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]>
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