Thursday, 11/11/10
Looking for a reason to be hopeful?
None of these musicians (or the conductor) is over the age of 18.
John Adams, Shaker Loops (1978), first movement (“Shaking and Trembling”), live
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lagniappe
John Adams, rehearsing this music:
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It is a strange business, composing music in twenty-first-century America. The job is difficult in itself: it is slow, solitary, and intensely cerebral. You have to believe deeply in yourself to get through the process. You have to be possibly a little mad. When you are done, you have in your hands not a finished object—a painting that can be put up on a wall or a novel that can be read at one sitting—but a set of abstract notations that other musicians must learn and perform. Then you step back into the culture at large, where few people embrace, or even notice, what you do. In this country, classical music is widely regarded as a dead or alien form—so much so that jazz aficionados routinely say, “Jazz is America’s classical music.” To make the counterargument that America’s classical music is America’s classical music is somehow to admit that the battle is lost. In such a climate, composers easily become embittered.
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When I visited Adams at his house in Brushy Ridge, last June, he was pondering the composer’s relationship with the mass culture. “I like to think of culture as the symbols that we share to understand each other,” he said. “When we communicate, we point to symbols that we have in common. If people want to make a point, they reach for a reference. It might be a Woody Allen movie, or a John Lennon lyric, or ‘I’m not a crook.’ When I was young, I came to realize that twelve-tone music, or for that matter, all contemporary music, was so far divorced from communal experience that it didn’t appear on the national radar screen. It would be nice to hear someone say, ‘Look at that gas station in the moonlight. It’s pure John Adams.’”
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The music of John Adams, unlike so much classical composition of the last fifty years, has the immediate power to enchant.
—Alex Ross, “The Harmonist,” The New Yorker, 1/8/01
