Composer Portraits: John Adams
Saturday, March 26, 2011, 8:00pm
Meymandi Concert Hall, Raleigh
John Adams
(b. February 15, 1947, in Worcester, Massachusetts)
John Adams is one of today’s most acclaimed composers. Audiences have responded enthusiastically to his music, and he enjoys a success not seen by an American composer since the zenith of Aaron Copland’s career. A recent survey of major orchestras conducted by the League of American Orchestras found John Adams to be the most frequently performed living American composer. He received the University of Louisville’s distinguished Grawemeyer Award in 1995 for his Violin Concerto. In 1997, he was the focus of the New York Philharmonic’s Composer Week, elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and named Composer of the Year by Musical America Magazine. He has been made a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. In 1999, Nonesuch released The John Adams Earbox, a critically acclaimed ten-CD collection of his work. In 2003, he received the Pulitzer Prize for On the Transmigration of Souls, written for the New York Philharmonic in commemoration of the first anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, and was also recognized by New York’s Lincoln Center with a two-month retrospective of his work, the most extensive festival devoted to a living composer ever mounted there. From 2003 to 2007, Adams held the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall. In 2004, he was awarded the Centennial Medal of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences “for contributions to society” and became the first-ever recipient of the Nemmers Prize in Music Composition, which included residencies and teaching at Northwestern University. He has been granted an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University in England, an honorary membership in Phi Beta Kappa and the California Governor’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts.
He grew up in Woodstock, Vermont, and in New Hampshire. From his father, he learned the clarinet and went on to become an accomplished performer on that instrument, playing with the New Hampshire Philharmonic and Sarah Caldwell’s Boston Opera Orchestra and appearing as soloist in the first performances of Walter Piston’s Clarinet Concerto in Boston, New York and Washington. (Adams first met Piston as a neighbor of his family in Woodstock and received encouragement, advice and understanding from the older composer, one of this country’s most respected artists.) Adams’s professional focus shifted from the clarinet to composition during his undergraduate study at Harvard, where his principal teacher was Leon Kirchner.
Rather than following the expected route for a budding composer, which led through Europe, Adams chose to stay in America. In 1972, he settled in California to join the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where his duties included directing the New Music Ensemble, leading the student orchestra, teaching composition and administering a graduate program in analysis and history. In 1978, he became associated with the San Francisco Symphony and conductor Edo de Waart in an evaluation of that ensemble’s involvement with contemporary music. Two years later he helped to institute the Symphony’s “New and Unusual Music” series, which subsequently served as the model for the “Meet the Composer” program, sponsored by the Exxon Corporation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, that placed composers-in-residence with several major American orchestras. Adams served as resident composer with the San Francisco Symphony from 1979 to 1985. He still lives in northern California.
In his compositions through the early 1990s, Adams was closely allied with the style known as Minimalism, which utilizes repetitive melodic patterns, consonant harmonies, motoric rhythms and a deliberate striving for aural beauty. Unlike some other Minimalist music, however, which can be static and intentionally uneventful, the best of Adams’s early works (Grand Pianola Music, Shaker Loops, Harmonium, Harmonielehre, the acclaimed operas Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer) are marked by a sense of determined forward motion, inexorable formal growth and frequent allusions to a wide range of 20th-century idioms, both popular and serious. His links with traditional music are further strengthened by consistent use of conventional instruments and predominantly consonant harmony, this latter technique producing what he calls “sustained resonance,”the quality possessed by the acoustical overtone series of common chords to reinforce and amplify each other to create an enveloping mass of sound. Adams’s recent compositions incorporate more aggressive harmonic styles and more elaborate contrapuntal textures to create an idiom he distinguishes from that of his earlier music as “more dangerous, but also more fertile, more capable of expressive depth and emotional flexibility.” Among Adams’s recent commissions are My Father Knew Charles Ives; On the Transmigration of Souls, commemorating the tragedies of 9/11 and winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize and the 2005 Grammy Award as Best Contemporary Classical Composition Recording; and The Dharma at Big Sur, composed for Los Angeles Philharmonic for the opening of Disney Hall in October 2003. The San Francisco Opera premiered Dr. Atomic, based on the life of atomic scientist Robert Oppenheimer, in October 2005. His most recent opera, A Flowering Tree, inspired by Mozart’s The Magic Flute and based on a folk tale from southern India, premiered in Vienna in November 2006 and was released on the Nonesuch label in 2008. Adams began his tenure as creative chair with the Los Angeles Philharmonic with the premiere of City Noir on October 8, 2009.
Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, Op. 112 (1815)
Ludwig van Beethoven
(b. December 16, 1770, in Bonn;
d. March 26, 1827, in Vienna)
“Goethe’s poems exert a great power over me not only because of their contents but also because of their rhythms; I am stimulated to compose by this language, which builds itself up to higher orders as if through spiritual agencies, and bears in itself the secret of harmonies.” Thus did Beethoven explain the inspiration he derived from the words and thoughts of the great German writer. Almost a quarter of Beethoven’s eighty songs are based on poems by Goethe, and in 1810, he contributed an imposing overture and several pieces of incidental music to a revival of Egmont for the reopening of the Vienna Hoftheater. Beethoven met Goethe at Teplitz during the summer of 1812, and three years later composed a choral work on the latter’s paired poems titled Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage. (Mendelssohn’s concert overture on the same subject dates from 1828.) The composition was first presented, under the composer’s direction, at a concert on Christmas Day 1815 in the Redoutensaal in Vienna to benefit the city’s hospital fund.
In his biography of the composer, Maynard Solomon wrote that Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage is “a small masterpiece of tone painting, which treats one of Beethoven’s favorite subjects – tranquility penetrated by agitation, dissolving into joyful triumph.” The first of the work’s two large paragraphs sets Goethe’s apprehensive words about a ship becalmed at sea, a troubling condition that not only disrupted trade in those days of the masted sailing ships but could mean starvation for the crew if it lasted long enough. This first section is quiet, almost motionless, except for two startling exclamations of terror from the chorus. The tension of the opening music is dispelled by the composition’s second section, whose rolling gusts of triplets and joyous choral shouts blow the sailors safely to port.
In addition to the chorus, this work is scored for flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, trumpets, timpani and strings.
Young Apollo, Op. 16 (1939)
Benjamin Britten
(b. November 22, 1913, in Lowestoft, Suffolk, England;
d. December 4, 1976, in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, England)
In Greek and Roman mythology, Apollo was one of the twelve Olympians, the gods who supplanted Hyperion and his fellow Titans. Apollo, son of Zeus and Leto, was recognized as the leader of the Muses and their arts of music, poetry, dance and drama, as well as the god of light and the sun. His attributes included the lyre, and he was regarded as the perfect embodiment of the kouros, the beautiful “beardless youth.” Britten, well-versed in ancient mythology, wrote of the expressive linchpin of his Young Apollo: “The end of one order of gods has come. Saturn, Hyperion and the other ancient gods, who ruled the world by might and terror, have to make way to the new order – gods of light, youth, beauty and laughter. Apollo, called to be the new god of beauty by Mnemosyne, the old goddess of memory, foresees his destiny; and in one final convulsion throws off his mortal form. He stands before us – the new, dazzling Sun-god, quivering with radiant vitality.”
Britten referred to the piece as a fanfare, and it is, indeed, one of his most brilliant and luminous creations, rooted throughout in the sun-bright harmony of A Major, shimmering in sonority, muscular in motion. Young Apollo opens with a soft pulsing foundation in the string orchestra above which the piano stretches ribbons of scales – British musicologist Mervyn Cooke called these figurations “a stunning apotheosis of the A-Major scale” – that elicit leaping responses from the string quartet. A solo piano cadenza leads to an Allegro molto passage of bursting youthful energy and radiant scoring. The tempo slows for a broad, impassioned reprise of the string quartet’s leaping theme from the introduction. The piano resumes its flying scales and the music is reenergized before it concludes with a final reminiscence of the quartet’s leaping motive.
In addition to the solo piano, this work is scored for a solo string quartet and strings.
The Unanswered Question (1906)
Charles Ives
(b. October 20, 1874, in Danbury, Connecticut;
d. May 19, 1954, in New York City)
The Unanswered Question, subtitled “A Contemplation of Something Serious,” is one of Ives’s most visionary and most popular works. It was written in 1906 along with a companion piece, Central Park in the Dark in the Good Old Summer Time (“A Contemplation of Nothing Serious”), when Ives was trying out all manner of sound combinations in his music. The Unanswered Question comprises three distinct kinds of music, superimposed: a string chorale, an unchanging trumpet phrase and a chattering woodwind response. Ives assigned these unlikely partners the following philosophical roles:
“The strings play pianississimo throughout with no change in tempo. They are to represent the ‘Silence of the Druids – Who Know, See and Hear Nothing.’ The trumpet intones ‘The Perennial Question of Existence’ and states it in the same tone of voice each time. But the hunt for ‘The Invisible Answer’ undertaken by the flutes and other human beings becomes gradually more active, faster and louder…‘The Fighting Answerers,’ as the time goes on and after a ‘secret conference,’ seem to realize a futility and begin to mock ‘The Question’ – the strife is over for the moment. After they disappear, ‘The Question’ is asked for the last time, and ‘The Silences’ are heard beyond in ‘Undisturbed Solitude.’” This turn-ofthe- 20th-century work continues to be disturbing, challenging and thought-provoking. “The world today makes us so aware of unanswered questions that the basic idea of the piece is easy to grasp,” wrote musicologist Edward Downes.
This work is scored for flutes, trumpet and strings.
Eros Piano for Piano and Orchestra (1989)
John Adams
John Adams comments, “Eros Piano began as an elegy on the death of [American composer] Morton Feldman [in 1987]. I was mindful of how John Cage had first described Feldman’s music as ‘erotic’ but later decided that it was heroic. I have always felt that both of Cage’s descriptions were correct. As examples of extended musical architecture, of a radically new attitude toward the flow of time, Feldman’s works – especially the late ones – are certainly heroic in what they attempt. But on the microscopic level, his music was always sensuous, erotic, obsessed with gradations of touch and the subtlest shifts of color.
“Another feature of Feldman’s music, which I call the ‘fetish,’ the obsessively reiterated motive or gesture, also suggests another composer, Toru Takemitsu. Both composers have created musical structures by lingering over and over on a single small detail. My Eros Piano became an homage to both composers. I take a transposed version of the Takemitsu ‘fetish,’ the falling, sighing perfect fifths first heard in the piano, and lead it through a different dream world, one teeming with my own musical subconscious.”
In addition to the solo piano, this work is scored for flutes and piccolos, oboes, clarinets including bass clarinet, bassoons, horns, a small battery of percussion, synthesizer and strings.
Short Ride in a Fast Machine (1986)
John Adams
For the recording of this work by the San Francisco Symphony on Nonesuch Records, the late Michael Steinberg wrote, “Short Ride in a Fast Machine is a joyfully exuberant piece, brilliantly scored for a large orchestra including two synthesizers. Commissioned for the opening of the Great Woods Festival in Mansfield, Massachusetts, it was first played on that occasion, 13 June 1986, by the Pittsburgh Symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas. Short Ride begins with a marking of quarter notes (woodblock, soon joined by the four trumpets) and eighth notes (clarinets and synthesizers), but the woodblock is fortissimo and the other instruments play forte. Adams describes the woodblock’s persistence as ‘almost sadistic’ and thinks of the rest of the orchestra as running the gauntlet through that rhythmic tunnel. About the title: ‘You know how it is when someone asks you to ride in a terrific sports car, and then you wish you hadn’t?’”
This work is scored for flutes and piccolos, oboes and English horn, clarinets, bassoons including contrabassoon, horns, trumpets, trombones including bass trombone, tuba, timpani plus a large battery of percussion, synthesizer and strings.
Harmonium (1981)
John Adams
Adams provided the following information: “Harmonium began with a simple, totally formed mental image: that of a single tone emerging out of a vast, empty space, and, by means of a gentle unfolding, evolving into a rich, pulsating fabric of sound. This wordless ‘preverbal’ creation scene describes the opening of the piece, and it was fixed in my mind’s eye long before I had even made the decision whether or not to use a text. Some time passed before I was able to get beyond this initial image. I had an intuition of what the work would feel like, but I could not locate the poetic voice to give it shape. When I finally did settle on a text for the piece I was frankly rather surprised by the oddity of my choice. At almost the same time I happened upon an obscure poem with the irresistible title Negative Love by the 17th-century English poet John Donne and two poems by the 19th-century American Emily Dickinson which, together with the Donne poem, suggested a completed unity of form and meaning.
“In other works written around the same time as Harmonium (Common Tones in Simple Time for orchestra, Shaker Loops for strings and Phrygian Gates for piano) much of the musical interest came about as a result of a balance between harmonic stability and the invention and variety of the sound ‘surface.’ Large, harmonically stable key areas, often governed by a single mode or even a single chord, were brought to life and impelled forward by an inner pulse and by a constantly evolving wave-like manipulation of the surface texture. (An early version for string quartet of Shaker Loops was, in fact, appropriately named Wavemaker.) Melody, when it did occur, was seldom a generator of form, as it is in almost all other tonal music. Rather it was born out of the ongoing harmonic and rhythmic flow of the continuum. One could even go so far as to call it an aspect of the music’s texture. Nevertheless, it is by no means absent or unimportant in Harmonium.
“With harmonic rhythm (i.e., the rate of change between harmonies) radically slowed down, modulation took on a new and exciting meaning and I found that, when properly handled, it could accomplish the effect of a kind of celestial gear shifting. A successful performance of any one of these pieces should give the feeling of travelling – sometimes soaring, sometimes barely crawling, but nonetheless always moving forward over vast stretches of imaginary terrain. Changes in harmony, normally a matter of bar to bar articulation in most tonal music (at least in the Western world), became a different matter when used in this manner: I found, for example, that I could use harmonic change in two very different ways. One way was to bring in a new key area almost on the sly, stretching the ambiguity out over such a length of time that the listener would hardly notice that a change had taken place (you find yourself in a new landscape but you don’t know how you got there). Another approach was to introduce a sudden change of key for all the available power of surprise and heightened emotional tension that it might provide, as in the successive shifts of key (which I call ‘gates’) in Wild Nights, abrupt transitions that act like a continuously accelerating centrifuge. “Of course Harmonium is different from all my other works because it has a text. In the Dickinson poems an internal structure is already apparent, and I took advantage of the unhurried cinematographic unfolding of imagery in Because I could not stop for Death to once again utilize the expressive power of changes of key (and in this case changes of mode as well). The ‘placing’ of the speaker – in a slowly moving carriage while the sights and sounds of her life gradually pass her by – created an irresistible opportunity for a slow, disembodied rhythmic continuum.
“Negative Love, on the other hand, presented different problems both on the interpretative as well as the imaginary level. What attracted me to the poem was its evasiveness: Every time I read it, it seemed to mean something different. The poem is really about the humility of love, and my response was to see it as a kind of vector, an arrow pointing heavenward. Thus the opening of Negative Love with its rippling waves of orchestral and choral sound sets in motion a musical structure that builds continuously and inexorably to a harmonic culmination point some ten minutes later. Throughout the movement the music is in a constant state of agitation. The tempo is always quickening, the amplitude growing louder and the overall density gaining power and mass until it reaches its peak upon the words:
If any who deciphers best, What we know not, our selves, can know, Let him teach me that nothing…
“At this point the entire mass shifts smoothly back to the opening tempo and opening atmosphere. “If Negative Love is a meditation on love and Because I could not stop for Death a sequence of tableau-like images about the arrest of time, Wild Nights embraces both of the former themes with a poetic intensity that is at once violent and sexual and full of that longing for forgetfulness which is at the core of all Dickinson’s works. Her goal is far from being some kind of Apollonian serenity of self-realization, her Eden is the sea, the universal archetype of the Unconscious, an immense, nocturnal ocean of feeling where the slow, creaking funeral carriage of the earlier poem now yields to the gentle, unimpeded ‘rowing’ of the final image.”
In addition to the chorus, this work is scored for flutes and piccolos, oboes, clarinets including bass clarinet, bassoons including contrabassoon, horns, trumpets, trombones including bass trombone, tuba, timpani plus a large battery of percussion, harp, piano, synthesizer, celesta and strings.
©2010 Dr. Richard E. Rodda