John Adams on Music Theory Print

A Flowering Tree

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Performance history#

The opera premiered on 14 November 2006 in the MuseumsQuartier Halle E in Vienna with Eric Owens as the narrator, Russell Thomas as the prince, Jessica Rivera as Kumudha, Orquesta Joven Camerata de Venezuela and the Schola Cantorum de Venezuela all under the direction of John Adams

Synopsis#

Kumudha, a beautiful young woman who comes from an impoverished family, is worried about her old and suffering mother. Kumudha discovers that she has the magical ability to transform herself into a flowering tree. With the help of her sisters, Kumudha turns herself into a tree with the intent that her sisters gather and sell the flowers from her branches. Her sisters gather the flowers off the tree and Kumudha returns to her human form. They sell the flowers in the local marketplace and return to their mother who receives the money with no explanation from her daughters. Kumudha and her sisters decide to once again sell flowers and she transforms into a tree yet again. The transformation is witnessed by a young Prince who is concealed in a nearby tree. He is at once infatuated and disturbed by Kumudha’s magic and beauty. He resolves to marry Kumudha and upon returning to the palace convinces his father, the King, to order Kumudha to be brought to the palace so that he can marry her. Following their wedding the Prince becomes silent and sullen and, to the distress of Kumudha, the couple spends several nights without speaking or touching each other. The silence is finally broken when the Prince reveals he knows about Kumudha’s magic and demands that she transform for him. Ashamed, Kumudha resists but eventually gives in. Meanwhile, out of jealousy the Prince’s sister has spied on Kumudha and the prince witnessing her transformation. When the Prince leaves the next day she taunts Kumudha and commands her to transform for her wealthy young friends. Reluctantly, Kumudha agrees. In the midst of the ritual however, the princess and her friends lose interest and leave. By breaking the magical ritual Kumudha is stuck in an in-between state where she is not entirely tree or entirely human. Now a hideous creature, Kumudha crawls into a gutter, where she is found by a wandering band of minstrels. Upon returning to the court, the Prince discovers his wife is missing. When he does not find her he assumes that his arrogance has driven her away. Feeling guilt and remorse, the prince decides to become a wandering beggar and mute in order to punish himself. After several years pass, the prince stumbles into the palace courtyard of a distant city where his sister is now a Queen. He is haggard and almost unrecognizable, but the Queen recognizes her brother and brings him into the palace where she bathes and feeds him. The prince, however, will not speak to her and is despondent. In the town marketplace, several of the queen’s maids see the minstrel troupe and hear the beautiful singing of a freakish thing with neither hands nor feet. They bring this strange and misshapen torso to the palace and suggest that its beautiful singing might revive the Prince. Not knowing that this is Kumudha, the Queen orders her to be bathed and covered with scented oils and brought to the Prince’s bed. Alone, Kumudha and Prince recognize one another. They are both overcome with grief and then with joy. He takes two pitchers of water and performs the old ceremony. Kumudha returns to her human form.

Absolute Jest

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Composition#

Absolute Jest is composed in a single movement and has a duration of roughly 25 minutes. The concerto incorporates the music of Ludwig van Beethoven (specifically his late string quartets, among other pieces) into Adams’s original material.

Background#

Adams first conceived the idea for Absolute Jest during a performance of Igor Stravinsky’s Pulcinella by Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony. Adams wrote, “Hearing this (and knowing that I was already committed to composing something for the San Francisco Symphony’s 100th anniversary) I was suddenly stimulated by the way Stravinsky had absorbed musical artifacts from the past and worked them into his own highly personal language.” He continued, “But there the comparison pretty much ends. Stravinsky was apparently unfamiliar with the Pergolesi and other Neapolitan tunes when Diaghilev brought them to him. I, on the other hand, had loved the Beethoven string quartets since I was a teenager, and crafting something out of fragments of Opus 131, Opus 135 and the Große Fuge (plus a few more familiar ’tattoos’ from his symphonic scherzos) was a totally spontaneous act for me.” The composer found the task of merging the “highly charged manner and sound” of a string quartet and the “mass and less precise texture” of an orchestra to be considerably difficult. He observed, “Unless very skillfully handled by both composer and performers, the combining of these two ensembles can result in a feeling of sensory and expressive overload.” Adams was displeased with the original version of the work that was premiered by the San Francisco Symphony in March 2012. He described the opening third of the piece as “largely a trope on the Opus 131 C minor quartet’s scherzo” and said it “suffered from just this problem.” Adams remarked, “This original opening never satisfied me. The clarity of the solo quartet’s role was often buried beneath the orchestral activity resulting in what sounded to me too much like ‘chatter.’ And the necessity of slowing down Beethoven’s tempo of the Opus 131 scherzo in order to make certain orchestral passages negotiable detracted from its vividness and breathless energy.” The composer thus began re-writing the opening of Absolute Jest six months after its world premiere, resulting in 400 bars of completely new material. Adams later described composing the work as “the most extended experience in pure ‘invention’” that he’d ever undertaken. He added, “Its creation was for me a thrilling lesson in counterpoint, in thematic transformation and formal design.” In regards to the title of the piece, he wrote, “The ‘jest’ of the title should be understood in terms of its Latin meaning, ‘gesta:’ doings, deeds, exploits. I like to think of ‘jest’ as indicating an exercising of one’s wit by means of imagination and invention.”

After the Fall (Adams)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Background#

Adams composed the piece while Víkingur Ólafsson was on tour playing Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The piece makes reference to the C minor prelude from Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. According to Adams, “something of Bach was bound to leak into my piece, I guess.” The title makes reference to the piano concerto No Such Spring by Adams’ son Samuel Adams.

Instrumentation#

The work is scored for solo piano and an orchestra with three flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, three percussionists, two harps, celesta, and strings.

American Berserk

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Style and composition#

American Berserk is composed in a single movement and has a duration of roughly six minutes. The composition is substantially influenced by jazz and bop piano playing, but Adams has also cited influence from the piano works of the American composers Charles Ives and Conlon Nancarrow. The title comes from a phrase in the Philip Roth novel American Pastoral, about which the composer wrote in the score program notes, “But unlike the Roth novel, which is largely elegiac and meditative, American Berserk is extroverted, punchy, and fundamentally good-natured.”

American Standard (Adams)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Movements#

It consists of three movements: Adams himself notes that the first movement is “obviously a march, but… stripped down to a plodding pulse, with no melody or harmony” and that it sounds “like the retreat from battle of a badly wounded army (not my original intention, but curiously evocative all the same)”. has achieved notability independent of American Standard as a whole. It is usually the only part of the work recorded or performed, and the only part for which published performance materials are available. The final movement is an “arrangement or reworking” of Duke Ellington’s jazz standard “Sophisticated Lady” that separates melody from harmony.

Antony and Cleopatra (Adams)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Music#

The opera is divided into two acts, running 80 and 85 minutes.

Performance#

The September 2022 premiere of the work had staging by Elkhanah Pulitzer set around the 1930s, described by critic Zachary Woolfe as “Art Deco elements and slinky gowns … winking at the glamorous Hollywood adaptations of the Cleopatra story” and a set that “opens and closes like an aperture, with some large structures looming in the back that recall the pyramids. Bill Morrison has contributed lyrically grainy black-and-white film projections of scenes including a sail on the Nile and a crowd ready to be whipped into frenzy by a dictator.” The European debut performance occurred on 4 November 2023, at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona.

Century Rolls

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Instrumentation#

Solo piano, 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, cor anglais, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, three horns, three trumpets, 2 trombones, timpani, percussion (2 players: vibraphone, xylophone, wood block, marimba, high bongo, glockenspiel), harp, celesta, and strings.

Movements#

The concerto is in three movements. The opening movement is nearly half the length of the entire piece followed by two shorter contrasting movements. The first movement opens with a simple motif from the harp, piccolo, and flute over top of the pounding of the piano. As the piece evolves the strings, brass, and percussion accompany the softer sounds of the harp, piccolo, and flute, making the piece much more dynamic. The other instruments rotate in and out, but the sound of the piano is consistent and hammering. This contrasting sound represents, as Adams believes, the dichotomy between ‘extravagant and unserious’. The light beginning filled with the softer sounds are fanciful and represent this ‘unserious’ aspect. However, as the movement continues and builds the harder, more ‘extravagant’ sounds take over the piece. Adams mixes elements of Gershwin, Rachmaninov, Paderewski, and Jelly Roll Morton to create a modern piano roll sound. The second movement, titled “Manny’s Gym”, is much slower than the first. The piano sound softens itself and the strings accompany with the same sensual sound. The sound of both the piano and the strings contrast greatly with the first movement. It is much more drawn out. It starts to build, but never reaches a climax. The sounds smooths down to a dreamlike trance. The title refers to the Gymnopedies of Erik Satie and to Emanuel Ax’s nickname, “Manny”. The title of the third movement, “Hail, Bop” is a pun on the Hale-Bopp comet, which appeared over America while Adams was writing the piece. The pounding sounds resonate throughout this movement, echoing the first movement and its ‘extravagant’ sound. Robert Stein writes that the ‘finale (Hail Bop) takes us back to the bump’n’boogie world of the first movement with its jabby syncopations and high speed scales and arpeggios.’

Chamber Symphony (Adams)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

History#

It was commissioned by the Gerbode Foundation of San Francisco for the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players but premiered by the Schönberg Ensemble in The Hague, Netherlands, on 17 January 1993. The commissioners gave the American premiere on 12 April 1993. followed by the Ensemble Moderne in 1997, the Absolute Ensemble in 1999, and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Montpellier in 2000. More recently, the Aurora Orchestra recorded the piece on Road Trip, its album of American music.

China Gates

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Recordings#

Albany TROY 038: Christopher O’Riley, piano
Telarc CD-80513: Gloria Cheng-Cochran, piano
Nonesuch 79699: Nicolas Hodges, piano
Black Box Classics 1098: Andrew Russo, piano
Naxos 8.55928: Ralph van Raat, piano
Yarlung 79580: Joanne Pearce Martin, piano
Orli Shaham, Canary Classics, piano
Deutsche Grammophon (DG) 00028948382897: Yuja Wang, piano

External links#

Boosey & Hawkes page on China Gates
G Schirmer music publisher page on China Gates
John Adams official page, entry on China Gates

City Noir

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Critical reception#

Anthony Tommasini, reviewing the world premiere, stated that “Mr. Adams has become a master at piling up materials in thick yet lucid layers. Moment to moment the music is riveting. Yet here as in some other Adams scores, I found it hard to discern the structural spans and architecture”. Following its European premiere in March 2010, Richard Morrison praised the work as “infused with the seething energies, menace and melodrama of one particular cinematic genre — the film noir. The restlessness, the sardonic relish of urban angst familiar from the hard-bitten tales of Hammett and Chandler seeps through it like a dark stain”. In regard to the same performance, Nick Kimberley wrote that the piece is “suffused with longing for a past in which big, bold gestures and firm-footed melody were the order of the day. And yet so affectionate is Adams’s manipulation of his musical memories that City Noir emerges as a dazzling showpiece. It may look resolutely backwards but it knows where it’s going”. In 2019, The Guardian ranked City Noir the 24th greatest work of art music since 2000, with Andrew Clements describing it as a “vivid portrait of Los Angeles … that references a host of American idioms without ever getting too specific. It’s not his finest orchestral work by any means (those came last century), but an effective, extrovert showpiece.”

Doctor Atomic

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Composition history#

The first act takes place about a month before the bomb is to be tested, and the second act is set in the early morning of July 16, 1945 (the day of the test). During the second act, time is shown slowing down for the characters and then snapping back to the clock. The opera ends in the final, prolonged moment before the bomb is detonated. Although the original commission for the opera suggested that U.S. physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb”, be fashioned as a 20th-century Doctor Faustus, Adams and Sellars deliberately worked to avoid this characterization. Alice Goodman worked for two years with Adams on the project before leaving. She objected to the characterization of Edward Teller, as dictated by the original commission. The work centers on key players in the Manhattan Project, especially Robert Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves. It also features Kitty Oppenheimer, Robert’s wife. Sellars adapted the libretto from primary historical sources. Doctor Atomic is similar in style to previous Adams operas Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, both of which explored the characters and personalities of figures who were involved in historical incidents, rather than a re-enactment of the events themselves.

El Niño (opera)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Performers#

The work is scored for soprano, mezzo-soprano and baritone soloists, a trio of countertenors, a forty-five piece orchestra (including two guitars and a sampling keyboard), SATB chorus, and a children’s chorus. It can be performed either as a staged production or as a concert oratorio. The original semi-staged production by Peter Sellars includes dance and film elements. A shortened version of the work, removing two of the three countertenors and the chorus as well as much of the orchestra, was suggested by soprano Julia Bullock in 2018 for a performance at The Cloisters of the Metropolitan Museum of Art under the title El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered.

Eros Piano

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Composition#

The composition of Eros Piano was inspired in part by the piano concerto riverrun by the Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu. In an interview with the author Edward Strickland, Adams said “I encountered Takemitsu’s riverrun, a rather modest piece about fifteen minutes long for piano and orchestra that he wrote for Peter Serkin, who played it in several American cities several years ago, but nobody seemed to have a very strong response. The English performance I found extraordinarily beautiful and listened to it many times and had the response I often do of writing a piece of my own in order to exorcise it.” He added, “Eros Piano is a gloss on riverrun, as Harmonielehre is a gloss on various Romantic composers.” Eros Piano was also influenced by the music of other American composers such as the jazz pianist Bill Evans, for whom Adams and Takemitsu had a shared fondness. The composer described the piece as “a quiet, dreamy soliloquy for piano, played against a soft, lush fabric of orchestral screens and clusters.” The piece is written in a single movement and has a duration of roughly 15 minutes in performance.

Girls of the Golden West (opera)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Composition history#

The opera is inspired by the 1851/1852 letters of Louise Clappe, who lived for a year and a half in the mining settlement of Rich Bar (now Diamondville, California) during the California Gold Rush. Clappe published the letters under the pen name Dame Shirley. The libretto is also sourced from other literature of the period, including newspaper articles and the writings of Mark Twain. Adams wrote, “To be able to set to music the authentic voices of these people, whether from their letters or their songs or from newspaper accounts from their time, is a great privilege for me.” Sellars, who also directed the opera, conceived the libretto while doing research for a production of Giacomo Puccini’s 1910 opera La fanciulla del West (based on David Belasco’s 1905 play The Girl of the Golden West), which also deals with the gold rush period. According to Sellars, “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.” Sellars’s previous collaborations with Adams have included premiere productions of Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer and Doctor Atomic (for which Sellars also wrote the libretto).

Gnarly Buttons

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Sources#

May, Thomas. The John Adams Reader ()
Taylor, Anthony G. “John Adams’s ‘Gnarly Buttons’: Issues of History, Performance and Style.” Doctoral document, University of Cincinnati, 2007. Electronic library access at: http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd/view.cgi?ucin1185548983

External links#

*John Adams official site, page on Gnarly Buttons

Grand Pianola Music

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Music#

The work is in three movements: It is a typical phase music work in that it is distinctly tonal, has a slow harmonic rhythm and stays in harmonically stable areas, and has a steady regular rhythmic pulse. As with many compositions in this genre, it is creative through its formal architecture, dramatically changing in mood and texture throughout its 30-minute length, especially in the first and third parts which both rise to a succession of highly dramatic crescendoes. The work’s inspiration was a mixture of two elements. At the time of its composition, the composer was beginning to pay more attention to the subject matter of his subconscious, such as dreams. In one dream, he describes driving along Interstate 5, when he was approached from behind by two black limousines. As the vehicles drew up beside him, they transformed into two incredibly long Steinway pianos, giving off volleys of E and B major arpeggios. It reminded him of walking down the hallways of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he used to hear students practicing the piano, creating a “sonic blur of twenty or more pianos playing Chopin, the ‘Emperor’ Concerto, Hanon, Rachmaninov, the Maple Leaf Rag, and much more”. An example of this is clearly audible during Part I of the work, when the two pianos enter as soloists for the first time. Several of his other works, including his large-scale orchestral work, Harmonielehre, were inspired by similar visions. The piece is at times very delicate but makes full use of the dynamic capabilities of its large ensemble in the fast movements. The woodwinds remain quiet for most of the time, gently repeating the rhythmic pulses while the two pianos play waves of arpeggios. The three female voices (described in the notes to the full score of the work as “the sirens”) sing wordless harmony, at some times singing very long slow triads over the chugging ensemble, at other times imitating the short fast notes of the winds and brass.

Guide to Strange Places

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Composition#

Guide to Strange Places is composed in a single movement and has a duration of roughly 24 minutes.

Background#

Adams first conceived the work when he stumbled across a guidebook called (The Black Guide to Mysterious Places of Provence) while vacationing with his family in France. He later wrote:

Instrumentation#

The work is scored for a large orchestra comprising piccolo, two flutes (2nd doubling piccolo), two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, contrabass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, four percussionists, harp, piano, celesta, and strings.

Hallelujah Junction

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Composition#

The name comes from a small truck stop on US 395 which meets Alternate US 40, (now State Route 70) near the California–Nevada border. The work centers around delayed repetition between the two pianos, creating an effect of echoing sonorities. There is a constant shift of pulse and meter, but the main rhythms are based on the rhythms of the word “Hal–le–LU–jah”. The work is in three unnamed movements, and generally takes about 16 minutes to perform. It was first performed by Grant Gershon and Gloria Cheng at the Getty Center in Brentwood, California, in 1998. It is dedicated to Ernest Fleischmann,

Harmonielehre

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Music#

The composition is in three movements: The first movement begins with the powerful repetition of chords in E minor in minimalist fashion. These chords form a recurring theme throughout the movement, interspersed with motoric episodes that use Schoenberg’s harmonic progressions as chordal “gates” (a name coined by Adams to describe juxtapositions of harmonic areas in his music). At the center of the arch-like 17-minute movement arises what Tom Service has called an “achingly expressive lyrical theme.” The brooding second movement, based on the legend of the Fisher King, shuns minimalist processes, favoring bleak Sibelius-like soundscapes, building inexorably slowly to twin climaxes of brutal dissonance, the second of which is drawn from the climactic sonority of the first movement of Gustav Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony. The third movement, according to Adams, is inspired by a dream that he had about his infant daughter Emily, whom he and his wife had briefly nicknamed “Quackie”.

Harmonium (Adams)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Music#

Each movement is a setting of an entire poem: “Because I could not stop for Death” ends with an orchestral interlude that segues into “Wild Nights” without a pause. A typical performance lasts about 35 minutes. Timothy Johnson has discussed various aspects of the harmonic language of Harmonium in detail. K. Robert Schwarz has noted the influence of the musical techniques of Steve Reich on Harmonium, and also has commented on the less schematic and more “intuitive” manner of Adams’ composition in the work. “Negative Love” is featured in the film Superstar: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol (1990).

I Am Love (film)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Plot#

In 2000, the wealthy Recchi family is a first and second-generation textile-manufacturing family in Milan. Tancredi Recchi and his wife Emma are hosting a formal dinner party for Tancredi’s ailing but still-formidable father, Edoardo Sr., patriarch and founder of the family business, who is celebrating his birthday. As the many servants bustle about, the family notes with disappointment the news that Edoardo Jr., Tancredi and Emma’s eldest son, lost an athletic competition on the day of his grandfather’s birthday. Edoardo Jr. arrives from that competition, having informed the family that he has invited a girlfriend, Eva, of the prominent Ugolini family, whom he plans to marry. Edoardo Jr.’s young adult siblings, Gianluca (Mattia Zaccaro) and Elisabetta, complain of yet again being served ukha, Edoardo Jr.’s favourite dish, a special soup his mother Emma, who is Russian by birth, has made for him since childhood. The grandfather announces he is passing the family business to his son, Tancredi, who has long worked with him, and also, unexpectedly, to Edoardo Jr. At the dinner, Elisabetta, who attends school in London, presents her grandfather with one of her artworks, a photograph, despite a tradition of presenting one another paintings. He is disappointed, but encouraged by his glamorous wife Allegra “Rori” Recchi (Marisa Berenson) to gloss over his disappointment. Later during the birthday celebration, Edoardo Jr. receives a surprise visit from Antonio, the man who defeated Eduardo in the competition earlier that day. Antonio, a chef by trade, brings a beautiful cake as a gift, and Edoardo, flattered by the gesture, introduces him to his mother. Several months after the party, while Emma is running errands, she discovers a CD, with a note from Elisabetta to her brother Edoardo revealing that Elisabetta is a lesbian. She tells her brother of an encounter with a woman and also reveals she is in love with a different woman. Meanwhile, Edoardo Jr. visits Antonio in Antonio’s father’s restaurant. They later make plans to open a restaurant together on some property Antonio’s father owns in San Remo. Months later, Emma is having lunch at Antonio’s restaurant with Rori and Eva, and she is aroused while relishing a prawn dish he prepared for her. Elisabetta returns to Milan, with her hair cut short, and invites Emma to go with her to Nice to look for a venue for Elisabetta’s art exhibition. While stopping in San Remo en route to Nice to surprise her daughter, Emma spots Antonio, follows him, and eventually speaks to him outside of a book shop. She goes with him to his house in the hills above the city, and they begin their affair. Meanwhile, Edoardo Sr. has died, and in London, Edoardo Jr. struggles as his father and other family members seek to sell the family business they inherited from Edoardo Sr. to foreign investors. Edoardo Jr. visits his sister and tells her of the future of the business and his opposition to the sale. On her second trip to San Remo, under the pretext of discussing a menu for the formal dinner she will host for the foreign investors who are buying the Recchi family business, Emma spends the day with Antonio, and the two enjoy passionate sex. Emma tells Antonio how Tancredi met her during a trip to Russia hunting for art treasures. Antonio cuts Emma’s blonde hair, a long lock of which falls unnoticed to the terrace, where Edoardo Jr. finds it during his own visit after the London meeting. They cook together, and Emma teaches him to make ukha. On the night of the dinner at the Recchi villa for the investors, a conversation between Edoardo Jr. and Eva is overheard, revealing she is pregnant with his child. Antonio prepares ukha. When Edoardo sees this dish served, he instantly realizes his mother is having an affair with Antonio. He leaves the dinner table in a fury. Emma follows him outside to the garden and alongside the pool she tries to talk to him. In pulling away from Emma’s outstretched hand, Edoardo loses his balance, falls, strikes his head on the edge of the pool’s stone trim, and falls into the pool. He sustains a cerebral haemorrhage and dies in hospital. At the cemetery following the funeral, Tancredi tries to console Emma. She tells him that she is in love with Antonio. He responds by telling her “You don’t exist.” Emma rushes home and changes her clothes while her housekeeper helps her pack her things to leave. Before she leaves, she exchanges a knowing glance with her daughter, who it appears understands her mother’s desire to follow her heart. Eva, who has hardly been noticed by Edoardo’s family since his death, clutches her abdomen as she calls out to Eduardo Jr.’s siblings and grandmother, revealing her pregnancy. When the family members look back into the foyer where Emma was standing, she is gone. During the final credits, Emma and Antonio are seen lying together inside a cave.

I Still Play

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Reception#

Reviewing the world premiere, Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times described the piece as “impressive” and “intensely played” by Denk.

I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Summary#

The story takes place in the aftermath of the 1994 earthquake in Los Angeles, and covers the reactions of all characters to the event. The main characters are seven young Americans all living in Los Angeles but from different social and ethnic backgrounds.

Style#

According to the composer, the all song and ensemble piece is “a Broadwaystyle show” fused with gospel, pop ballad, the blues, doo-wop and popular song.

Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Composition#

The piece is in three movements, played without pauses between them: All three movements in total last about 28 minutes. Woodwinds : piccolo : : 2 oboes : English horn : : bass clarinet : 2 bassoons : Brass : 4 horns in F : 2 trumpets in C : Percussion (1 player) : almglocken : bass drum : snare drum Keyboards : solo piano : honky-tonk piano Strings : bass guitar : violin I : violin II : violas : cellos : double basses

My Father Knew Charles Ives

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Background#

John Adams composed My Father Knew Charles Ives in 2003 as a musical autobiography and as a homage to the early 20th-century American composer Charles Ives, who has been one of Adams’s major musical influences. Adams’s father Carl Adams did not actually know Charles Ives, but the composer observed many similarities between the two men’s lives, and between their lives and his own. In the score program notes, Adams wrote: He continued: The title, Adams observed, may have been unconsciously influenced by Morton Feldman’s 1971 chamber piece I Met Heine on the Rue Fürstenberg. It’s also worth noting, however, that throughout his career the composer has been fixated on communicating the importance of honoring your roots: In the Modernist experience, the idea of creating an “international style” was very prestigious, especially in the immediate postwar period when anything that smacked of nationalism or ethnic identity was viewed with understandable consternation. But for me, I’ve come to realize how much I love the “provincial”, the “local”. I love the earthy “ethnic” quality of Bartok; I love Duke Ellington whose music represents black American culture; I love what’s Russian about Tolstoy or Tchaikovsky; or what is French about Debussy or Proust; or what’s English about Elgar or Dickens. The international style is not very interesting for me. I find it quite sterile.

Naive and Sentimental Music

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Structure#

The piece has a duration of approximately 48 minutes, and has three movements: ::The first movement opens with a meandering melody over simple chords that subsequently undergoes a variety of symphonic transformations. ::This movement consists of slowly evolving harmonies punctuated by chords from an amplified steel guitar. ::In a minimalistic vein, the last movement uses rhythmic fragments that gradually build up to a thunderous climax.

Instrumentation#

The work is scored for 4 flutes (3, 4 double piccolos), 3 oboes (3 doubles English horn), 3 B♭ clarinets (3 doubles bass clarinet 2), bass clarinet, 3 bassoons (3 doubles contrabassoon), 4 horns in F, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, 2 tubas, amplified steel string guitar, piano, celesta, keyboard sampler, 2 harps, 5 percussion parts (including 3 who are principally mallet players, for a huge variety of percussive instruments: almglocken, high anvil, large bass drum, chimes, small Chinese gongs, crotales, suspended cymbals, glockenspiel, Japanese temple bowls, low gongs, marimba, “ranch” triangles, shaker, large sleigh bells, tam-tam, triangles, vibraphone, and xylophone), and strings.

Nixon in China

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Historical background#

During his rise to power, Richard Nixon became known as a leading anti-communist. After he became president in 1969, Nixon saw advantages in improving relations with China and the Soviet Union; he hoped that détente would put pressure on the North Vietnamese to end the Vietnam War, and he might be able to manipulate the two main communist powers to the benefit of the United States. Nixon laid the groundwork for his overture to China even before he became president, writing in Foreign Affairs a year before his election: “There is no place on this small planet for a billion of its potentially most able people to live in angry isolation.” Assisting him in this venture was his National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, with whom the President worked closely, bypassing Cabinet officials. With relations between the Soviet Union and China at a nadir—border clashes between the two took place during Nixon’s first year in office—Nixon sent private word to the Chinese that he desired closer relations. A breakthrough came in early 1971, when Chinese Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong invited a team of American table tennis players to visit China and play against top Chinese players. Nixon followed up by sending Kissinger to China for clandestine meetings with Chinese officials. The announcement that Nixon would visit China in 1972 made world headlines. Almost immediately, the Soviet Union also invited Nixon for a visit, and improved US-Soviet relations led to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT). Nixon’s visit to China was followed closely by many Americans, and the scenes of him there were widely aired on television. Chinese premier Zhou Enlai stated that the handshake he and Nixon had shared on the airport tarmac at the beginning of the visit was “over the vastest distance in the world, 25 years of no communication”. Nixon’s change, from virulent anti-communist to the American leader who took the first step in improving relations with a great communist power, led to a new political adage, “Only Nixon could go to China.”

On the Transmigration of Souls

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Adams’s intentions#

In an interview, Adams explained: “I want to avoid words like ‘requiem’ or ‘memorial’ when describing this piece because they too easily suggest conventions that this piece doesn’t share. If pressed, I’d probably call the piece a ‘memory space.’ It’s a place where you can go and be alone with your thoughts and emotions. The link to a particular historical event – in this case to 9/11 – is there if you want to contemplate it. But I hope that the piece will summon human experience that goes beyond this particular event.” According to the composer, “Transmigration means ’the movement from one place to another’ or ’the transition from one state of being to another.’ But in this case I meant it to imply the movement of the soul from one state to another. And I don’t just mean the transition from living to dead, but also the change that takes place within the souls of those that stay behind, of those who suffer pain and loss and then themselves come away from that experience.”

Phrygian Gates

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Recordings#

*John Adams - Complete Piano Music, Ralph van Raat (Naxos Records) 2007

External links#

Phrygian Gates John Adams website
Phrygian Gates by Ralph van Raat on YouTube

Saxophone Concerto (Adams)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Background#

The Saxophone Concerto was Adams’s first composition following his three-hour oratorio The Gospel According to the Other Mary. Adams, whose father played alto saxophone in swing bands during the 1930s, has cited his early exposure to such jazz saxophonists as John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, and Wayne Shorter as inspiration for the piece. The composer described the work’s style in the score program notes, writing, “While the concerto is not meant to sound jazzy per se, its jazz influences lie only slightly below the surface.” Noting the relative scarcity of saxophone concertos in the classical repertoire, Adams further remarked: Thus, Adams stipulated that the concerto be played in the jazz style of saxophone performance, as opposed to the classical “French” style of playing typically heard in such pieces as Maurice Ravel’s Boléro and Darius Milhaud’s La création du monde. The saxophonist Timothy McAllister became acquainted with the composer after performing saxophone parts in Adams’s Nixon in China and City Noir. McAllister later suggested the possibility of performing a new work by Adams, to which the saxophonist recalled, “…we were having dinners and lunches out at New World Symphony (in Miami Beach, Florida); I believe it was March of 2011. We were walking to dinner one night and he said, ‘I think I should write you a piece.’ I worked hard to contain my elation at the mere suggestion.” McAllister continued, “I let it go, and over a year went by, and – you know how it is with people, you kind of fall in and out of touch. I just kind of stayed on his radar as I kept doing ‘City Noir,’ and then in February of 2012 I received an e-mail out of the blue from him, saying that he’d finished ‘The Gospel According to the Other Mary,’ and he was thinking about the next project and he’d like to do a saxophone concerto in Sydney, and asked if I was free.”

Scheherazade.2

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Background#

Adams was inspired to write the piece after visiting an exhibit on the history of the Arabian Nights at the Arab World Institute in Paris. According to the score program note, the composer was struck by “the casual brutality toward women that lies at the base of many of these tales” and how women are still oppressed and abused in modern society. He wrote, “In the old tale Scheherazade is the lucky one who, through her endless inventiveness, is able to save her life. But there is not much to celebrate here when one thinks that she is spared simply because of her cleverness and ability to keep on entertaining her warped, murderous husband.” Adams continued, “So I was suddenly struck by the idea of a ‘dramatic symphony’ in which the principal character role is taken by the solo violin—and she would be Scheherazade.” The symphony thus follows a loose narrative through “a set of provocative images” about a modern Scheherazade’s struggle in a patriarchal society.

Shaker Loops

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

History#

Shaker Loops began as a piece called Wavemaker in which Adams tried to emulate the ripple effect of bodies of water in his music. The piece was a commercial failure, but Adams kept the idea of repeating loops of oscillations on string instruments. He retitled the piece Shaker Loops, both because of the “shaking” of the strings as they oscillate between notes and the idea Adams had of Shakers dancing to repetitive, energetic music.

Short Ride in a Fast Machine

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Popularity, performance and cancellations#

The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra premiered Short Ride in a Fast Machine in 1986. The fanfare was the 10th most-performed orchestral work composed in the last twenty-five years, in 2008. Scheduled performances at the Last Night of the Proms were cancelled twice: in 1997 after the death of Princess Diana, and in 2001 after the September 11 attacks. Lawrence Odom transcribed the piece for concert band. The piano duo of Christina and Michelle Naughton open their album American Postcard with the piece, in a two piano arrangement by Preben Antonsen.

The Cabinet of Dr. Ramirez

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Cast#

Mikhail Baryshnikov as Cesar
Joan Cusack as Cathy
Peter Gallagher as Matt
Ron Vawter as Dr. Ramirez
Kate Valk as Sue
Werner Klemperer as Fat Man Looking for a Tax Break
Paul Eckstein and Peter Francis James as Janitors
Lola Pashalinski and Paul Butler as Narcs
Merlin Santana as Newsboy
Mark Morris as Mine
Harsh Nayyar as Beaver Gourmet

The Chairman Dances

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Instrumentation#

The work is scored for a large orchestra. ;Woodwinds :2 flutes, both doubling piccolo :2 oboes :2 clarinets in B, second doubling bass clarinet :2 bassoons ;Brass :4 horns in F :2 trumpets in B :2 tenor trombones :tuba ;Percussion :glockenspiel :vibraphone :xylophone :crotales :sandpaper blocks :wood blocks, high and medium :crash cymbal :hi-hat :suspended cymbal :sizzle cymbal, suspended :claves :bell tree :triangle :tambourine :castanets :snare drum :pedal bass drum :timpani ;Keyboards :piano ;Strings :harp :string section

The Death of Klinghoffer

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Performance history#

Theatre director Peter Sellars developed the concept of this opera The first performance took place at the Théatre Royal de la Monnaie, Brussels, Belgium, on March 19, 1991, directed by Sellars. The next month, the Lyon premiere took place. This was followed by a Nonesuch studio recording in that French city with the same cast. The first US performance was at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on September 5, 1991. Controversy ensued. An opening scene depicting a suburban family, the Rumors, was permanently cut from the score on grounds that it caused offense due to antisemitic stereotypes. The Nonesuch recording, released in 1992, does not include this music. Because of the reaction to the subject matter and philosophy of the opera, planned stagings at Glyndebourne and in Los Angeles were cancelled. When the original production was staged by San Francisco Opera in November 1992, the Jewish Information League mounted protests. The first staging in Germany took place in 1997 in Nürnberg, followed by a second German production at the Opernhaus Wuppertal in 2005. Another European production was given in February 2001, in Helsinki at Finnish National Opera. The first complete UK performance was a 2002 concert in London by the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The first Australasian performance took place in February 2005 at the Auckland Festival, New Zealand. The first fully staged UK production was given in August 2005 at the Edinburgh Festival by Scottish Opera. The opera received a new production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in December 2003. The Curtis Institute of Music, through its Curtis Opera Theatre and Curtis Symphony Orchestra, gave a performance in Philadelphia in February 2005. Four years later, students at the Juilliard Opera Center performed a semi-staged concert version with Adams conducting. The Death of Klinghoffer received its second full American staging in June 2011 at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, conducted by Michael Christie, directed by James Robinson, and starring Christopher Magiera as the Captain and Brian Mulligan as Klinghoffer. The opera received its first London production on February 25, 2012, starring Alan Opie as Klinghoffer and Christopher Magiera as the Captain, conducted by Baldur Brönnimann and staged by Tom Morris at the English National Opera, in a co-production with the Metropolitan Opera. In June 2014, the Met’s general manager Peter Gelb announced that after discussions with the Anti-Defamation League the planned Live in HD transmission of the production would be cancelled. The opera was set for seven performances at the Met in October and November 2014 and performed as scheduled. After being dropped from production by the Los Angeles Opera, the opera received its Los Angeles area premiere in March 2014 with Long Beach Opera, conducted by Andreas Mitisek and staged by James Robinson.

The Dharma at Big Sur

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Background#

The piece is divided into two movements, titled A New Day and Sri Moonshine, which are intended as homages to Lou Harrison and Terry Riley, respectively. Adams described the process of composing the piece: Adams originally intended for the piece to include a spoken component, and while studying California-related writings for inspiration, he discovered Jack Kerouac’s novel Big Sur, with Adams finding that Kerouac’s thoughts mirrored his own. However, Adams ultimately decided to have the composition be scored for instruments only, stating: “I realized that what I had to ‘say’ was something that could only be expressed in music.”

The Gospel According to the Other Mary

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Instrumentation#

The piece is scored for the following orchestra: Woodwinds : piccolo : 2 flutes : 2 oboes : English horn : 2 B clarinets : bass clarinet : 2 bassoons : contrabassoon Brass : 4 horns : 2 trumpets : 2 trombones Percussion (3 players) : snare drum : pedal bass drum : very low bass drum : timbale : low tom-tom : tuned gongs : chimes : almglocken : glockenspiel : Plucked and struck strings : cimbalom : bass guitar : piano : harp Strings : Violin I, II : Violas : Cellos : Double basses

The Wound-Dresser

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

References#

*The John Adams Earbox, Nonesuch Records, NY 1999

External links#

Full text of Walt Whitman’s “The Wound-Dresser”
In the BBC Discovering Music: Listening Library

Tromba Lontana

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Program note#

John Adams wrote of the piece

Instrumentation#

The work is scored for an orchestra comprising two flutes, two piccolos, two oboes, two clarinets, four horns, two trumpets, percussion (glockenspiel, crotales, suspended cymbal and vibraphone), piano, harp, and strings.

Violin Concerto (Adams)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Structure#

The work is in three movements: It is dedicated to the memory of David Huntley of Boosey & Hawkes.

Instrumentation#

The work calls for solo violin accompanied by an orchestra with the following instrumentation. ;Woodwinds : 2 flutes (both doubling piccolos) : 2 oboes (2nd doubling cor anglais) : 2 clarinets (2nd doubling bass clarinet) : 2 bassoons ;Brass : 2 horns in F : trumpet in C ;Percussion : 2 players, doubling on : timpani : guiro : 3 bongo drums : 2 conga drums : bass drum : suspended cymbal : tambourine : claves : high cowbell : vibraphone : marimba : tubular bells ;Keyboards : 2 synthesizers ;Strings : violin I (minimum 6) : violin II (minimum 6) : violas (minimum 5) : cellos (minimum 5) : double basses (minimum 2)