Introduction
John Adams has numerous feathers in his cap – a renowned music composer, creative thinker, a music conductor, and several others to his credit. Adams holds a unique place in the American music domain. His compositions, both the opera music as well as the symphony music, are the most notable among the modern classical works. These specific compositions of Adams are special in terms of the depth in their expression, brilliance in terms of sound, and the intensely humanistic feel present within their themes.
Early Life and music
Born and brought up in New England, Adams learnt playing the clarinet from his father and he regularly was seen playing in marching bands as well as in community orchestras during his formative age. It was at a young age of 10 that Adams started composing music and by the age of 14, his works were already performed.
The scholarly and creative ethnicities and customers of New England, along with his education at the Harvard University as well as his attendance at the concerts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, helped in him being shaped as an artist as well as also a thinker. Adams joined the Harvard University in the year 1965 and he soon became the music conductor for the Bach Society Orchestra.
The Clarinet Concerto World Premiere saw Adams performing as a solo artist. Subsequent to this, Adams shifted to San Francisco in the year 1972, and since then he started teaching music at the San Francisco Conservatory for almost 12 years up to the year 1982. While teaching music at the San Francisco Conservatory, he also worked at an electronic music studio where he donned the hat of a conductor. This was for the New Music Ensemble.
During his stay in San Francisco, Adams was attracted to the sounds of minimalist music like Steve Reich and Philip Glass. As Adams felt that minimalist music had its own set of limitations in terms of the increased repetition, he went on to define a new form of music called the ‘post-minimalism’ which he initiated with his own work titled Shaper Looks in the year 1978.
Famous Compositions
As already mentioned earlier, Adams is possibly one of the most popular minimalist composer who followed the generation of great composers like Reich and Glass, and his works are specifically famous with respect to the works of opera that Adams had done upon modern subjects. San Francisco Symphony was on that had premiered many of the groundbreaking works of John Adams like for instance, “Harmonium (1981), Grand Pianola Music (1982), Harmonielehre (1985), My Father Knew Charles Ives (2003) and Absolute Jest (2012).”
In the year1985, Adams started collaborating with the famous poet Alice Goodman and also with stage director Peter Sellars. This collaboration eventually gave birth to two of the most revolutionary and remarkable operas namely, Nixon in China (1984–87) and The Death of Klinghoffer (1990–91). Both these pioneering works were produced globally in various places and are regarded as being the most sought after and regularly performed operas in the last two decade period.
Adams has time and again remarked about the emergence of a kind of split personality in his compositions during the early 1980s. During this particular time period, he swapped amidst two stylistic polarizations with a remarkable symmetry with which he composed impertinent, and almost challenging ‘trickster’ works (pls include the citation for the oxford online article that you have provided me as I am unable to find out any information about the source).
The stage collaborations did not end with the above and it continued for three more with Sellars, which led to the creation of “the 1995 “songplay”, I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, with a libretto by June Jordan; El Niño (1999–2000); and Doctor Atomic (2005).”
El Nino was basically a multilingual recapping of the genesis story, which was primarily created to celebrate the millennium and Dr. Atomic was a work in remembrance of J. Robert Oppenheimer as well as about the first atomic bomb and its creation.
Commissioned and also premiered by the San Francisco Opera in the year 2005, Doctor Atomic was also introduced to the audiences of Europe in the year 2007. Doctor Atomic was premiered at the Netherlands Opera and it also received new productions by the Lyric Opera of Chicago as well as also by the Metropolitan Opera in the year 2008. The same was presented by the English National Opera in the year 2009.
Musical Style of John Adams
John Adams defines himself as being an ethnic composer as he is possibly one among the very few contemporary musicians who had composed a completely unique, individual and almost distinguishable language of music out of a highly diverse collection of sources. In the last three decades of the 20th century, the flurry of styles and likelihoods that has challenged ambitious composers has risen without and bounds, and this might also easily have overawed a less discerning trait, but that multiplicity of orientations has been used in a positive way by Adams in his works and musical journey.
Today, possibly at the pinnacle of his career, Adams is probably one of the very few American composers who has a tremendously malleable and compliant language of music at his fingertips, in which the entire Western custom and practice, ranging from the baroque to the contemporary is encompassed, and that invariable offers accolades to the rock and jazz music too. This remarkably autonomous and egalitarian outlook to a myriad musical forms and styles, and the choosy and persistently creative ear for synchronization and instrumental shade, makes the musical style of Adams highly attractive, available and extremely pleasing. Moreover, it is not an overstatement to mention that Adams has become the most extensively accomplished American composers of today.
Harmonium, a work that he composed in the year 1981 is a vocal composition, is primarily is a depiction of the poems of John Donne and Emily Dickinson. Adams created this composition using instrumental as well as choral qualities that had incandescent intensity. Several of the musical techniques that Adams used in Harmonium can be traced back to minimalist musical style, and specifically to the methods used by Reich, “then Grand Pianola Music (1982) for voices, two pianos and wind ensemble, really kicks over the traces;”
The stepping stones of this particular composition might still be regarded as having their foundations on repetition like the minimalist music, but overlapped on that matrix are heavily despicable, and have romantic gestures. As elucidated by Adams himself, 'Beethoven, and Rachmaninov soak in the same warm bath with Liberace, Wagner, the Supremes, Charles Ives and John Philip Sousa,” and it probably resulted in a scandal at its New York premiere.
On one level, the music of Grand Pianola can be regarded to be a parody of 19th-century grandiloquence, while on the contrary, it also can be denoted as being a clear statement of the artistic intent of Adams, an indication that he would not be restricted by any doctrine or prescription of music and he would definitely compose whatever he feels to compose by making use of all the material as he deems being an appropriate fit for his compositions.
Analysis of the Opera ‘Nixon in China’
As mentioned by Adams himself in a particular instance, one of the most difficult of his operatic works, whose musical language is not so easy to be summarized is the opera ‘Nixon in China.’ However, Timothy Johnson endeavored to analyze this particular wok in his book titled John Adams’s “Nixon in China.”
Johnson not only presents an analytical view of Adams works but also a historic and cultural perspective that surrounds his landmark compositions. This particular operatic composition of Adams was essentially inspired by the visti of Richard Nixon to China in the year 1972. This is possibly one of the most engaging and colorful compositions of Adams, which is highlighted by the “'out-take' The Chairman Dances, a sassy foxtrot for Chairman Mao and his wife.” This was possibly the only operatic composition of Adams that was conducted for more than 70 times for almost a decade long period (pls include the citation for the oxford online article that you have provided me as I am unable to find out any information about the source).
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In his biography, Adams had apparently stated that it took him almost two long years to compose this particular masterpiece and this two year period that he spent composing this work was like a steep learning curve for him in his musical career as he realized that he was creating characters on the basis of his harmonic and rhythmic choices.
References
BBC Music Magazine. (2016). John Adams. Retrieved from Classical-Music.com: http://www.classical-music.com/topic/john-adams
Earbox.com. (2016). Biography. Retrieved March 13, 2016, from Earbox.com: http://www.earbox.com/john-adams-biography/
John Adams Composer. (2015). Biography. Retrieved March 13, 2016, from John Adams Composer: http://johnadamscomposer.com/
Johnson, T. A. (2011). John Adams’s “Nixon in China”: Musical Analysis, Historical and Political Perspectives. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company.
Naxos Digital Services Ltd. (2016, March 13). John Adams. Retrieved from Naxos: http://www.naxos.com/person/John_Adams_18185/18185.htm
Oxford Music Online. (2016). Timelines in music history: Contemporary Music. Oxford Music Online. Retrieved March 14, 2016, from http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/public/page/twentiethcenturytimeline
