It can be hard to pin down Adams’ style, because somewhat in the same way that Stravinsky was constantly evolving, the composer changes his musical approach to fit whatever project he is working on at the time. But even though elements of minimalism recur in his music, the composer moved beyond the approach. In his early pieces, he created his own brand of minimalism, which can be heard in some of the insistent, iterative passages in Nixon in China (1985-87), one of the few contemporary operas to gain a foothold in the standard repertoire. San Francisco Chronicle critic Joshua Kosman, for example, has written that Adams’ 1999 large-scale orchestral work Naïve and Sentimental Music (a title inspired by the writings of 18th-century philosopher Friedrich Schiller) “takes its rhetoric and sense of scale from the symphonies of Bruckner, Mahler and Sibelius, and its musical content from the nexus of pop melody and old-style minimalism à la Steve Reich.”Īnd indeed, Adams drew on the work of Reich and Philip Glass, composers a decade or so older than him. “I need to have both – that extrovert, public activity to balance the introverted and solitary nature of my composing,” he said in a 2017 interview published on the Chicago Symphony Orchestra website.Īdams is part of a wave of composers in the late 20th century who rejected the iron grip that serialism exerted on the field for decades and looked to other musical styles and classical music’s past for inspiration. Unlike some composers who dabble in the pursuit, Adams has taken conducting seriously enough that he was invited by the vaunted Berlin Philharmonic to lead a slate of his works as that orchestra’s composer-in-residence in 2016-17. In addition, Adams will conduct two of his own creations: City Noir (2009) and Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? (2018). The Grammy Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winner will serve as the Colorado Music Festival’s 2022 composer-in-residence and co-curator of its July 12-17 Music of Today series, which features an array of works by 17 living composers. Once an upstart who caused waves with his controversial “CNN operas” like Nixon in China and Death of Klinghoffer, the 75-year-old composer has become a much performed and respected éminence grise in the field.
Who sprang to fame in the 1980s with high-spirited works like Short Ride in a Fast Machine.
Photo by Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini Predicting musical immortality is a speculative enterprise at best, but few if any composers from our time stand a better chance of being remembered 100 years from now than John Adams…
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