(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)
John Adams (USA, 1947), raised
in New England and trained in composition at Harvard University,
moved to San Francisco in 1971, and was soon conducting the
New Music Ensemble at
the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
He composed American Standard (1973), which originally was scored for any combination of instruments and encouraged performers to add any piece of music, was a piece in three movements: a march, a hymn, and a jazz ballad.
He became one of the first academic composers to dilute minimalism with
romantic pathos.
It was the lengthy and intricate piano sonata
Phrygian Gates (1977) to mark the embrace of minimalist principles.
Romantic and sensual despite its fragmentation and programmatic intent, Phrygian Gates was for minimalism the equivalent of Chopin’s Preludes.
The second masterpiece is the more ambitious Shaker Loops (1978) for string septet, which alternates highly rational constructions—such as the stormy crescendo of the third movement or the surreal dance of overtones in the fourth—with amorphous and crumbling landscapes, such as the swamp of glissandi in the second. The suite Common Tones In Simple Time (1979) further softens the angularities of early minimalism, while formally remaining the most orthodox work of the period and the poorest in dramatic development (elongated tones verging on quasi-drones, undulating patterns, almost-pop melodies, chirping percussion, and a pastoral finale). Yet the music emerges refined into a cloud of sound and, rich in twists and turns, assumes more dreamlike and cosmic overtones.
These are pieces in which a simple and static harmonic idea (sometimes centered around a single chord) is enlivened by a tumultuous proliferation of surface events driven by a primordial pulse of great suggestive power. By reducing harmonic variation to a minimum, Adams elevates modulation to the foremost compositional value.
Harmonium (1981), for orchestra and chorus, in which he married minimalist pulsation to imposing Romantic rhetoric, was the work that revealed his “Mahlerian” tendencies. In the first part, Negative Love, the hypnotic choral solfeggio grows progressively in rarefied spirals through a supernatural suspense, unfolds into a lofty and tragic song filled with romantically extreme sensations, ever more tense and complex, explodes into an agitated babble with an industrial cadence amid the orchestra’s relentless percussive chaos, and finally fades into a celestial calm streaked by a clockwork mechanism. As a whole, Harmonium gives the impression of a poem about Time and Space, from the primordial chaos of Creation to the sidereal voids. The second part is more subdued and ineffable, while the third, Wild Nights, is outright cataclysmic, torn apart by thunderous orchestral bursts, overwhelming percussive cascades, and tempestuous choral climaxes in a wild collective apotheosis, before calming into a slow and anarchic interplay of counterpoints and muted solfeggi. The three parts are inspired by three poems: “Negative Love” by John Donne, and Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death” and “Wild Nights.” In the lineage of Mahler, Holst, and Shostakovich, Adams thus founds post-minimalist symphonism.
Quite the opposite is Grand Pianola Music (1982) for two pianos, voice, percussion, and winds, which is almost parodistic in its use of perverse diatonicism, sly band-like elements, and a whole series of allusions hidden within the iterations. The first movement gradually builds around the obsessive tinkling of the two pianos (playing the same score out of phase) and an angelic chorus repeating syncopated melodic figures. Having gained force and substance, in the second movement the suite indulges in a tender, hushed lyricism, only to explode resoundingly in the finale, amid a gospel theme, “Beethovenian” piano passages, and an anachronistic, grandiloquent Romantic symphonic gesture. After the almost triumphant success of his early compositions (and of the contemporary Bride Of Dreams for orchestra, still unpublished), this score—so light in tone—caused scandal, and Adams was tempted to repudiate it.
The serene Light Over Water, an “environmental” symphony for synthesizer and brass, is inspired by Rainbow In Curved Air, whose chromatic vitality it echoes—though with explicit use of dissonance (first part)—and by In C, whose hammering, obsessive phrasing it recalls (second part), before departing from both when (third part) it dissolves into ethereal resonances at the threshold of audibility.
(Original English text by Piero Scaruffi)
The monumental Harmonielehre (1985) for large orchestra, influenced
by Viennese expressionism and by the neoclassical orchestral works of
George Rochberg and David Del Tredici,
marks a return to the bleakest austerity.
The first part has the hallmarks of a desperate piece of music. Reeds and
percussion repeat tragic, loud, harsh notes that seem to make up a war-like
theme, a theme that the strings and the percussion sustain and propagate.
It slowly dissolves in a floating nebula of plaintive chords. Towards the
end, feverish trumpets resurrect it and bring it to an almost Beethoven-ian
climax.
The second part abandons the virulent strains of the first one in favor of a
less organic flow of angst. Almost at the end a burst of tragic notes comes as
an end to a long agonizing.
The final movement is a mixture of flute-driven allegro and of
Tchaikovsky-like adagio, the two evoking an autumnal wind that sweeps the
dead leaves from the ground. A repetitive Steve Reich-ian pattern leads to
a dramatic crescendo that seals the geometry of the sympohny.
The vernacolar idioms of the "grand pianola music" resurface, with all their
provocative and farcical subtleties,
in the five Chairman Dances (1985), often hijacked by
grotesque dance tempos and grandiose melodramatic orchestrations that
traditionally fall outside the scope of classical music.
There is also a lot more dynamic development than in traditional minimalist
compositions, even by Adams' own standards.
The first dance begins in a propulsive festive mode, echoed by winds and
percussion, that reaches an almost Tchaikovsky-ian apotheosis before
the strings plunge into a fairy-tale atmosphere. The dance ends in a tone
reminiscent of the poppy-jazzy musicals of the 1950s.
The feverish Short Ride in a Fast Machine (1986) could be a DeFalla
vignette of Spanish life.
His first opera,
Nixon In China (1987), referencing the historical meeting between
former arch-enemies
Richard Nixon and Zedong Mao, was one of the seminal events of the 1987
theatrical season, although the music, fusing parodistic elements and
romantic elements, was only a summary of the least interesting aspects of his art.
Fearful Symmetries was an experiment of fusion of popular
culture and classical culture: by employing a
drum-machine and saxophones,
Adams composed a collage of driving boogie-woogie tempos, feverish
funky
syncopation and breathtaking
rock'n'roll acrobatics, the whole being reminiscent of Peter Gordon's fantasias.
If Steve Reich was the "Haydn" of minimalism, Adams was its "Mozart", already
launched into a clever and sometimes irreverent bypassing of the classic style.
The worldwide interest in Nixon In China prompted Adams to write more
operas, but both The Death of Klinghoffer (1991), about Palestinian terrorism and structured more like an oratorio than an opera, and especially
I Was Looking At the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky (1995), a lighter work which is basically a collection of Broadway show-tunes, sort of Adams
trying to compose a musical, disappointed.
During the 1990s, Adams turned increasingly to orchestral music, a field in
which he had given several minor compositions
(Wound Dresser,
Eros Piano, 1989; Lollapalooza, 1995;
Slonimsky's Earbox, 1996).
El Dorado (1991) enhanced the orchestra with synthesized sounds.
The piano concerto Century Rolls (Nonesuch, 2001) and the less than satisfactory Violin Concerto (1994) were contrasted by
an intriguing Chamber Symphony (1992) that fuses Frank Zappa's most cartoonish music with Schoenberg's chamber music,
and the three-movement symphony Naive and Sentimental Music (1999), one
of his most dramatic and vigorous works.
Despite its title (that would be appropriate for much of Adams' post-Chairman music), and the pastoral flute melody that recurs throughout it,
the movement Naive and Sentimental Music is a series of
variations with anguished and neurotic overtones.
The undulating and dreamy overture of
Chain to the Rhythm
similarly explodes into loud and frenzied orchestration that, towards the
end, approaches the quality of laughter.
The movement Mother of the Man instead unfolds slowly, with the guitar
tiptoeing through a lattice of string drones.
The ballet music of John's Book of Alleged Dances (1994)
and the chamber music of Gnarly Buttons (1996)
sound like melodic fantasias inspired by folk and jazz themes.
El Nino (2000) is an opera-oratorio a` la Handel.
Earbox (Nonesuch, 2000) is a ten-disc retrospective.
My Father Knew Charles Ives (2003),
City Noir (2009),
I Still Dance (2019),
Frenzy (2023),
Rock You Stand On (2025)
are pieces for orchestra.
Road Movies; Hallelujah Junction; American Beserk; China Gates; Phrygian Gates (Noneusch, 2004) contains music for piano, particularly the three-part Road Movies.
The Dharma at Big Sur (2003) is a concerto for electric violin.
Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? (2018), another peak, and
After the Fall (2024)
are concertos for piano and orchestra.
On the Transmigration of Souls (2004) for orchestra and choir was a requiem for the victims
of the 2001 terrorist attacks.
Doctor Atomic (2005) was an opera on the scientist
who directed the first atomic bomb test in New Mexico. It mainly confirmed that
Adams is not a good composer of operas, especially when there is no competent
libretto.
In 2009 Adams eas appointed "Creative Chair" of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.
Other concertos includes: Absolute Jest (2012), a concerto grosso for string quartet and orchestra (and one of his artistic peaks), and Saxophone Concerto (2013).
The Gospel According To The Other Mary (2014) is an outstanding oratorio.
I Still Play (2017) are variations for piano.
Other operas include:
A Flowering Tree (2006),
Girls of the Golden West (2017), and
Antony and Cleopatra (2022).
The four-disc box-set John Adams Edition (2017) delivers
Harmonielehre, Short Ride in a Fast Machine, The Wound Dresser, Lollapalooza, City Noir, The Gospel According To The Other Mary, and Scheherazade,
recorded by the Berliner Philharmoniker when Adams was their first composer-in-residence.
The 40-disc box-sey John Adams Collected Works (Nonesuch, 2022) spans more than four decades
