American Master: A Portrait of John Adams

One of the pathologies of modernism

was the demand to throw away

tradition, the demand to always make it new.

Contemporary music that is just very, very,

very difficult for non-specialists to even get comfortable with

is that way because it doesn't respond to certain unifying gestures,

and I think the greatest of all unifying gestures is a pulse.

And the second greatest is tonality.

John Adams is the living composer whose work is most often performed today.

Inspired by the raw emotion of jazz,

the hypnotic repetition of minimalism

and the tonal explorations of the 20th century avant-garde,

Adams draws, as well, from the drama and romanticism of European music.

From Beethoven to Debussy, and Wagner to Sibelius.

He has written operas that touch on present-day politics,

orchestral works of startling beauty, and oratorios that

reinterpret the central myths of Western spirituality.

He lives in California,

the perfect setting for a man whose music transcends history.

Reaching forwards adventurously into the unknown,

as well as paying homage to the masterpieces of the past.

I've given... There are accents missing. Er...

Scott, you have accents at 1.27 in the second group of notes...

'The material I took is originally written for a string quartet.

'I took passages from'

a couple of Beethoven string quartets

that have always meant a great deal to me.

And I put it through what you could call a musical hall of mirrors.

I stretch it and I transpose it, I turn it upside-down.

That was Adams, not Beethoven! That's good.

I'm going to tell you something really funny,

but it's really the truth, that when you come in and you start,

this is gorgeous, and the moment that it's not pure Beethoven and it starts to be my deconstruction of it,

you start playing kind of coarse.

THEY LAUGH It's like you're going along, and then,

this isn't the way it goes, it was supposed to go different,

you start whacking, and it gets, kind of, just a little bit...harsh.

'I have a very, very strong feeling of kinship with Beethoven,'

and, of course, it's very uncool. You know,

if you want to be a leading-edge composer these days, your references

are Radiohead or Pygmy music, or Metallica, something like that.

It's not cool to say that Beethoven's your big inspiration,

but it's the truth.

But I love Beethoven because of the combination of great tenderness

and inability. He's the most noble of all composers.

But I also love it because of the driving energy,

which fits my American sensibility very well.

This is the clarinet I played all through my youth.

I was probably 12, maybe 14 years old when I first got it.

I played Mozart on it and I played in a concert band with my father,

I played in orchestras, I played it all the way through college.

Obviously, it has a lot of deep, psychological

and emotional connections

because it is the instrument that my father played

and it was the instrument that my mother listened to

when I was growing up, and, you know, it's a melodic instrument.

It's capable of great emotional utterance,

and then, of course, it's also capable of being very sexy and...

..colourful like in Klezmer, like when Benny Goodman played it.

My parents were both what we would call amateur musicians, although

my father did play briefly in a professional swing band in the 1930s.

There was jazz in the house and classical music.

My mother sang in several church choirs, and she also had starring

roles in local productions of South Pacific, Carousel, Oklahoma...

I grew up with what I consider to be a very rich American musical

pedigree, part European, part indigenous.

I remember listening to the 1812 Overture,

and probably some Mozart, because Mozart was always key in my childhood.

Also circus band marches,

and very early on, I was obsessed with the idea of conducting.

I took one of my mother's knitting needles

and started conducting the record player!

I don't think there's a single piece of music that launched my career,

launched my interest in music.

It was an atmosphere, not only of my home

but of the small-town communities that I grew up in.

In my case,

it was this wonderful orchestra that I joined

when I was about 13 or 14 years old that was sponsored by the state mental hospital.

The orchestra rehearsed once a week

and played what we call light classics,

meaning anything from Peer Gynt Suite to the Unfinished Symphony to

selections from The Sound Of Music.

And we performed for these severely disturbed mental patients.

And it was quite wonderful.

Sometimes it scared me,

but more often, they would react with intense emotionality.

They would cry, they would laugh, and since I was the only

kid in the orchestra, they would all come after me.

I often tell the story of how my grandfather ran a dance hall

in central New Hampshire,

and all the big bands came to his dance hall.

And when I was in high school,

I several times heard the great Duke Ellington band, and I can't

even begin to describe the depth of the influence it had on me.

First of all, it's the beat.

JAZZ MUSIC PLAYS

I think that was, again,

a very primal experience, being with the mental patients,

in terms of the power of the sound, the sensuality of it...

JAZZ MUSIC PLAYS

It's so emotionally extrovert, and that is really the essence,

I think, of American music,

and I also think it's certainly the essence of my music.

People who know me think of me as a somewhat introverted,

retiring person who is...

I'm willing to be social when I have to

and I can turn it on and talk to a large group of people,

but basically I'm happier if I spend all day only talking to my wife,

or maybe write an e-mail to a friend, but I enjoy being alone.

On the other hand, when I write music, I go to the other

pole of my personality and I write music that is very extroverted.

I was in university during a very,

very turbulent time in American cultural history.

I'm very glad I was.

It was a traumatic time because of the Vietnam War.

It was also an ecstatic time because it was a period of rebellion.

I was in college from 1965 to 1971.

COMMOTION

There was LSD, there was rock, there was Jimi Hendrix, The Supremes,

the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, Bob Dylan,

the Band... It was an amazing time.

My roommates were creating bands and, you know,

buying electric guitars and recording songs...

I always knew that I was going to be a classical composer.

At that time, the models were pretty far out.

Someone like John Cage, whom I was very serious about...

Boulez was hugely influential.

He was kind of at his first blossoming,

and of course, all the graduate students ran out

and bought a copy of Marteau Sans Maitre, and I did too,

because we were told that this was the future.

But I realised it was not something...

It wasn't a place I wanted to go.

I don't promise that we can eradicate poverty

and end discrimination and eliminate all danger of war in the space

of four or even eight years, but I do promise action.

The Vietnam years at Harvard fuelled John Adams'

passion for politics, a passion that has stayed with him to this day.

His three major operas, the most recent Doctor Atomic,

the controversial Death Of Klinghoffer,

and his first operatic masterpiece, Nixon In China,

tackle major political themes of our times.

All Adams' operas have been the fruit of a long-standing creative

collaboration with director Peter Sellars.

Up to that point,

all the contemporary music Peter heard was of the surrealist school,

very dissonant with no beat and very cold, emotionally.

Suddenly, someone gave him

a recording of this composer named John Adams which had music

that was, to him, very emotional and very powerful.

And he proposed the idea of an opera called Nixon In China.

He already had the title in mind.

And Nixon, of course, was a major event in my life, because Nixon

was president when I received my notice to report to be a soldier.

And so I had very negative feelings about Nixon.

It seemed that an opera which had these really very colourful

characters like Mao and Nixon and Mao's wife, and Kissinger,

could be a really interesting,

entertaining, but also very meaningful theatrical work.

# How your most rigid theorist revises as he goes along

# Now you're referring to Wang Ming, Chaiang, Chang Kuo-tao and Li Li-san

# I spoke generally

# The line we take now is a paradox

# Among the followers of Marx

# The extreme left

# The doctrinaire

-# Tend to be fascist

-And the far right?

# True Marxism is called that by the extreme left

# Occasionally the true left calls a spade a spade

# And tells the left it's right... #

Although there's a great deal of humour,

and I make fun of the pomposity of both Nixon and Mao,

the essence of Nixon In China goes much deeper than satire,

and there are moments of great poignancy.

I think I can say, without any qualification, that this

opera has the best libretto written in the 20th century.

# We have at times been enemies

# We still have differences

# God knows

# But let us in these next five days

# Start a long march

# On new highways

# In different lanes but parallel

# And heading for a single goal

# The world watches and listens

# We must seize the hour

# We must seize the hour

# We must seize the hour

# We must seize the hour

# And seize the day. #

I think if you're going to be an opera composer,

you can't be a purist.

You have to be willing to draw in any number of influences to make

the operatic experience as fluid and as varied as life is.

I think that's certainly what made Mozart such a great composer,

and Verdi, so if Nixon In China is a success,

it's partly because it reflects what American life is like.

It reflects the combination of the demotic musical objects

that are very corny and vulgar,

and then the opposite.

It also reflects very noble and...deeply imagined...

..expressions of the human soul.

I'd grown up in New England and I'd spent my entire life there.

I'd never even been to Europe.

I was 22 years old, I was married to my first wife at the time

and she had never been anywhere, either.

And so we took a trip across the country.

The trip was a kind of symbol of liberation, you know,

it was a road trip

and that's a classic American archetype...

You know, whether it's Jack Kerouac or many of the great...folk singers

like Woody Guthrie or whatever,

the idea of the road trip, the American movement

across the landscape, was some unknown...destiny.

In retrospect, it seems like it was a great moment in my life,

and I did not intend to stay in California.

I thought I would go back to school and have a nice dreary,

pedestrian life as a college professor,

but I got out here and I really found myself.

And it was the first time I'd experienced the Pacific Ocean,

which is, it's a palpably different feel

than you get on the Atlantic coast.

On the Pacific, the land is very jagged.

There are huge cliffs that drop down and down the Big Sur,

you can stand and just watch the immense forest of the Pacific Ocean

pound against this continental shelf, and it's very awe-inspiring.

It's hard to look at that, it's hard to experience it, without feeling

a certain sense of the divine, of the power of other worldly beings.

The Dharma At Big Sur brings together the notion of the Dharma,

of the search for the essence of our being, and Big Sur,

which is one of the most memorable, beautiful

and provocatively transcendental locations in the United States.

So the work is this kind of long, flowing first movement that is

a rhapsody in which I let the violinist float above the orchestra.

There's no improvising in the piece.

And then the second half is this gradual, kind of very slow

picking up of speed and waves of sound that culminates in a big,

kind of ecstatic climax at the end.

I think I borrowed the form from the raga, in other words,

a slow introduction and then a fast, ecstatic...dance at the end.

MUSIC: "The Dharma At Big Sur"

Spiritual matters have always meant a great deal to me,

and I've always experienced music as this strange

combination of the spiritual and the erotic.

I think many of my pieces confront that,

whether it's early pieces like Shaker Loops or Harmonium,

or even the most recent ones like The Dharma At Big Sur,

and, for sure, The Gospel According To The Other Mary.

There's this potent collusion

of sexuality and eroticism,

and then the desire for spiritual transcendence.

John Adams arrived in San Francisco in 1972.

He started out in Berkeley,

the cradle of West Coast student radicalism.

He took a series of relatively menial jobs,

including work in the open docks.

In the spirit of the times, he wanted to be a working-class

composer, earning his living the hard way and composing at night.

Things weren't that easy, and he was fortunate to land a job

teaching at the San Francisco Conservatory Of Music,

where he stayed for nine years.

I suspect I was a terrible teacher

because I didn't really know what I was doing.

I talked about whatever was on my mind, you know.

I was supposed to be teaching harmony and I talked about Tolstoy,

because I had discovered Tolstoy that year, or Dante.

And I also did a lot of electronic music, making crazy pieces.

I even built my own synthesiser.

It was a wonderful time because I was young, I was in my 20s,

I taught analysis,

I spent a lot of time teaching Beethoven string quartets

and Wagner operas, and usually I was only one week ahead of the students.

You know, I didn't know Tristan And Isolde - I taught

Act One even though I'd never even experienced Act Three.

I was a bachelor at that point. I had broken up with my first wife,

so I read biographies of composers, I read social history,

I read Karl Marx, Sartre, Dickens... I got deeply involved in Buddhism

for a period, and I also got very interested in electronics.

In the '70s, most of the music that I took seriously

was...

the very radical avant-garde style.

Either European high modernism, or, in this country,

probably John Cage and all of his epigones.

And there was something strangely unsatisfying about it.

I was often really bored by it.

If you listen to a piece,

you know, by any of those avant-garde composers, there's no beat,

there's no pulse, there's no melody, there's no identifiable harmony...

It's pretty bleak landscape, and the music of Steve Reich...

..and Terry Riley, and then later, I heard some

excerpts from Einstein On The Beach when Philip Glass came through...

It was very radical, because it did have a beat,

and it was tonal and it was also very insistent.

Particularly Glass's music.

MUSIC: "Phrygian Gates"

I began experimenting with minimalism at about the age of 30.

The first piece I wrote was a large canvas,

24-minute virtuoso piece for piano called Phrygian Gates.

MUSIC: "Phrygian Gates"

It was clearly a minimalist piece, in the sense of repetition

and kind of wave-like structures in music.

It's a very satisfying piece for me, and I still continue to enjoy it,

although compared to what I write now, I think it's somewhat rigid.

You know, I was still in the grip of the modernist demand that

everything be completely unified on an architectonic level.

With being a young Turk

and wanting to be on the vanguard of experimental music,

I thought I'd be an electronic composer

or write pieces for instruments,

maybe I invented out of spare car parts, or something like that.

I had absolutely no intentions of writing

a big piece for chorus and orchestra.

I was given a commission to write for the San Francisco Symphony

by this young Dutch conductor, Edo de Waart.

Now, in 1980, getting a commission from the San Francisco Symphony

would be like, I don't know, it would be like...

..Jean-Paul Sartre...

becoming a...a conservative,

er, politician or something, you know?

It was like a complete sell-out.

As far as my avant-garde friends,

they thought I had just become guilty of apostasy.

CHORAL PIECE CONTINUES

I really put away all my avant-garde obsessions

and made this piece that was very rich and very overtly emotional

but at the same time, compositionally it was informed by minimalism.

But my minimalism was very different from Reich's or Glass's,

much more informed by the European canon of great music.

I didn't try, consciously, to make a music that didn't refer to

Debussy or Beethoven or Wagner.

I invited them all in and I think the other way in which my music was different

than the classical minimalist gesture

was that I wanted to have music that had violent changes of emotion.

MUSIC CONTINUES

CHOIR SINGS

You know, one great thing about the Berlin Philharmonic,

when you see them, apropos...

Er, is that somehow American, particularly American orchestra musicians,

no matter whether they're having a good time or not,

they always have this poker-face, like they're baseball players.

You're not supposed to show you're enjoying yourself.

But the Berlin Phil,

they always look like they're really having a good time.

Maybe it's because they're the Berlin Phil and they know it.

It's good that you never lose that sense of enjoyment and excitement,

because there's something about a certain mode of behaviour in American orchestras

that gives the impression of it's just labour and it's not joy.

And that's why we're so lucky as musicians, you know, we can do something that we really love.

We don't have to do something that we don't like to earn a living.

OK, 248.

I'd been commissioned to write a string quartet for Kronos,

which is, of course, a very well-known avant-garde string quartet.

It was a really important summer for me

because I'd discovered Marcel Proust.

And I was so taken with the mood

of Proust's prose, of his writing,

this wonderful kind of dreamlike atmosphere, and the sensuality of it

and the poignancy of it, the sentiment.

And I tried to bring this into the string quartet at the same time that I was trying to

develop my interest in minimalism.

And it was a failure, it didn't work.

Look, on certain levels, this is not a very difficult piece.

But on other levels,

it presents challenges to extreme rhythmic precision.

So that when you start to play louder...

..your bow is going to change because you have to dig in more.

And it's OK, I mean, you can have a good performance,

but to get a really good performance,

you just really have to lock that in.

And where the trouble starts is around 60 or so.

When you start getting louder, and people start introducing accents.

I hear just these little moment of blur

and I want it to just be...taka-taka, taka-taka, taka-taka, taka-taka...

STRINGS PLAY PRIMARY RHYTHM

I did something really good.

I made a wise decision which is that I looked at this quartet

and I identified some things in it that were good

and I threw out everything else.

And I took just the rhythmic core of the piece

and I somehow understood

that this musical material wanted to do something else.

I was trying to force it to behave in another way that

I intellectually thought it should go.

And it was that point in my life

where I realised that musical material is like it's own being, it's like a plant.

And as a composer, you have to be a good gardener,

and you have to know what the potential of this material is,

you can't force it into some preconceived intellectual mode.

You can, but the chances are it'll be stillborn.

And I turned it into a piece called Shaker Loops, which got it right

because in Shaker Loops, the music is doing what it wants to do.

My father was unaffiliated, he had no interest in religion.

My mother on the other hand had grown up in an Irish Catholic family.

Going to church was a very meaningful experience.

We didn't go to the Catholic Church,

but she sang in the Episcopal choir,

and then when I was about 13 or 14,

she changed to the Unitarian Church and I went with her.

I was drawn to spiritual matters at that age.

Of course, Unitarianism is a classic New England...

far more philosophical practice than it is a logical one.

It's a mixture of very enlightened Protestant Christianity

and the best of philosophical transcendentalism.

We think of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau.

INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYS

I think there's quite a landscape quality to...

a lot of his...

It's spacious orchestral writing.

I used to do a lot of road trips when the kids were young

and I would just go out to do some photographs and I would take,

you know, a lot of CDs or back then it was, I think, cassette tapes of John's music,

and turn it up really loud and put the windows down, you know,

and just drive. And it was just like the most exhilarating feeling to do that.

I think we both feel that we kind of mutually inform each other.

I mean there are times when he's seen photographs that I've made and then said

that inspired some passage or, you know, piece that he did.

PIANO PLAYS

It's sort of an unspoken kind of collaboration,

it's that thing that we share a love of and we each approach it in our own way.

I think that's the best way to say it.

When he wrote a piece called Hallelujah Junction,

and then he called his book Hallelujah Junction,

which is a place out in the middle of Sierra Valley, which is a place

that we've been going since before we were married, actually.

Just at that part, it's the Eastern Sierra slopes down in toward Reno,

and that's where Hallelujah Junction is.

MUSIC CONTINUES

My companion Debbie, my wife,

for the last 28 years or more,

has played a tremendously important role in both my artistic

as well as my spiritual life.

We talk about these matters all the time and we've, you know,

we've gone through our adult lives and are approaching, you know,

our old age together.

And she is a very, very profoundly deep thinker

and has long been involved in the study of philosophy,

and particularly the work of Carl Jung.

And so she's not only my mate and my wife,

but also my soul buddy, which is something I am deeply grateful for.

OPERATIC PIECE PLAYS

Like most of his fellow countrymen, John Adams is

rooted in a profound sense of what it is to be an American.

Throughout its history,

America has reflected the values of its Founding Fathers,

driven as they were by a sense of creating heaven on earth.

The spirituality that illuminates so much of Adams's music is

connected to a deeply felt engagement with the world

in which the humanity of the individual,

caught up in the often tragic web of history, is paramount,

whether it be President Nixon or Chou En-lai,

the Palestinians who murdered the American cruise ship passenger, Leon Klinghoffer,

or Robert Oppenheimer, the inventor of the atomic bomb.

# Batter my heart

# Three-personed God

# For you

# As yet

# But knock

# Breathe

# Knock

# Breathe

# Knock

# Breathe

# Shine and seek to mend

# Batter my heart

# Three-personed God

# That I may rise and stand

# O'er throw me and bend your force

# To break

# Blow

# Break

# Blow

# Break, blow

# Burn and make me new. #

I get a phone call from the New York Philharmonic saying that, um,

the orchestra wanted me to write a piece to commemorate

the first anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks.

It was a very difficult situation for me,

because I didn't see how one could write a piece

that would be in any kind of good taste or have a really deep meaning about something

that was so recent and had caused terrible scars

on the collective consciousness of the country.

I ended up by writing a piece that was very private.

It uses huge forces, probably 200 people on a stage,

a children's chorus, an adult chorus and a very large orchestra.

But it's a work that is largely pianissimo

and I thought of it as a work that, um...

in which the souls of the people who died

were kind of hovering in the performance space in a very, very quiet way.

VOICES DESCRIBE VICTIMS

# We will miss you

# We all love you

# We miss you

# We love you

# Miss you

# Love you... #

John Adams's politics have been more subtle than dogmatic.

Not least in his work with Peter Sellars.

Their latest collaboration revisits Christ's Passion

in a thoroughly contemporary and fiercely political way,

giving voice to the usually silent women who

stand on the periphery of the Gospel story.

I should probably get them, if I have a copy, just to show you.

Here's the first draft that has what Peter gave me.

You can see how Peter works,

he doesn't write an original work himself.

What he does is he assembles texts he's Xeroxed straight from the Bible.

This is Peter's handwriting and there's more Xerox from a different author.

Then there is a poem by the Mexican poet, woman poet,

Rosario Castellanos, in the original Spanish.

Then I have my, my modes, my scales, my material.

Which I use largely to prod myself to move out of my comfort zone.

I assign myself certain musical challenges

to find within a certain scale or mode, an expressive potential.

You know, I am 65 years old, I've been composing for 45 years

and I still don't know if something's going to work or not.

And maybe that's a good thing because it means

I'm not falling back on familiar solutions that I know will work.

I took a lot of risks in this piece

and I think it actually in the end, it worked.

I was very satisfied with it, which I didn't expect I would be.

POIGNANT VIOLIN PLAYS

I arrived here in 1971, so 41 years ago.

And California has changed a lot since then.

It's still possible to be in very, very remote places here in the West.

We have a little cabin high up in the Sierras where our children

spent their summers.

'And I've had some of my really wonderful musical ideas

'when I've been out in that landscape.

'Sometimes in an automobile, sometimes hiking.'

'It's become harder and harder for Americans to feel that freedom'

because our lives are so intertwined with technology now.

I don't think people have even had the ability to stand back and to see

how...damaging the digital experience has been

on human consciousness.

I'm just beginning to understand that about myself,

that when you stare into a computer screen,

you're going into the virtual environment and it's not real.

I think that being in a lonely place,

in a place where you are away from that constant chatter,

that constant vibration with the sort of collective psyche,

then you're alone with yourself and you're experiencing true solitude,

is a profoundly necessary thing for one's psyche

and, um...

the older I get, the more I realise that I need that.

That it feeds... It feeds, you know, the deepest part of myself.

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