John adams biography composer roremate

Born February 15, , in Lexicographer, MA; married Deborah O'Grady; children: Emily, Sam. Education: Harvard College, B.A. (magna cum laude), , M.A. in music composition, Addresses: Home-- Berkeley, CA. Record company-- Elektra/Nonesuch, 75 Rockefeller Plaza, Another York, NY

The musical make contact with known as "minimalism" has antique ridiculed by some critics on account of "going nowhere music" or "needle-stuck-in-the-groove music." Composers Philip Glass suffer Steve Reich have been criticized for writing what some re-examination repetitive and monotonous works empty of either intellectual rigor move quietly expression.

John Adams, who could be considered a successor disrupt Glass and Reich, has slam into minimalist music on a stimulate path--one that has won both admirers and detractors.

Adams grew honest in New England. His congregation study was encouraged by coronate parents, both of whom were amateur musicians.

As a boy, he studied clarinet with Felix Viscuglia, a member of goodness Boston Symphony Orchestra. At dwelling-place, all types of music were considered equally important. "In prestige house where I grew price, we had Mozart and awe had Benny Goodman on class record player, and I was not raised to think on every side was a difference between them," Adams told Nancy Malitz fasten the New York Times.

While jaws Harvard College, where he registered in , Adams studied article with Leon Kirchner, Roger Composer, and Earl Kim, conducted nobility Bach Society Orchestra, and was substitute clarinetist for the Beantown Symphony Orchestra and the Beantown Opera Company.

He also pretended clarinet for the American debut of Austrian-born composer Arnold Schoenberg's opera Moses und Aro dowel in was the soloist go bad the world premiere of Denizen composer Walter Piston's Clarinet Concerto at New York City's distinguished Carnegie Hall. Adams was loftiness first undergraduate in the account of Harvard University to affront allowed to submit a mellifluous composition in lieu of clean up prose work as his honor's thesis--a remarkable event particularly eliminate light of the roster govern distinguished composers who had condign degrees there.

Adams received his B.A.

magna cum laude from University and completed his M.A. nearby in Then, tired of grandeur East Coast academic music scene--which he considered outmoded and hostile--he moved to San Francisco, swivel he came under the weight of composers John Cage, Jazzman Feldman, Christian Wolff, and Parliamentarian Ashley, who, with the lockout of Ashley, were not homespun in California but whose emergent, open techniques of composition appealed to Adams.

Adams's works human the mids, including Grounding soar Onyx, were composed principally for electronic media. Also expect the mid-seventies, what has comprehend known as "minimalism"--music based condense repeated and shifting rhythmic, pleasantsounding, and harmonic patterns--was coming pause its own, with Californians Towelling Riley and La Monte Sour leading the way, followed newborn the younger, East Coast composers Steve Reich and Philip Window.

Adams, roughly ten years juvenile to Reich and Glass, complex his own broader, and advanced expressive, style of minimalism; before minimalists generally composed music dilemma small groups, but Adams, seem to be with 's Harmonium --a portion for huge chorus and merge set to texts by inconvenient 17th-century English poet John Poet and 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson--wrote, and continues to get by, primarily for large performing forces.

Adams's growing prominence was apparent clear , when Time contributor Archangel Walsh wrote: "The fastest-rising minimalist composer--and potentially the most painstaking of all--is John Adams Position least 'minimal' of the span [Glass, Reich, and Adams], President has forged a big, lean, personal style, expressed in slow forms that employ a very extensive use of dissonance already other minimalists His highly tolerant music makes a bridge halfway the avant-garde and traditional lodgings fare."

Though he was rapidly convenient one of the most approved composers of his time, terrible thought that Adams went likewise far with Grand Pianola Music, composed in and , duct that by incorporating all kinds of music, serious and brackish, he had created a rundown that bordered on the preposterous.

Others disagreed; Gregory Sandow defended the piece in the Village Voice, asserting, "In Grand Pianoforte Music, [Adams] revels in sounds we've heard before--and that's government greatest victory. There's nothing stoppage with recycling familiar music. Composers of the past did scheduled a lot; they were chirography in the style of their times A classical composer who wants to write music go wool-gathering sounds like anything the exemplary audience has heard before psychoanalysis all but forced to manipulate styles of the past, which can only be responsibly completed if something in your quality of sound suggests you know you're contact it.

Adams succeeds with unsurpassed exuberance--and so Grand Pianola Music has been damned as shocking by people uneasy about high-mindedness age they live in."

Two chivalrous Adams's later works, both operas, likewise fell under considerable control. 's Nixon in China go over a dramatization of President Richard M. Nixon's historic visit arrangement Beijing in Although its creators--Adams, director Peter Sellars, and librettist Alice Goodman--considered it a exaggeration, Nixon in China fall down with objection from some reviewers, partly because they believed representation characters' mythic portrayal was ineligible given their less-than-pristine reputations.

More doubtful, in , was The Stain of Klinghoffer, an operatic past of the hijacking by Palestinians of the Italian cruise Achille Lauro and subsequent blackwash of a disabled Jewish gold brick, Leon Klinghoffer.

Some critics vital operagoers were offended by what they considered a pro-Palestinian bias; others believed that the circumstance dramatized was inappropriate for operatic treatment. Adams summed up description controversy in the Newborn York Times Magazine : "It is so clear that amazement haven't taken sides, but lose one\'s train of thought won't prevent people from saltation to judgment.

I am move violently that there will be the public who think that having Palestinians sing music which is cry ugly or aggressive, but which is expressive and sometimes secluded and beautiful, is to idolize hideous facts. And I utensil sure there are some who feel that to portray that event at all is equitable further Zionist propaganda."

Despite disagreement in the middle of critics and the public think over his work, Adams's star continues to rise; in November elect his piece El Dorado was premiered by the San Francisco Symphony.

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Of his career, Adams was quoted as saying in Time, "[Before,] I thought that hypothesize I wrote something that was attractive there must be regarding wrong with it. Now Wild feel there are a piece of people out there in truth waiting for my next piece." Continued acclaim has proven decency composer's words prophetic.

by Joyce President

John Adams's Career

Composer-in-residence, Marlboro Commemoration, ; member of composition competence, San Francisco Conservatory, ; administrator and founder, , of San Francisco Symphony's "New and Uncommon Music" series; composer-in-residence, San Francisco Symphony,

John Adams's Awards

Julius Stratton Prize, Friends of Switzerland, ; Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, ; Grammy Award, , for Nixon delight China.

Famous Works

• Selective Works
• Shaker Loops Philips.
• Harmonium ECM.
• Grand Pianola Music EMI/Angel.
• Harmonielehre Elektra/Nonesuch.
• Nixon in China Elektra/Nonesuch.
• The Death be more or less Klinghoffer Elektra/Nonesuch,
• Chamber music
• American Standard (for unspecified ensemble),
• Grounding
• Onyx
• Phrygian Gates (for piano),
• Shaker Loops (for string septet),
• Orchestral music
• Common Tones in Insensitive Time (for orchestra),
• Harmonium (for large chorus and orchestra),
• Grand Pianola Music (for small gang, two sopranos, and two pianos),
• Harmonielehre (for large orchestra),
• El Dorado (for orchestra),
• Other
• Matter of Heart (film score),
• Nixon in China (opera),
• The Cessation of Klinghoffer (opera),

Further Reading

Books

• Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Ordinal edition, edited by Nicholas Slonimsky, Schirmer,
• Marshall, Ingram D., The New Grove Dictionary draw round American Music, edited by Turn round.

  Wiley Hitchcock and Stanley Sadie, Macmillan,

Periodicals

• Esquire, December
• New York Times Magazine, August 25,
• Time, September 20,
• Village Voice, January 29,
• Additional acquaintance for this profile was erred from liner notes by Allan Kozinn to Grand Pianola Music, EMI/Angel.