Adams, John

[Roehre]

A bit! Anyone who thinks contemporary music needed "saving" can't have anything else much of interest to say about it, surely.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

If you arranged (for example) several albums by Mike Oldfield for orchestra, you'd likely get as many classical bums on seats and as many gushing critics.

David Bedford did one; didn't happen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7O3q_1l_Es

[teamsaint]

David Bedford did one; didn't happen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7O3q_1l_Es

Cant really have ben a surprise, given the listening alternatives available.

[richardfinegold]

A bit! Anyone who thinks contemporary music needed "saving" can't have anything else much of interest to say about it, surely.

It doesn't hurt to have a living, breathing Composer with some type of Public Profile. Most people think that Classical Music only consists of works by dead people. If Adams serves as a portal for people to become interested in Classical Music, what is the harm?

[kea]

It doesn't hurt to have a living, breathing Composer with some type of Public Profile. Most people think that Classical Music only consists of works by dead people. If Adams serves as a portal for people to become interested in Classical Music, what is the harm?

To me the analogy would be telling fans of Renaissance art that painting is still relevant, and presenting as one's example Thomas Kinkade.

[Blotto]

David Bedford did one; didn't happen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7O3q_1l_Es

Bloody hell, that's boring! I admired it for the first few bars but then ... they played the bars again.

[Blotto]

I suspect Bedford's Tubular Bells at the Proms might get a near-full house, and a BBC Four screening!

It should have been the free Prom, eh? :p

But actually, what a shame the free audience weren't invited to hear Adams instead of Riverdance. It would have enlarged somebody's musical horizons rather than kept them low. Did the programmers really think that Riverdance was all that audience deserved? That the prospect of Riverdance might draw someone in and expose them to Grieg's piano concerto?

[jayne lee wilson]

Bloody hell, that's boring! I admired it for the first few bars but then ... they played the bars again.

Yes, what a relief there are so few repeats in the artform formerly known as Classical Music! Oh, Just Imagine how bored we'd all be...
Good job Mozart invented Serialism, isn't it? What a clever chap.

[jayne lee wilson]

Anyway.

I first heard John Adams some time in the 1990s - probably Shaker Loops, Harmonium, Common tones in Simple Time, Tromba Lontana - I taped the Halle premiere of El Dorado... so what did I find so attractive? A sense of speed, trajectory, rhythmical lift & impulse which became an exhilaration, a vision of something light, shining, sometimes darker and more driven, like a natural phenomena in the sea or sky... something carrying me, lifting me like a stormy sea or a warm breeze on a hilltop. Then I discovered Chamber Symphony, Fearful Symmetries... I thought, there's more to this guy - cartoonish mockery, lurid violence - and the pulverising train-rhythms of Symmetries took me back to Big Audio Dynamite, Mick Jones and The Clash. After encounters with Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, I thought, socially aware and direct communication too! - this guy can do it all... and later I began to relate back to pieces like Sibelius' Night Ride and Sunrise, or Beethoven's Pastoral (2nd movement as well as 1st!)...

It didn't bother me that his materials were so familiar; the musical structures and images created were giving me new and intense experiences. I didn't ask them (or any music) to do more.

But I began to wonder, with the Violin Concerto, whether the seriousness of intent implied by such a title had misled him a little - in order to create the wondrous beauties of the slow movement (and the transition to it) he'd overstretched a limited symphonic technique; I found more - a lot more - in the first movement later, but always felt the finale simply "finished the job", let the rest down a shade (hardly unique in that).
So when I came to Harmonielehre or especially, Naive and Sentimental Music, I had a sense of "worst fears confirmed". A feeling that he'd had to attempt something like this, but couldn't quite achieve his grandly symphonic aims. In trying to move beyond what he'd first had, freshly and originally, to say, in trying to build more ambitious structures, he'd revealed his limitations... something like a rock band with 3rd- or 4th-album syndrome, or a great singles act attempting a concept album.

In Guide To Strange Places, he seems almost to recognise this and to try to self-renew in that shorter, sharper earlier vein... but it doesn't quite come off. It seems far more interesting than the big post-Mahlerian, post-Wagnerian rapprochements, but the ending sounds too selfconsciously an attempt to be...modernist.

But there remain incidental pleasures and beauties, like John's Book of Alleged Dances, or the Trinity Aria from Doctor Atomic... and I sense that El Nino may have more to offer than I've yet had time to discover.
What draws you to a composer's work is finally a mystery - especially a strong, early attraction: I can no more easily explain my love of Bruckner or Poulenc than that of, well, at least some of John Adams; my attraction to Birtwistle is as hard to describe, personally, as my recent fascination with Per Norgard: utterly compelled by music which I find very difficult to verbally evoke.

So much the better for that...

[richardfinegold]

To me the analogy would be telling fans of Renaissance art that painting is still relevant, and presenting as one's example Thomas Kinkade.

I fail to see why his having some success commercially represents a threat to Life As We Know It.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I fail to see why his having some success commercially represents a threat to Life As We Know It.

It doesn't (but it might suggest that "commercial success" demonstrates a depressing vision of both "commerce" and "success") - but then I fail to see how admiration of Adams can lead someone to real contemporary "classical" Music. The success of Jack Vitriano isn't what makes people aware of Tracy Emin's work - it's the synthetic, vicarious outrage of the Tabloids that did that - any more than it brings a wider public to an awareness of Lorna Simpson.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

On further reflection, there is, of course, one way in which Vitriano might lead someone to Simpson - if, visiting a gallery with an example of the former's work, there also happened also to be one of the latter's on display. Then, at least, there'd be a chance of an encounter. (Similarly, a Betjeman poem in an anthology might lead to an encounter with Pound in the same anthology.) If an ensemble programmed an Adams piece alongside one by Billone, then maybe ....


Not impossible - the London Sinfonietta pairing Reich's Music for 18 Musicians with Ferneyhough's Transit some years ago was astonishingly successful*, and when Adams was CotW, he included Babbitt's Relata II as "historical background", so fair dos.


* = But then Drumming is a much better work than anything Adams' imagination allows him to write.

EDIT: as, indeed, is Music for 18 Musicians which was the Reich piece on that programme.

[MrGongGong]

But I just cannot shake off the gut feeling that the guy is having the longest and most lucrative laugh in musical history at us all.

I hope you aren't raising the whole ENC nonsense ?

[BBMmk2]

No-one, I don't think has mentioned "On The Transmigration of Souls" with he 20th anniversary coming up, I think this work, hmmm is this the best of this composer or not? I find it quite moving.

[amateur51]

No-one, I don't think has mentioned "On The Transmigration of Souls" with he 20th anniversary coming up, I think this work, hmmm is this the best of this composer or not? I find it quite moving.

To what 20th anniversary are you referring Bbm?