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A guide to John Adams's music

His operas tackle politics, terrorism and terror itself. One of our most important contemporary
voices, his music is both more radical and more conservative than his minimalist forebears
Tom Service
Tuesday 4 September 2012 11.57BST

Here's what I love most about John Adams: the gilded celebration of sheer,
unadulterated major-key glamour at the end of On The Dominant Divide, the finale of
his Grand Pianola Music. Scored for two pianos, vocalists and ensemble, the piece was
composed in 1982, a time when the idea of writing tonal music let alone the spangly,
hummable tune of On the Dominant Divide was, according to many central European
and academic diktats, beyond the stylistic and even political pale.
As Adams himself remembers, "the audience response [at the premiere] included a
substantial and (to me) shocking number of 'boos'. True, it was a very shaky
performance, and the piece came at the end of a long concert of new works principally
by serialist composers from the Columbia-Princeton school. In the context of this
otherwise rather sober repertoire, Grand Pianola Music must doubtless have seemed like
a smirking truant with a dirty face, in need of a severe spanking."
The three movements of Grand Pianola Music are a brilliant ne plus ultra of one side of
Adams's creativity. The piece came to him as a flash of inspiration in a dream "in which,
while driving down Interstate Route 5, I was approached from behind by two long,
gleaming, black stretch limousines. As the vehicles drew up beside me they transformed
into the world's longest Steinway pianos 20-, maybe even 30-feet long. Screaming
down the highway at 90mph, they gave off volleys of B flat and E flat major arpeggios."
The effect in the piece he wrote after he woke up is a sort of pile-up between Steve
Reich, Rachmaninov, Liszt, Liberace and the rest of music history.
But let's rewind a bit. Adams was never a composer to play by the rules his predecessors
had mapped out for him even if those rules were all about opening up musical
freedoms. Born in 1947, Adams is half a generation younger than the progenitors of
minimalism Steve Reich, La Monte Young, Philip Glass, and Terry Riley. He was also
growing up when those twin antipodes of American music, John Cage and Elliott Carter,
were in the full flowering of their creativity. As he studied at Harvard and worked as an
orchestral clarinettist on the east coast, he was able to absorb influences from a huge
variety of sources.
Adams's breakthrough as a composer came when he moved to the west coast his home
ever since. And the piece that crystallised his creative world was his string septet Shaker
Loops. Here's what Adams (incidentally, one of today's most virtuosically literate
composers: check out his collected writings, Hallelujah Junction) says about this piece,
written in 1978: "Rather than set up small engines of motivic materials and let them run
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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."
You could paraphrase: it's minimalism, but not as you know it. Attracted to the surfaces
of the minimalism, but frustrated by its lack of harmonic interest and large-scale
momentum, Adams's solution in Shaker Loops was at once more radical and more
conservative. Radical, because he was prepared to fuse the purity of minimalist
processes with a richer range of references, and conservative because he wanted to find
a way to restore old ideas of harmonic ebb and flow to this new style, to create his "large
architectonic shapes". But just as with Grand Pianola Music, it's the sound and shimmer
of Shaker Loops that will make you fall for this music (or at least, it is why I fell for it!)
Have a listen here.
That first phase of Adams's development climaxes with two masterpieces of the mid1980s. There's his first opera, Nixon in China (which the composer conducts at the
Proms on Wednesday with the BBC Symphony Orchestra), which dares to put recent
events on the opera stage dares, and wins, thanks to the poetry of Alice Goodman's
libretto and the irresistible imagination of Adams's music. The score for Nixon is by turns
souped-up tonal surrealism (listen to the opening to see what I mean) and a delicate,
reflective meditation (in the final act especially).
Adams also wrote the huge three-movement orchestral piece Harmonielehre that recast
the expressive power of late romanticism (it virtually quotes Mahler's 10th Symphony in
its slow movement) in the garb of a post-minimalist workout. Again, those labels are far
less helpful than simply hearing the music: try the unstoppable energy of the start of
Harmonielehre, or the first 20 minutes or so of Nixon, one of the most compelling
openings to any opera, ever.
Adams's music of the later 90s and the noughties has brought another two full-scale
operas, The Death of Klinghoffer and Doctor Atomic, both on contemporary themes (the
murder of Leon Klinghoffer on board the Achille Lauro in 1985, and the birth of the
atomic bomb), and he hasn't shirked from big statements on everything from religion to
pop culture to natural disasters in his other theatre and vocal works, some of them in
collaboration with Peter Sellars.
But something else has happened in Adams's recent music. He has continued to develop
his palette of references and harmonic richness, even encompassing the European
modernism that he seemed at first to resist. There's an ongoing dialogue with
Schoenberg (the title of Harmonielehre pays tribute to one of the Austrian composer's
masterly didactic tomes) in music such as the Chamber Symphony and the Violin
Concerto; on the other hand, there are obvious and affectionate reworkings of pop tunes
and musicals in I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, and there's a welter
of historical and contemporary reference in his recent orchestral piece, City Noir.
I'm still undecided over whether this side of Adams's music packs the same punch as his
earlier work. It's not because his more recent work is less ambitious in a way, it's more
far-reaching in its subject matter and what it's trying to do musically, but the risks are
greater, too. To my ears, the saturation of the Chamber Symphony or a piece such as his
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orchestral Guide to Strange Places does not pay off, because there's both too much detail
in the chromatic density of some of the harmony and not enough real complexity, and
because Adams has a way of subsuming the diversity of his musical sources beneath the
sheen and dazzle of his own language, so that everything sounds weirdly homogeneous.
But if I'm struggling a bit with his recent work and I found Doctor Atomic similarly
disappointing compared with Klinghoffer or Nixon there are many that would disagree.
But what is beyond doubt is that Adams is one of those contemporary voices we all need
to hear and keep hearing.

Five key links

Nixon in China
Shaker Loops
Grand Pianola Music
Harmonielehre
Violin Concerto
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Classical music
John Adams

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