celebrate the opening ofDisney Hall in 2003,The Dharma at Big Sur (2003) is a two-movement work for solo electric six-string violin and orchestra. Adams wrote that withDharma, he "wanted to compose a piece that embodied the feeling of being on the West Coast – literally standing on a precipice overlooking the geographic shelf with the ocean extending far out to the horizon".[48] Inspired by the music ofLou Harrison,[49] the piece calls for some instruments (harp, piano, samplers) to usejust intonation, atuning system in which intervals sound pure, rather thanequal temperament, the common Western tuning system in which all intervals except the octave are impure.
Adams's third opera,Doctor Atomic (2005), is about physicistJ. Robert Oppenheimer, theManhattan Project, and the creation and testing of the first atomic bomb. The work premiered at the San Francisco Opera in October 2005.[50] Its libretto, by Sellars, draws on original source material, including personal memoirs, recorded interviews, technical manuals of nuclear physics, declassified government documents, and the poetry of theBhagavad Gita,John Donne,Charles Baudelaire, andMuriel Rukeyser. It takes place in June and July 1945, mainly over the last few hours before the first atomic bomb explodes at the test site in New Mexico. Characters include Oppenheimer and his wifeKitty,Edward Teller, GeneralLeslie Groves, andRobert Wilson. Two years later, Adams extracted music from the opera to create theDoctor Atomic Symphony.[51]
In 2018,The Santa Fe Opera performedDoctor Atomic in its summer season. The production took place in Santa Fe, 33 miles away from theLos Alamos Laboratory, the Manhattan Project's research and development facility. This proximity forged a deeper connection between the production and the people of Los Alamos, fostering a new relationship with the pueblo communities. According to Andrew Martinez, this association "became an opportunity to confront the histories and present-day experiences of pain and suffering that New Mexico citizens have endured since that rainy summer night in July 1945 when the first atomic bomb was detonated".[50] The production also featured a 2,400-pound silver orb hanging from the ceiling, representing the bomb. This single set piece stood on an otherwise empty stage, set against the backdrop of theSangre de Cristo Mountains.[50]
Adams's next opera,A Flowering Tree (2006), with a libretto by Adams and Sellars, is based on a folktale from theKannada language of southern India translated byA. K. Ramanujan about a young girl who discovers she has the magic ability to transform into a flowering tree. The opera was commissioned as part of the Vienna New Crowned Hope Festival to celebrate the 250th anniversary ofMozart's birth, and has many parallels with Mozart'sThe Magic Flute, including its themes of "magic, transformation and the dawning of moral awareness".[52]
Adams wrote three pieces for theSt. Lawrence String Quartet: his First Quartet (2008), his concerto forstring quartet and orchestra,Absolute Jest (2012), and his Second Quartet (2014). BothAbsolute Jest and the Second Quartet are based on fragments fromBeethoven, withAbsolute Jest using music from hislate quartets (specificallyOpus 131,Opus 135 and theGroße Fuge) and the Second Quartet drawing from Beethoven'sOpus 110 and111piano sonatas.
From 2011 to 2013, Adams wrote his two-actPassion oratorio,The Gospel According to the Other Mary, a decade after his Nativity oratorio,El Niño. The work focuses on the final few weeks of the life ofJesus from the point of view of "the other Mary",Mary of Bethany (sometimes misidentified asMary Magdalene), her sisterMartha, and her brother,Lazarus.[53][54] Sellars's libretto draws from theBible and fromRosario Castellanos,Rubén Darío,Dorothy Day,Louise Erdrich,Hildegard von Bingen,June Jordan, andPrimo Levi.
Scheherazade.2 (2014) is a four-movement "dramatic symphony"[55] for violin and orchestra. Written for violinistLeila Josefowicz, who frequently performed Adams's Violin Concerto andThe Dharma at Big Sur, the work was inspired by the characterScheherazade (fromOne Thousand and One Nights) who, after being forced into marriage, recounts tales to her husband in order to delay her death. Adams associated modern examples of suffering and injustice toward women, with acts inTahrir Square during theEgyptian revolution of 2011,Kabul, and comments fromThe Rush Limbaugh Show.[56][57][58]
Adams's seventh opera,Girls of the Golden West (2017), with a libretto by Sellars based on historical sources, is set in mining camps during theCalifornia Gold Rush of the 1850s. Sellars described the opera this way: "These true stories of the Forty-Niners are overwhelming in their heroism, passion and cruelty, telling tales of racial conflicts, colorful and humorous exploits, political strife and struggles to build anew a life and to decide what it would mean to be American."[59]
In 2022, Adams completed his eighth opera,Antony and Cleopatra, based onShakespeare'splay of the same name.
On June 14, 2023, the Library of Congress announced that it was acquiring Adams's manuscripts and papers for its Music Division, which also includes the papers of Bernstein, Copland,George andIra Gershwin,Martha Graham,Charles Mingus, andNeil Simon, among others.[60]
Adams was married to Hawley Currens, a music teacher, from 1970 to 1974.[61] He is married to photographer Deborah O'Grady, with whom he has a daughter, Emily, and a son, the composerSamuel Carl Adams.[9][62]
Adams's music is usually categorized asminimalist orpost-minimalist, although in an interview he said that his music is part of the "post-style" era at the end of the 20th century.[63] He employs minimalist techniques, such as repeating patterns, but is not a strict follower of the movement. Adams adopted much of the minimalist technique ofSteve Reich andPhilip Glass, but his work synthesizes this with the orchestral textures ofWagner,Mahler, andSibelius.[64] ComparingShaker Loops to the minimalist composerTerry Riley's pieceIn C, Adams remarked:
rather than set up small engines of motivic materials and let them run free in a kind of random play of counterpoint, I used the fabric of continually repeating cells to forge large architectonic shapes, creating a web of activity that, even within the course of a single movement, was more detailed, more varied, and knew both light and dark, serenity and turbulence.[65]
Many of Adams's ideas are a reaction to the philosophy ofserialism and its depictions of "the composer as scientist".[66] TheDarmstadt School oftwelve-tone composition was dominant while Adams was in college, and he compared class to a "mausoleum where we would sit and count tone-rows inWebern".[67]
Adams experienced a musical epiphany after readingJohn Cage's 1961 bookSilence, which he said "dropped into my psyche like a time bomb",[68] causing him to drop out of academia, "pack his belongings into a VW Bug, and drive to California".[69] Cage posed fundamental questions about what music was, and regarded all types of sounds as viable sources of music. This perspective offered Adams a liberating alternative to serialism's rule-based techniques. But Adams found Cage's music equally restricting.[16] He began to experiment with electronic music, and his experiences are reflected in the writing ofPhrygian Gates (1977–78), in which the constant shifting between modules inLydian mode andPhrygian mode refers to activatingelectronic gates rather than architectural ones. Adams explained that working with synthesizers caused a "diatonic conversion", a reversion to the belief that tonality was a force of nature.[70]
Some of Adams's compositions amalgamate different styles.Grand Pianola Music (1981–82) is a humorous piece that purposely draws its content from musical cliches. InThe Dharma at Big Sur, Adams draws from literary texts such asJack Kerouac,Gary Snyder, andHenry Miller to illustrate the California landscape. He has professed his love of genres other than classical music; his parents were jazz musicians, and he has also listened to rock music, albeit only passively. Adams once claimed that originality was not an urgent concern for him the way it was for minimalists, and compared his position to that ofGustav Mahler,J. S. Bach, andJohannes Brahms, who "were standing at the end of an era and were embracing all of the evolutions that occurred over the previous thirty to fifty years".[71]
Like other minimalists of his time, Adams used a steady pulse to define and control his music. The pulse was best known fromTerry Riley's early compositionIn C, and more and more composers used it as a common practice. Jonathan Bernard highlighted this adoption by comparingPhrygian Gates, from 1977, andFearful Symmetries, from 1988.[72]
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Adams started to add a new character to his music, which he called "the Trickster". The Trickster allowed Adams to use the repetitive style and rhythmic drive of minimalism while simultaneously poking fun at it.[73] When Adams commented on his own characterization of particular minimalist music, he said that he went joyriding on "those Great Prairies of non-event".[74]
Adams won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2003 forOn the Transmigration of Souls.[45] Response to his output as a whole has been more divided, and Adams's works have been called both brilliant and boring in reviews that stretch across both ends of the rating spectrum.Shaker Loops has been called "hauntingly ethereal", while 1999'sNaïve and Sentimental Music has been called "an exploration of a marvelously extended spinning melody".[75]The New York Times called 1996'sHallelujah Junction "a two-piano work played with appealingly sharp edges", and 2001'sAmerican Berserk "a short, volatile solo piano work".[76]
The most critically divisive pieces in Adams's collection are his historical operas. At first release,Nixon in China received mostly negative press. InThe New York Times,Donal Henahan called theHouston Grand Opera world premiere of the work "worth a few giggles but hardly a strong candidate for the standard repertory" and "visually striking but coy and insubstantial".[77] In theSt. Louis Post-Dispatch, James Wierzbicki called Adams's score the weak point in an otherwise well-staged performance, describing it as "inappropriately placid", "cliché-ridden in the abstract" and trafficking "heavily in Adams's worn-out Minimalist clichés".[78] But with time, the opera has come to be revered. InMusic and Vision,Robert Hugill called a production "astonishing ... nearly twenty years after its premier",[79] whileThe Guardian'sFiona Maddocks praised the score's "diverse and subtle palette" and Adams's "rhythmic ingenuity".[80]
More recently,New York Times criticAnthony Tommasini commended a 2007American Composers Orchestra concert celebrating Adams's 60th birthday, calling Adams a "skilled and dynamic conductor" and the music "gravely beautiful yet restless".[81]
The operaThe Death of Klinghoffer has been criticized asantisemitic by some, including the Klinghoffer family.Leon Klinghoffer's daughters, Lisa and Ilsa, after attending the opera, released a statement saying: "We are outraged at the exploitation of our parents and the coldblooded murder of our father as the centerpiece of a production that appears to us to be anti-Semitic."[82] In response to these accusations of antisemitism, composer andOberlin College professorConrad Cummings wrote a letter to the editor defendingKlinghoffer as "the closest analogue to the experience of Bach's audience attending his most demanding works", and noted that, as a person of Jewish descent, he "found nothing anti-Semitic about the work".[83]
After the September 11 attacks in 2001, performances by the Boston Symphony Orchestra of excerpts fromKlinghoffer were canceled. BSO managing director Mark Volpe said of the decision: "We originally programmed the choruses from John Adams'The Death of Klinghoffer because we believe in it as a work of art, and we still hold that conviction. ... [Tanglewood Festival Chorus members] explained that it was a purely human reason, and that it wasn't in the least bit a criticism of the work."[84] Adams andKlinghoffer librettist Alice Goodman criticized the decision,[85] and Adams rejected a request to substitute a performance ofHarmonium, saying: "The reason that I asked them not to doHarmonium was that I felt thatKlinghoffer is a serious and humane work, and it's also a work about which many people have made prejudicial judgments without even hearing it. I felt that if I said, 'OK,Klinghoffer is too hot to handle, doHarmonium, that in a sense I would be agreeing with the judgment aboutKlinghoffer.'"[86] In response to an article by theSan Francisco Chronicle'sDavid Wiegand[87] denouncing the BSO decision, musicologist and criticRichard Taruskin accused the work of catering to "anti-American, anti-Semitic and anti-bourgeois" prejudices.[88]
A 2014 revival by theMetropolitan Opera reignited debate. Former New York City mayorRudy Giuliani, who marched in protest against the production, wrote: "This work is both a distortion of history and helped, in some ways, to foster a three decade long feckless policy of creating a moral equivalency between thePalestinian Authority, a corrupt terrorist organization, and the state of Israel, a democracy ruled by law."[89] MayorBill de Blasio criticized Giuliani's participation in the protests, andOskar Eustis, the artistic director ofThe Public Theater, said: "It is not only permissible for the Met to do this piece – it's required for the Met to do the piece. It is a powerful and important opera."[90] A week after watching a Met performance of the opera, Supreme Court JusticeRuth Bader Ginsburg said "there was nothing antisemitic about the opera" and characterized the portrayal of the Klinghoffers as "very strong, very brave" and the terrorists as "bullies and irrational".[91]
Major awards
Grammy awards
Other awards
Memberships
Honorary Doctorates
Other
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