Hailing from New England yet now based in California, composer John Adams occupies a central place in twentieth-century classical music and may be seen equally as the final minimalist or the initial post-minimalist. Although his idiom overlaps in several respects with those of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Terry Riley, Adams incorporated an expansive range of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic resources from his first pieces onward, rendering his output more immediately approachable to listeners who might find Riley’s In C or Glass’s Einstein on the Beach excessively austere.
Born on February 15, 1947, in Worcester, Massachusetts, Adams grew up in a succession of New England communities. His parents noticed his musical gifts at an early age; his father, an amateur clarinetist, introduced him to the instrument, and the two performed together in a local concert band in their New Hampshire town during Adams’s early teenage years. By then he had already accumulated several years of piano and additional music instruction, and he maintains that he recognized his intention to compose by the age of eight, having begun writing tonal orchestral works by thirteen. He enrolled at Harvard University in 1965, where he finished both undergraduate and graduate studies with Leon Kirchner, Roger Sessions, and David del Tredici while cultivating a parallel enthusiasm for jazz and rock; a 1970 tape composition for two channels bore the title “Heavy Metal.” At Harvard his primary activities centered on performance and conducting, composition remaining largely a pastime. After receiving his degree in 1971 and accepting a teaching post at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Adams redirected his energies toward writing, producing chamber and choral scores for assorted groups. He later disavowed most of these early efforts, the bulk of which stay unpublished, and identifies 1977’s “Phrygian Gates,” a pulsating solo-piano work commissioned by Mack McCray, as his first mature composition. This piece was soon followed by the 1978 string-ensemble work “Shaker Loops,” which became his most widely performed early score, and by Harmonium in 1980, a setting for chorus and orchestra that draws its texts from John Donne and Emily Dickinson.
The 1982 ensemble piece Grand Pianola Music marked Adams’s first overtly contentious work: scored for two pianos, female voices, winds, brass, and percussion, its brassy, ironic character was likened to a Mad magazine satire of Charles Ives and drew boos at its premiere. Harmonielehre, completed in 1985, constitutes an even more explicit parody; titled after Arnold Schoenberg’s 1911 treatise on tonal harmony, the long score represents Adams’s initial step away from strict minimalism by grafting minimalist procedures onto the harmonically opulent late-Romantic language of the early twentieth century. Adams has voiced his aversion to Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method on numerous occasions, and in Harmonielehre he effectively rewrites that system through the accumulated history of twentieth-century music.
Adams’s subsequent large-scale work, the 1987 opera Nixon in China, briefly lifted him from specialized contemporary-music circles into broader public awareness. With an English libretto by poet Alice Goodman, the full-length opera presents Richard Nixon, Pat Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Chairman Mao, and Madame Mao as principal characters and draws on the historical record of Nixon’s 1972 visit to China. The piece generated widespread media attention, including commentary from observers who misinterpreted it as liberal political propaganda. Although Adams, who was of draft age during the Vietnam War, has never concealed his personal distaste for Nixon, Goodman’s text remains unexpectedly sympathetic to the former president, even in its sharpest passages. Two smaller pieces extracted from the same project are the 1985 ballet score The Chairman Dances and the 1987 voice-and-orchestra suite The Nixon Tapes.
The Death of Klinghoffer, another opera with a Goodman libretto, appeared in 1991 and proved still more divisive. This tragic, elegiac score is based on the 1984 terrorist seizure of the cruise ship Achille Lauro; its artistic merits have frequently been overshadowed by debates alleging a pro-Palestinian or anti-Israeli slant arising from the non-villainous portrayal of the hijackers. A planned performance of the opera’s choruses by the Boston Symphony Orchestra was canceled in November 2001 amid heightened sensitivities after the September attacks in New York City, Pennsylvania, and Washington.
Additional major compositions include the 1995 song cycle I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, with text by poet June Jordan; the 2000 Nativity oratorio El Niño; the 1988 orchestral work Fearful Symmetries, among his most rock-inflected scores; and the 1993 tape-and-sampler piece Hoodoo Zephyr, which reflects his enduring interest in jazz and blues. Alongside continued productivity across varied genres and instrumentations, Adams resumed conducting works by other composers with orchestras worldwide. In 1999 Nonesuch Records issued Earbox, a ten-CD retrospective containing complete recordings of Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, and earlier pieces dating back to the 1973 chamber work “Christian Zeal and Activity.” By the 2020s Adams had finished four additional operas, the most prominent being Doctor Atomic, along with further concertante and orchestral scores and numerous smaller pieces.
