Learning by EarThe many moods of John Adams.
Posted Tuesday, Oct. 14, 2008, at 5:35 PM ET
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StumbleUponAnd yet was this his sound? Over the next couple of years, Adams wrote the supertoothsome Grand Pianola Music, which he describes as " 'Hammerklavier' head-to-head with Liberace cocktails" and which some of his friends described as "absolute shit." (The piece was inspired by watching pianist Rudolf Serkin while on acid.) Then an aloof, hourlong electronic piece. Then Harmonielehre, a lush symphony dressed in chromatic harmony (think Wagner). Then his first opera, Nixon in China, which was none of these things. Nixon won a Grammy, an Emmy, and a Great Performances spot, and it made Adams famous:
The underlying style here—the clipped, rhythmic chugging with abrupt, often stepwise shifts in harmony—is high Minimalism, an idiom most famously pioneered by Philip Glass and one that anchored Adams through these first years of experimentation. At its worst, Minimalism of this sort can sound like the soundtrack to a Nova documentary about sun spots. Adams, at his best, set its high watermark. The style attracted him, he says, partly for its scale and openness; it also (though Adams doesn't spell this out) tends to change harmonies in a way, and at a pace, similar to a lot of the popular music he heard in college. Minimalism was Adams' lodestar until the early '90s. Then he abandoned it.
Trying to describe Adams' "voice" from that point is like trying to get a very fast bug under a jar. His second opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, a dreamlike, macabre piece about Palestinian hijackers, gave way to the Chamber Symphony, which is a Bronx cheer in the face of Phrygian Gates' broad consonance:
From here, he wrote for musicians playing simultaneously in different tempos. He composed an ill-received pop musical about an "earthquake/romance" in Los Angeles. He collaborated on a multimedia nativity oratorio with a "Hispanic flavor"—and then an opera set at the A-bomb test site (which opens at the Met this week). Adams' 2003 Dharma at Big Sur was a raga-influenced concerto for a six-stringed electric violin over an orchestra playing on a nonstandard scale. (Imagine jimmying with your piano such that the white keys are ever so slightly displaced from their usual pitches.) This elaborate gambit crashed and burned at the premiere. Still, Adams thinks he was maybe onto something. He'd used quarter-tone ensemble—a different kind of nonstandard-tuning arrangement—a year earlier in his 9/11 memorial, On the Transmigration of Souls. That piece, whose delicate score uses recorded city sounds, a libretto of found text, and a trumpet quoting Charles Ives, comes at the listener with chilling intimacy:
Adams says he vacillates between loving On the Transmigration and finding it "a dud." Readers of his memoir will get the sense he vacillates a lot about his work—and, in an equal and opposite way, about his audience. He is deeply attentive to listeners' reactions, reveling in "audience excitement." Yet he also suggests that innovative music must meet with audience resistance "before eventually being understood and appreciated." At one point, he knocks "the musical amateur" whose interests end at Bach and Mozart. At another, he knocks "listeners overburdened with good taste." Probably, readers should not overburden themselves trying to puzzle this one out.
Fickleness is often defensive. New classical music lies at the bottom of a canyon carved by hundreds of years of effluence. The risk of getting lost or buried in the landscape is acute. The trouble isn't that the art has atrophied since Bach or Mozart. The trouble is it's grown. In 1770, there was effectively one style of contemporary "high" music in the West; by the 1930s, composers as different as Schönberg, Gershwin, and Rachmaninoff were vying for the American concert hall. What classical music is—and what, if anything, that distinction preserves—gets even fuzzier in an age of high-concept rock and avant-garde jazz. What does a classical composer do that no one else does?
That question is the backbone of Hallelujah Junction. And it's a testament to the nuance and candor of Adams' memoir that the book never settles on an answer. (The closest he comes is a deeply weird conclusion urging listeners to take some "hints from evolutionary science" and resist seeing music as teleological "progress.") Instead, we find an artist hunting for the golden thread to seal a restive, uncertain career. "The 'next' piece ought to be the 'best piece,' the living proof that the disparate elements of my musical language … have once and for all come together in a single statement of confident, unblemished perfection," he writes. "But that is never the case." In the end, it is the looming sense that Adams hasn't found his voice—not quite, not yet—that makes this book so gripping and his art so real.
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