Originally posted by jayne lee wilson
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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...
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...
In an earlier post I said that Adams is more of a Grieg than a Beethoven. His more enjoyable non Operatic pieces tend to be shorter and not an attempt at a grand structural Argument.
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