John Adams

A Research and Information Guide

Alexander Sanchez-Behar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781138055803
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351677936
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Ethics in Medicine

Winner of the 2022 Vincent H. Duckles Award, Music Library Association

John Adams: A Research and Information Guide offers the first comprehensive guide to the musical works and literature of one of the leading American composers of our time.

The research guide catalogs and summarizes materials relating to Adams's work, providing detailed annotated bibliographic entries for both primary and secondary sources. Covering writings by and interviews with Adams, books, journal articles and book chapters, newspaper articles and reviews, dissertations, video recordings, and other sources, the guide also contains a chronology of Adams's life, a discography, and a list of compositions. Robust indexes enable researchers to easily locate sources by author, composition, or subject.

This volume is a major reference tool for all those interested in Adams and his music, and a valuable resource for students and researchers of minimalism, contemporary American music, and twentieth-century music more broadly.

1

Chronology of John Adams’s Life

1. 1947  Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on February 15, 1947 to Carl John Vincent Adams and Elinore Mary Coolidge. Both parents were amateur musicians. Carl, who was a clarinetist, provided John’s earliest musical training.
2. 1950  Family moved to Woodstock, Vermont.
3. 1954  Moved to Concord, New Hampshire, prompted by a new job for Carl at an industrial hardware company.
4. 1955  Began clarinet lessons with his father.
5. 1956  First lessons in composition, harmony, and theory under the instruction of an unnamed teacher from Saint Paul’s Preparatory School.
6. 1960  Clarinet lessons under the tutelage of Felix Viscuglia, bass clarinetist of the Boston Symphony.
7. 1962  Joined the New Hampshire State Hospital Auxiliary Orchestra. John Adams composed and conducted an unpublished suite for string orchestra. Attended a summer music camp in western Maine where he conducted Schumann’s Piano Concerto.
8. 1964–65 Private studies in conducting lessons from music director Mario di Bonaventura, who was a student of Nadia Boulanger and Igor Markevitch. Studied keyboard harmony and analysis from Luise Vosgerchian, student of Nadia Boulanger and professor at Harvard University. Met Walter Piston, professor emeritus of Harvard University. During his senior year in high school, Adams was a member of the Greater Boston Youth Symphony.
9. 1965–69 Undergraduate studies at Harvard University. Instruction in harmony from Harvard professor Elliot Forbes, followed by studies in counterpoint from David Del Tredici. In 1966 Adams joined the Boston Symphony Orchestra as a substitute and performed the American premiere of Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron. In the summer of 1966 Adams heard Duke Ellington perform in person. In 1967 Adams, together with actor John Lithgow, staged six performances of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro. As a junior, Adams was the student conductor of Harvard’s Bach Society Orchestra, which performed repertoire ranging from Bach to contemporary music. Adams wrote a letter to Leonard Bernstein about the state of contemporary music and the cognitive dissonance it was eliciting for Adams. Bernstein responded shortly thereafter of his own struggles with avant-garde music. In 1968 Adams declined an invitation to attend the conducting program at Tanglewood. During his last years at Harvard, Adams took private lessons in composition and analysis from Earl Kim and Leon Kirchner, both of whom were Arnold Schoenberg’s pupils. In spring 1969 Adams performed Piston’s Clarinet Concerto at Carnegie Hall in a concert performed by the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra. Adams completed his undergraduate studies in July 1969.
10. 1969  Began graduate studies in composition at Harvard University.
11. 1970  Married Hawley Currens, music teacher in Boston schools and daughter of a cardiologist.
12. 1971  Completed a master’s degree in composition at Harvard University. Shortly after graduation, Adams and his wife moved to Berkeley, California. During this time, Adams worked as an apartment building manager assistant and subsequently at a warehouse in Oakland called Regal Apparel.
13. 1972  Adams’s friend Ivan Tcherepnin informed Adams of a music-composition vacancy at the San Francisco Conservatory. Adams joined their faculty and remained there for ten years. In addition to his teaching duties, Adams was responsible for directing the New Music Ensemble for the school’s series of New Music concerts.
14. 1974  Adams and Hawley Currens divorced. Adams relocated to San Francisco.
15. 1978  Became New Music Advisor for the San Francisco Symphony.
16. 1981  Met his future wife, Deborah O’Grady, at the New Music America Festival.
17. 1982  Resigned from his teaching post at the San Francisco Conservatory. In the same year, Adams received a three-year commission as composer-in-residence with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra through the Meet the Composer Orchestra Residencies Program.
18. 1983  Met Peter Sellars at the Monadnock Music Festival.
19. 1984  Adams’s daughter, Emily Davis Adams, was born on May 30, 1984. The week after Emily’s birth their family moved back to Berkeley.
20. 1985  In December Adams was introduced to Alice Goodman by Peter Sellars, to begin working on Nixon in China
21. Adams’s son, Samuel Carl Adams, was born on December 30, 1985.
22. 1988  Won the Grammy Award for the Best Classical Contemporary Composition for Nixon in China.
23. Named Creative Chair of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. He served with this orchestra for two years as conductor and advisor.
24. In the spring Adams accepted an invitation to be resident of the American Academy in Rome. While living in Rome, Adams received an invitation to attend the Third International Music Festival for Humanism, Peace and Friendship Among Nations to be held the same year in Leningrad, Russia. While at the festival Adams formed a friendship with composer John Cage. At the Festival, the Lithuanian orchestra performed Harmonielehre.
25. 1992  Began integrating musical ideas from Nicolas Slonimsky’s 1947 compendium titled Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns in his compositions. Adams acknowledged this influence on his works since the Chamber Symphony. The two composers formed a friendship at an unknown date after Slonimsky had moved to California.
26. 1993  Won the Royal Philharmonic Award for his Chamber Symphony.
27. 1995  Won the Grawemeyer Award for Violin Concerto.
28. 1997  Won the Grammy Award for the Best Classical Contemporary Composition for El Dorado.
29. 2002  Received a commission to write a work in memorial of September 11. He titled the work On the Transmigration of Souls.
30. 2003  Won the Pulitzer Prize in Music for On the Transmigration of Souls.
31. Received a commission to write for the opening of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Adams titled his new composition The Dharma at Big Sur.
32. Appointed Artist in Association with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and composer-in-residence at Carnegie Hall.
33. 2004  Won the Grammy Award for the Best Classical Contemporary Composition for The Transmigration of Souls.
34. Won the Nemmers Prize in Composition from Northwestern University. Along with the cash award and a performance of the composer’s works with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Adams was granted a residency with the Northwestern University Bienen School of Music.
35. 2007  Awarded the Harvard Arts Medal, a distinction for demonstrated achievement in the arts by a Harvard alumnus.
36. 2008  Recipient of the Honorary Doctor of Music degree from Northwestern University.
37. 2009  Won the National Endowment for the Arts Opera Honors Award.
38. Appointed Inaugural Creative Chair of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
39. Recipient of the Honorary Doctor of Music degree from Duquesne University.
40. 2012  Recipient of the Honorary Doctor of Music degree from Harvard University.
41. 2013  Recipient of the Honorary Doctor of Music degree from Yale University.
42. 2015  Recipient of the Honorary Doctor of Music degree from the Royal Academy of Music.
43. 2016  Named composer-in-residence at the Berlin Philharmoniker.
44. 2017  Awarded the San Francisco Opera Medal.
45. 2019  Awarded the Erasmus Prize by The Netherlands’ Praemium Erasmianum Foundation for exceptional contribution in the arts.

2

Writings by Adams

1.Adams, John. Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

Adams’s autobiography is an important source for scholars of minimalist music and musicians wishing to explore the composer’s life and works. The layout and content are intended to be autobiographical in nature, and to that aim, the book represents the most comprehensive source available. Adams’s memoir details his family history, recounting his earliest musical experiences as a child in his family’s Winnipesaukee Gardens, where they had a dance hall that was frequented by touring musicians and other important figures such as Duke Ellington. Adams’s personal anecdotes reveal his love of jazz and classical music from an early age. He gives accounts of learning to play the clarinet under the tutelage of his father. He contemplates a transformative moment at an early age when his third-grade teacher read a biography of Mozart to his class. That moment planted the seed that would blossom into a life of musical composition.

During his college years as a music major at Harvard University, he experienced a dialectical opposition between his love of popular music and the academic avant-garde that pervaded universities across the country. Adams recalls corresponding with Leonard Bernstein about his frustrations over the state of contemporary classical music. This conflict of musical forces proved pivotal in the formation of Adams’s compositional style, rooted in the continuum of classical or art music, though with a popular, minimalist aesthetic that appealed to the composer. Adams pinpoints the composers who were most influential to his own development, among them the American modernist Charles Ives and one of the pioneers of musical minimalism, Steve Reich.

Adams’s autobiography details how, upon graduating from college, he made the decision to relocate to the West Coast. He elaborates on all of the menial jobs he worked at until he was serendipitously sought out by the San Francisco Conservatory to teach music composition classes. Working as a composer and directing the New Music Ensemble at the conservatory helped Adams nurture his career and lead to an important commission with the San Francisco Symphony.

In the remainder of his autobiography, Adams discusses the personal history and motivation for writing each composition from beginning stages to completion. He provides an insight into the creative process and the development of his compositional style. Overall, Adams gives readers a glimpse into his career and his thoughts on music in a way that no other writer could.

2.____. John Adams Official Website. Accessed December 21, 2018. www.earbox.com.

Adams’s official website offers extensive notes on his musical works in greater detail than his publisher, Boosey & Hawkes. In addition to program notes, one can hear sample audio clips of his works, view portions of opera productions on video (from Nixon in China and Doctor Atomic), find featured recordings for sale, and for select works, hear video interviews with the composer. Adams’s website has undergone notable changes in layout and content over the years. For about a year circa 2010, Adams wrote a series of posts on a wide range of musical subjects in a blog format, and readers added comments and expressed their views. The posts had a light and humorous nature, and their subjects were often about Adams’s neighbor as well as the French novelist Marcel Proust. These posts no longer appear in Adams’s website. At present, the composer features news items on his Twitter and Facebook accounts. Recent updates to the website have resulted in less content along with an updated list of Adams’s works, though readers can access previous versions of his official website through the online internet archive Wayback Machine (https://archive.org/web).

3.____. “Three Weeks to Go for Doctor Atomic.” NewMusicBox (September 9, 2005). http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/Three-Weeks-to-Go-for-Doctor-Atomic.

Adams writes a reflection piece on his impressions of Doctor Atomic rehearsals in anticipation of the world premiere. This article is not duplicated in Adams’s official website. Adams explains the process of revising the score after hearing baritone Gerald Finley sing musical selections. Adams composed the opera using detailed MIDI mockups of the instrumental parts before finalizing the work. The composer touches on many issues related to vocal composition and shows an aversion toward the operatic tradition that uses loud orchestration and makes text largely unintelligible. Instead, Adams opts for some amplification of the voices with the aid of sound designer Mark Grey. He brings to attention a major scene that was left out of the final opera, consisting of a phone conversation between General Groves and an army doctor. Adams believes the dramatic and musical form was complete without this scene (Alice Miller Cotter provides additional information on this scene in her 2016 dissertation). Additionally, Adams discusses text setting and being loyal to a librettist’s artistic aims while reflecting on his previous collaborations with Alice Goodman and June Jordan. Last, Adams reveals plans for a Doctor Atomic symphony, not with the structure of a suite or musical extracts, but rather recomposing the opera into a symphony in the same vein as Hindemith’s Mathis der Mahler symphony.

3

Books

4.Botha, Marc. A Theory of Minimalism. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.

Botha contends that a valid definition of minimalism cannot be reduced to a set of traits or music...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Chronology of John Adams’s Life
• 2. Writings by Adams
• 3. Books
• 4. Journal and Magazine Articles, Book Chapters
• 5. Select Interviews
• 6. Doctoral Dissertations, Master’s, and Honors Theses
• 7. Select Newspaper Titles, News Articles, and Reviews
• 8. Select Video Recordings
• 9. Other Internet Sources
• 10. Related Writings on Minimalism
• 11. Miscellaneous
• 12. Encyclopedia Entries
• A. Discography of Adams’s Compositions and Arrangements
• B. List of Compositions
• C. Index of Authors
• D. Index of Compositions and Arrangements
• E. Subject Index