John Adams

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John Coolidge Adams (born February 15, 1947) is an American composer, clarinetist, and conductor of classical music and opera, with strong roots in minimalism. Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China, Doctor Atomic (2005), which includes Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China, Robert Oppenheimer's first atomic bomb design, and the demise of 69-year-old Jewish-American passenger Leon Klinghoffer, who used a wheelchair, among other operas. The Erasmus Prize, five Grammy Awards, the Harvard Arts Medal, France's Ordre des Lettres, and six honorary doctorates were among Adams' awards in addition to the Pulitzer.

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Life and career

John Adams, in full, was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on February 15, 1947. He lived in Woodstock, Vermont, for five years before moving to East Concord, New Hampshire, where his grandfather operated a dance hall. Adams' family didn't own a television and didn't have a record player until he was ten years old. Both his parents were musicians; his mother was a member of major bands; and his father, a clarinetist, was a clarinetist. He grew up with jazz, Americana, and Broadway musicals, first meeting Duke Ellington at his grandfather's dance hall. Adams played baseball as a youth.

Adams took up the clarinet in the third grade, first taking lessons from his father, Carl Adams, and later with Boston Symphony Orchestra bass clarinetist Felix Viscuglia. As a student, he has performed in various local orchestras, concert bands, and marching bands. Adams began writing at the age of ten, and he first heard his music perform as a child. In 1965, he graduated from Concord High School.

Adams next attended Harvard University, where he obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1969 and a Master of Arts degree in 1971, while studying composition under Leon Kirchner, Roger Sessions, Earl Kim, Harold Shapero, and David Del Tredici. He supervised Harvard's student ensemble, the Bach Society Orchestra, for a year and a half as an undergraduate. Adams became engrossed by the strict modernism of the twentieth century (such as Boulez's) while attending Harvard and argued that music must continue evolving, to the extent that he once wrote a letter to Leonard Bernstein criticizing Chichester Psalms' ostensibly stylistic reactionionism. Adams, on the night, loved listening to The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and Bob Dylan, and has told the world that he once stood in line at eight a.m. to buy a copy of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is a member of Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Adams was the first Harvard undergraduate to write a musical composition for his senior thesis. He wrote The Electric Wake for "electric" in his thesis, i.e. The soprano is accompanied by a group of "electric" strings, keyboards, harp, and percussion. However, a performance could not be put together at the time, and Adams has never heard the piece performed. Adams earned his B.A. magna cum lauded and finished his M.A., completing his undergraduate degree in 1971.

Adams' mother gave him a copy of John Cage's book Silence: Lectures and Writings from his mother after graduating. He was inspired to move to San Francisco, where he taught classes and orchestrated the school's New Music Ensemble, despite being shaken of his allegiance to modernism. Adams composed several pieces of electronic music for a handmade modular synthesizer he called the "Studebaker" in the early 1970s. He also wrote American Standard, a three-movement setta march, a hymn, and a jazz ballad that were recorded and released on Obscure Records in 1975.

Adams wrote Phrygian Gates, his first mature work, my official 'opus one', as well as its much shorter companion piece, China Gates. He completed Shaker Loops, a string septet based on a previous, unsuccessful string quartet called Wavemaker, by the next year. He completed his first orchestral piece, Common Tones, in 1979, which was premiered by the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Orchestra under Adams' baton.

Adams made the San Francisco Symphony's New Music Adviser and arranged the symphony's New and Unusual Music concerts in 1979. Adams' massive, three-movement choral symphony Harmonium (1980–81) setting texts by John Donne and Emily Dickinson resulted from a commission from the symphony. He followed this up with the three-movement, orchestral piece (without strings), Grand Pianola Music (1982). Matter of Heart, a documentary about psychoanalyst Carl Jung, was a score he later described as "of shocking mediocrity" that he wrote. Adams worked on the purely electronic score for Available Light, a dance choreographed by Lucinda Childs with sets by architect Frank Gehry, from 1982-1983. Light Over Water is the result of a dance alone, but it is not limited to dance.

Adams wrote his three-movement, orchestral piece Harmonielehre (1984–85), which he characterized as "a demonstration of faith in the power of tonality at a time when I was uncertain about the future." As with many of Adams' works, it was inspired by a vision, in this case, a dream in which he was driving across the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and saw an oil tanker on the surface of the water suddenly turn upright and take off like a Saturn V rocket.

Adams produced Nixon in China, his first opera, Nixon in China, based on Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China. The opera was the first collaboration between Adams and theatre director Peter Sellars, who had suggested it to Adams in 1983. Adams has since worked with Sellars on all of his operas.

Adams wrote The Chairman Dances (1985), which he described as a "out-take" of Act III of Nixon in China, in order to complete a long-awaited commission for the Milwaukee Symphony. In addition, he authored the short orchestral fanfare Short Ride in a Fast Machine (1986).

In 1988, Adams composed two orchestral pieces: Fearful Symmetries, a 25-minute work by Nixon in China, and The Wound-Dresser, a parody of Walt Whitman's 1865 poem of the same name, written when Whitman was volunteering at a military hospital during the American Civil War. The Wound-Dresser is praised for his baritone voice, two flutes (or two piccolos), two oboes, clarinet, bass clarinet, two bassoes, two horns, two trumpets, trumpet (or piccolo trumpet), synthesizer, and strings.

Adams began working as a conductor in the United States during this period. He served as conductor and music advisor for the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra from 1988 to 1990. He has also been artistic director and conductor of the Ojai and Cabrillo Music Festivals in California. He has appeared in orchestras around the world, including the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, as well as Wagner's own works.

In 1991, he produced his second opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, while still working with librettist Alice Goodman and director Peter Sellars. The opera is based on the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro by Palestinian terrorists and details of passenger Leon Klinghoffer's assassination, a veteran, physically impaired American Jew. The opera has sparked controversy, with accusations that it is antisemitic and glorifies terrorism.

Chamber Symphony (1992), Adams' next work, is for a 15-member chamber orchestra. The work is inspired by an unexpected combination of sources: Arnold Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony No. 0 is written in three movements. Op. 1, Op. "Academic" is Adams' specializing in 9 (which Adams was studying at the time) and "hyperactive, inventino, and acrobatic" music of the cartoons his young son was watching.

He composed his Violin Concerto for American violinist Jorja Fleezanis next year. This work, which is expected to last a little more than half an hour, is divided into three movements: a "long-awaited rhapsody for the violin" is followed by a slowed chaconne (titled "Body through which the dream flows"), and a piece comes with an energetic toccare. Adams' violin concerto was lauded by the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition.

He completed I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky in 1995, a stage work with libretto by poet June Jordan and staging by Peter Sellars. Adams referred to the work as a "songplay in two acts" when it was inspired by musicals. The main characters are seven young Americans from various social and ethnic backgrounds, all living in Los Angeles, with stories set around the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

Hallelujah Junction (1996) is a three-movement piece for two pianos that employs variations of a repeated two-note pattern. The notes' intervals remained the same throughout most of the piece. Adams' 2008 memoir was titled with the same word.

El Nio (2000), a commemoration written to mark the millennium, is a "oratorio about birth in general and the Nativity in particular." The collection includes texts by biblical texts as well as poems by Hispanic poets such as Rosario Castellanos, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Gabriela Mistral, Vicente Huidobro, and Rubén Daro.

The New York Philharmonic commissioned Adams to produce a memorial piece for the victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. On the Transmigration of Souls, the resulting work was premiered around the first anniversary of the attacks. The Transmigration of Souls is a score for orchestra, chorus, and children's choir, as well as taped recordings of the victims mixed with the sounds of the city. It was named in the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Music as well as the 2005 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Composition.

"Concord," "The Lake," and "The Mountain," two San Francisco Symphony Orchestral piece My Father, Knew Charles Ives (2003) is cast in three movements: "Concord," "The Lake," and "The Peak." Adams noticed several similarities between the two men's lives and their lives, including their love of small-town New England life and their unfulfilled musical aspirations, despite the fact that his father did not know American composer Charles Ives.

The Dharma at Big Sur (2003), a two-movement work for solo electric six-string violin and orchestra, was written for the Los Angeles Philharmonic to commemorate the opening of Disney Hall in 2003. Adams said with Dharma, he wanted to create a piece that represented the feeling of being on the West Coast rather than extending far beyond the ocean's horizon." The piece was inspired by Lou Harrison's music, and it requires only intonation, not equal temperament, rather than equal temperament.

Doctor Atomic (2005), Adams' third opera, is about physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project, and the construction and testing of the first atomic bomb. Doctor Atomic's libretto, written by Peter Sellars, relies on original source material, such as personal memoirs, audio recordings, engineering manuals of nuclear physics, declassified government papers, and the poetry of Bhagavad Gita, John Donne, Charles Baudelaire, and Muriel Rukeyser. The opera takes place in June and July 1945, mainly because of the last few hours before the first atomic bomb blasts explodes at the test site in New Mexico. Oppenheimer and his partner Kitty, Edward Teller, GM Leslie Groves, and Robert Wilson are among the characters. Adams took music from the opera to create the three-movement Doctor Atomic Symphony two years later.

A Flowering Tree (2006), Adams and Sellars libretto, is based on a folktale from southern India's Kannada language, which has been translated by A.K. Ramanujan talks about a teenage girl who discovers that she has the ability to transform into a flowering tree. The two-act opera was performed as part of the Vienna New Crowned Hope Festival to commemorate Mozart's birth in 250 years. As such, it has several similarities with Mozart's The Magic Flute, including its themes of "magic, change, and moral dawning."

Adams composed three pieces for the St. Lawrence String Quartet: his First Quartet (2008), his string quartet and orchestra, Absolute Jest (2012), and his Second Quartet (2014). Both Absolute Jest and the Second Quartet are based on Beethoven's fragments, with Absolute Jest employing music from Beethoven's late quartets (particularly Opus 131, Opus 135, and the Große Fuge) and the Second Quartet based on Beethoven's Opus 110 and 111 piano sonatas.

Adams wrote his two-act Passion oratorio The Gospel According to the Other Mary, a decade after his Nativity oratorio El Nio. The study focuses on Mary Magdalene's last few weeks of Jesus' life from the viewpoint of "the other Mary," Martha Magdalene, her sister Martha (sometimes misidentified as Mary Magdalene), and her brother, Lazarus. Peter Sellars' libretto takes its text from the Old Testament and New Testament of the Bible, as well as from Rosario Castellanos, Rubén Daro, Dorothy Day, Louise Erdrich, June Jordan, and Primo Levi.

Scheherazade.2 (2014), a four-movement orchestra, is a "dramatic symphony" for violin and orchestra. The work was written for violinist Leila Josefowicz, who appeared in Adams' Violin Concerto and The Dharma at Big Sur, who, after being forced to marry, recounts tales to her husband in order to postpone her death. Adams, with performances in Tahr Square during the 2011 Egyptian revolution, Kabul, and remarks from The Rush Limbaugh Exhibition, he shared recent examples of abuse and injustice towards women around the world.

Girls of the Golden West, Adams' most recent opera, with a libretto by Sellars based on historical records, is set in mining camps during the California Gold Rush of the 1850s. "These authentic stories of the Forty-Niners [a term for people who participated in the 1849 Gold Rush] are overwhelmingly affecting in their faith, passion, and sacrifice, chronicling tales of racial inequity, colorful and tragic exploits, political strife, and the struggle to build a new life and wondering what it means to be American," Sellars wrote.

Adams was married to Hawley Currens, a music educator from 1970 to 1974. He is married to photographer Deborah O'Grady, with whom he has a daughter, Emily, and a son, composer Samuel Carl Adams.

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