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Learning by EarThe many moods of John Adams.

By Nathan HellerPosted Tuesday, Oct. 14, 2008, at 5:35 PM ET

John Adams.Listeners hoping to find out what kind of composer John Adams is are unlikely to get much help from John Adams. In his new memoir, Hallelujah Junction, Adams writes that composition is "fundamentally intuitive," but it is also, he says, a "rational" process that "takes time and effort." He was early on attracted to music that "embraced pulsation and repetition." He was also repelled by that music's "tiresomely uniform surfaces." Harmony, more than melody or rhythm, is the "DNA" of a composer's style—except Adams' style, which has rhythmic, "dance-like roots." In the classical-music world, Adams is seen as a sort of late-career Picasso: a star, a standby, a one-man manufactory of brilliant, audience-friendly work. Hallelujah Junction doesn't overturn these perceptions, but it adds a surprising hue of restlessness and uncertainty to the portrait. One of America's most accessible living composers turns out to be one of the hardest to pin down.

Adams leads the first generation of post-Sgt. Pepper classical innovators. A lot of lore hangs on this cultural fact. As a student in the '60s and early '70s, the story goes, Adams was spinning dizzily between 12-tone-tinged serialism and the chance music of the avant-garde. Meanwhile, he was absorbing innovative '60s rock in a way that would, a decade later, help him discover his unique "voice"—one that abandoned obscure forms for late-Romantic largesse and the toe-tapping appeal of pop and jazz. If you enjoy the Magical Mystery Tour but can't see the point of 12-tone music, this is exactly the sort of self-discovery story you want to hear.

It's an incomplete one, though, as his memoir attests. Adams finds his musical "voice" on Page 88 of Hallelujah Junction. In the ensuing 230 pages, that voice is recalibrated or significantly transformed at least five times. Ultimately, he looks less like someone who's sailed a still and steady course than an artist who's spent his career bending, swaying, and carefully rebalancing to surf inclement waves.

Adams came of age at a time when being an American composer—and a popular one—was no longer frontier territory. Gershwin, Copland, Bernstein, and Barber set the archetype so firmly that the pubescent Adams staved off loneliness by inventing an imaginary hero in their mold, a local "New Hampshire composer" called Bruce Craigmore (a name ripe for a flannel-wear label somewhere). Maestro Craigmore eventually went the way of all fantasies, but Adams' musical interests did not. He gained virtuosity on the clarinet, his father's instrument; finagled the best available education in theory and conducting; fomented various wiseass insurrections against his teachers; and, rakishly, named "my libido" his prized possession in the school yearbook. The editors, less rakishly, assumed John Adams' libido was an instrument.

Harvard, where he landed in the fall of 1965, should have borne these talents to fruition. Its composition program was first-rate. Adams shone as a clarinetist and conductor and discovered a careerlong interest in electronic music. But he reports being more musically stimulated by rock-saturated "parties of pot, scotch whiskey, and unfiltered Lucky Strikes" than by classroom technique; his only full-length composition in college was an academic requirement. By the spring of his senior year, classmates were storming Harvard's administrative building, buffeted by hostile policemen, and Adams was abusing pharmaceuticals to ensure he'd fail his draft-board exams. In 1971, after a short, halfhearted fling with graduate school, he left New England and Kerouac-ed it to San Francisco, where he eventually took a teaching job and, six years later at the age of 30, heard the premiere of what he describes as his first mature composition, a piano piece called Phrygian Gates.

The cycling, modal atmospherics of Phrygian Gates were a slap in the face to the work of his 20s, work that at one point incorporated the sound of flies on dog pooh. Where those efforts were conceptual (or aspiring in that direction), this was sensual. Where Adams' previous approaches denied the ear's expectations, this music rode them.

When he lucked into his first symphonic commission, he tried to carry the aesthetic of Phrygian Gates over to the orchestra and chorus. The result was revelatory. "The premiere of Harmonium … took almost everyone, including its composer, by surprise," he writes. When oscillating textures and sustained harmonies like those in Phrygian Gates are scored out for a Mahler-type ensemble, the result isn't just an expansion of the same idea. It's almost a different music:

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This became the quintessential early-Adams sound: long brass crescendos and braided suspensions over a chattering orchestra, rhythmic counterpoint struck through with syncopation. It's a musical language that's eloquent on its immediate terms—sonorous, majestic, and kinetic—and it made Adams' career. Later, that buoyant, multitextured quality would flavor even his smaller-scale work, like the 1998 two-piano piece Hallelujah Junction. (Compare this with the piano sound of Phrygian Gates, before he'd wrestled out his symphonic style.)

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Nathan Heller is a Slate copy editor.
Photograph of John Adams by Carlo Allegri/Getty Images for LAPA. Clips from Phrygian Gates by John Adams, performed by Rolf Hind, and Hallelujah Junction by John Adams, performed by Nicolas Hodges and Rolf Hind, from Road Movies © 2004 Nonesuch Records Inc. Clip from Harmonium by John Adams, performed by the San Francisco Symphony with John Adams conducting, from Harmonium/The Klinghoffer Choruses © 2004 Nonesuch Records Inc. Clip from Nixon in China, with music by John Adams and libretto by Alice Goodman, performed by the Orchestra of St. Luke's with Edo de Waart conducting, from Music From Nixon in China, © 1988 Elektra/Asylum/Nonesuch Records. Clip from Chamber Symphony by John Adams, performed by Ensemble Modern with Sian Edwards conducting, from John Adams: Shaker Loops, Phrygian Gates, Chamber Symphony © 1997 BMG Music. Clip from On the Transmigration of Souls by John Adams, performed by the New York Philharmonic with Lorin Maazel conducting, from On the Transmigration of Souls © 2004 Nonesuch Records Inc. All rights reserved.
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