Up From Minimalism

   One composer's bid to lead the postmodern pack
   By David Gates Newsweek, November 1, 1999

   "Did you know I played in the American premiere of 'Moses und Aron'?"
   asks John Adams.  "I was a Harvard undergraduate, playing clarinet
   with the Boston Symphony.  I imagine it was a mess." He offers this
   as a weird fun fact: if there's a composer about whom Adams has
   mixed feelings, it's Schoenberg, the master of mandarin modernism.
   Sure, 20th-century music is unimaginable without Schoenberg's defiance
   of steady pulsation and stable tonality.  Yet his refusal of
   conventional satisfactions has saddled his successors with, as Adams
   says, "a public- relations problem.  When a piece of mine is done at
   a concert, the average listener is going to open the program and say,
   'Oh, a new work!  It's going to be unpleasant'!"

   This week Adams, 52, will release "The John Adams Earbox," a richly
   satisfying 10-CD retrospective including the killer-diller orchestral
   fanfare "Short Ride in a Fast Machine" (1986) and the heroic-ironic
   opera "Nixon in China" (1987).  Adams may or may not be America's
   great contemporary composer; his early models Philip Glass and Steve
   Reich continue to gain in depth and complexity, even as they continue
   to court the edgy pop audience.  But Adams is closer to the classical
   mainstream, writing mostly for "European" instruments; at the same
   time he never got over Coltrane and the Stones.  "Serious" composers,
   he notes, have always used vernacular music: "Mozart, Handel,
   Monteverdi.  Stravinsky drew blatantly from Russian folk and church
   music.  So my pedigree is very secure." Glass and Reich, with their
   synthesizers and combolike ensembles, seem more like boho outlaws;
   the melodic Adams has the common touch.

   Yet his inner highbrow died hard.  As a young composer, Adams was
   "intimidated by all the orthodoxy and the bulls--t of the avant-garde,"
   and thought that "saying no to Schoenberg was siding with the
   philistines." Then he discovered the emotionalism of Wagner - and
   the radical simplicity of the "minimalists" Glass and Reich, with
   their steady, pulsing tempos, reassuring tonality and hypnotic
   repetitive structures.  Though Adams still gets lumped with these
   composers, even such early pieces as "Shaker Loops" (1978) have a
   generous variety of mood and coloration; today he may sound like
   Glass, Ives, Bernard Herrmann, Leroy Anderson or Pink Floyd - in a
   single piece.

   That, of course, is the rap against him: that he's centerless, a
   maker of pastiches.  "Earbox" may change some minds; with a quarter
   century of work loaded in a single CD changer, you can discern a
   single witty and passionate sensibility beneath the stylistic masks.
   Adams used to fret about originality too.  "I remember Cage writing
   about Jasper Johns," he says, "and how if Johns sees anything on his
   canvas that remotely resembles anything someone else has done, he
   destroys it.  It took me a while to realize that there's just the
   opposite way to be an artist: to be a kind of omnivorous personality."
   Again, he's got encouraging precedents to cite.  "I think Stravinsky
   was one, and certainly Mahler was, and Bach as well - somebody who
   just reached out and grabbed everything, took it all in and through
   his musical technique and his spiritual vision turned it into something
   really great."

   Still Adams sees one difference between himself and his forebears:
   in his time the notion of a "great" composer is an anachronism.
   "Popular culture in America is so pervasive that a serious composer
   can't hope to compete," he says.  "That's been tough for me to accept,
   because I know so much about the past.  When Tchaikovsky died they
   closed the schools in Leningrad.  When Verdi died it was a day of
   national mourning in Italy.  Today only the death of someone like
   John Lennon can cause that kind of national trauma.  And so one has
   to fall back on more meaningful thoughts.  Such as the lasting quality
   of your work." Adams's "Earbox" should settle that.  It could even
   help with that public-relations problem of his.  All he needs is the
   public.

Scott Morrison <[log in to unmask]>