Happy Birthday John Adams! 67 today.

[Gordon]

As I have just finished reading a biography of Robert Oppenheimer I thought I'd give his Dr Atomic Symphony a spin [beats that film music on R3 this PM]. What do people think of it?

http://www.amazon.co.uk/John-Adams/e/B000AR9FM2/ref=ac_dtp_sa_bio

[Serial_Apologist]

I like "The Wound Dresser" - probably because it rather reminds me of Vaughan Williams. But that for me is the trouble with Adams - always reminding me of someone else whom I like better, or not at all.

[edashtav]

I like "The Wound Dresser" - probably because it rather reminds me of Vaughan Williams. But that for me is the trouble with Adams - always reminding me of someone else whom I like better, or not at all.

Spot on, S-A.
John Adams finds vintage wine, pours it into sparkling new bottles and labels it as John Adams, A.C.

[jayne lee wilson]

Well, I'm a great John Adams fan - it seems to me that some listeners hear the source materials, the influences, ahead of the fresh sonic pleasures he creates out of them. OK... but I tend to hear it the other way round, enjoying the piece and only latterly noting whatever feeds into it, if at all... (or in a more cynical mood, I might just mutter a Brahmsian "any fool can see that"...)

Favourites? The last act of Nixon in China, an elegy of disappointment; that skin-prickling transition from the first movement of the Violin Concerto to the second, worth the composition and the listener's effort for those moments alone; the soothing, serene, gentle pulsing and colourshifting of Common Tones in Simple Time;
Tromba Lontana for its brief and precious atmospherics; Chamber Symphony for its restlessly inventive, anti-traditional commonality with Hindemith, Stravinsky, Schoenberg; the entry of the pianos, joyfully naked and unashamed, in the finale of Grand Pianola Music; then Shaker Loops, Harmonium, El Dorado part 2, all for the sheer pleasure they serve upon my ears.

But the more ambitiously symphonic and structurally extended Adams tends to get - Naive and Sentimental music, say - the less I can go with him...

"In almost all of his best pieces, there's a mixture of ecstasy and sadness - the catharsis at the end of Harmonium, the still, sad, personal last act of Nixon in China, or the middle movement of the Violin Concerto. It has an immense sadness and depth at the center of it".
(Simon Rattle)

[Tevot]

Hello there,

Harmonium was the first Adams piece I came across - particularly because I was intrigued by the titles of the poems that were set - i.e. "Negative Love" and "Because I could not stop for Death..." I'll probably give it a spin later on today along with A Short Ride in a Fast Machine...

I'd agree with SA's post #2 about there being conscious or unconscious echoes of other composers in Adams' work - for example in "On the Transmigration of Souls" I hear Charles Ives and Jean Sibelius...

Best Wishes,

Tevot

[BBMmk2]

I rather like his short ide in Fast machine, Harmonielehre, the violin concerto, and his piano music. lso high up is he Chairman /dances as well!

[edashtav]

John Adams seems happy to acknowlege the importance of roots and influences. He ends his memoir "Hallelujah Junction" with this paragraph:

The evolutionary scientist's sentimental hankering for a return to a golden age in music may indeed be proven irrelevent by a new generation of composers who, while enjoying the option to creatively plunder ( in the best sense of the word) give us something entirely new and fresh, thoughtful and pleasurable, and in doing so, confirm a more positive outlook: "advances to something better as reasons for celebration".
That piece selectively quotes from Stephen Gould, who wrote in 1996 that our culture has two canonical modes for trending. One is "advances to something better as reasons for celebration", the other is "declines to abyss as sources of lamentation."

I fear that Adams revels in his acts of recreation, and laments as he throws into the abyss works by more radical, and fundamentally more creative, composers.

Adams's work is typically American: positive in attitude, heart-warming, a pile of brightly coloured car-rugs that insulate many music-lovers from any need to confront what is really new and challenging.

Superficially, Adams is very good at what he does, but is the whole good enough, of sufficient relevance and profundity to be a lasting testament of our times?

[Richard Barrett]

he throws into the abyss works by more radical, and fundamentally more creative, composers (...) positive in attitude, heart-warming, a pile of brightly coloured car-rugs that insulate many music-lovers from any need to confront what is really new and challenging.

Couldn't have put it better, or, to tell the truth, anything like as well.

Obviously Jayne doesn't come into that category of listeners however. Jayne, for me it's not just about counting the influences on this piece or that, but that the emotional content of the music also seems second-hand and calculated, like the work of a panel of Hollywood producers turning an original work into an emptily formulaic one with the all-important feelgood factor. (And sorry but Simon Rattle's pronouncement seems to me as superficial as the music it's describing!)

[Black Swan]

I along with Jayne seem to be in the minority camp here. I like Adams' music. This is enough for me. I am a bit biased as I am American and have long tried to understand and champion American music. Yes I do hear Ives and other composers in Adams music this is not an issue only for Adams music. So I wish him a Happy Birthday and hope he has many more.

[edashtav]

[...]the emotional content of the music also seems second-hand and calculated, like the work of a panel of Hollywood producers turning an original work into an emptily formulaic one with the all-important feelgood factor. (And sorry but Simon Rattle's pronouncement seems to me as superficial as the music it's describing!)

I'm glad that you've highlighted the ersatz aspects of Adams' emotional content, Richard.

[Gordon]

Thanks all for various inputs, a bit polarised on occasion!! No harm in that. I have found Adams' music hard to "get", somehow it doesn't go anywhere. Perhaps if I was a practicing musician it would be different. Repeated listening doesn't help either. The initial impact of say Fast Machine palls after a while, sort of burns itself out.

I don't know the opera Dr Atomic so perhaps it would be harsh to be critical of the Symphony derived from it but, again, it sounds impactful at first but then doesn't seem to grow with repeated listening. As a piece of programme music it fails for me - 1st movement "Laboratory" doesn't work. 2nd movement "Panic", and do we need 14 minutes of it?? Well, OK, a bit of a film scene might help to visualise action but it does nothing special to illustrate Oppenheimer or his staff under pressure to deliver the bomb. Not subtle enough - but the sleeve notes go into how clever Adams is - in musical technique - failing though to project . 3rd movement "Trinity", at the first actual test explosion site. Very traumatic for the team - a spectacle like no other but then the realisation of what they had done and what was inevitably to come - what of the famous Oppenheimer quote from Bhagavad Gita, "I am becme Death, destroyer or Worlds" [or some such translation which, apparently, varies a lot]. No sense of that - the awe, the fear, dread, the guilt even [many of them spoke of that feeling after this test] in the music for me put against the scientist's sense of achievement - and it only takes him 7 minutes to explore that breadth of emotion. Perhaps he should have listened to Mahler 9 and written a threnody instead. 3 movements go nowhere in exploring the vast wealth in the subject matter and seem out of balance. Perhaps the fans of Adams can put me right?

[jayne lee wilson]

I guess I can no more hypnotize some of you into enjoying Adams' music than you can show me how to stop! But there are many other critically-aware performers and listeners of broad sympathies who like it too, and don't hear it as emotionally cheap or secondhand or ersatz. If I put on any of the aforementioned pieces I know I'll want to continue, I'll sink into it as I would into Haydn or Rameau or Maxwell Davies or Poulenc or Berg, all of which have recently compelled my attention. With responses of varying character and intensity!

Maybe some of us have an internal autoswitching device, like a sampling rate detector, shifting the filter of our emotional and musical expectations, maybe this alters or disables the critically associative checks and balances that seem to put some listeners off music like Adams' so much. I do have a love of sheer sound, and have always been aware of my attraction to quiet, pulsing or throbbing rhythms, or long quiet, drifting chords... I've sometimes put this down to my earlier life, a few miles from the hushed roar of the sea, or semidistant docks and steelworks, all of whose soft drones, clanks and rumblings have a soothing effect on me.

I think "taste" or "preference" probably is analysable - physiological or associative or early-ingrained... but it remains very difficult, often impossible, to follow the links and clues...
On the other hand, I've always felt my keenest musical pleasures to come from discovery, from new experiences - which brings me back to Adams, whose earlier music certainly had, for me, that sort of charge attached to it (and can still compel, even in its latter familiarity). In the end, all you can try to do is report your response honestly.

[edashtav]

[...] I've always felt my keenest musical pleasures to come from discovery, from new experiences. [...]

In the end, all you can try to do is report your response honestly.

[my emphasis]
Hear,Hear!