[14] He grew up with jazz, Americana, and Broadway musicals, once meeting Duke Ellington at his grandfather's dance hall. Commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony,[46][47] Adams' orchestral piece My Father Knew Charles Ives (2003) is cast in three movements: "Concord", "The Lake", and "The Mountain". College in the ’60s: At Harvard, where he earns a B.A. Leon Klinghoffer's daughters, Lisa and Ilsa, after attending the opera, released a statement saying: "We are outraged at the exploitation of our parents and the coldblooded murder of our father as the centerpiece of a production that appears to us to be anti-Semitic. With neither discussion nor fanfare, he has become America's composer laureate. But when John Adams set out to write music representing the Crucifixion of Jesus, the composer underwent what he calls “a good old-fashioned crisis of faith.” [12] As an adolescent, he lived in Woodstock, Vermont for five years before moving to East Concord, New Hampshire,[13] and his family spent summers on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee, where his grandfather ran a dance hall. [11], John Adams, in full John Coolidge Adams, was born in Worcester, Massachusetts on February 15, 1947. I felt that if I said, 'OK, Klinghoffer is too hot to handle, do Harmonium, that in a sense I would be agreeing with the judgment about Klinghoffer.' [33] In the winter of 1982–83, Adams worked on the purely-electronic score for Available Light, a dance choreographed by Lucinda Childs with sets by Frank Gehry. Timothy McAllister, saxophone / Sydney Symphony Orchestra / John Adams Composer's Notes My Saxophone Concerto was composed in early 2013, the first work to follow the huge, three-hour oratorio, "The Gospel According to the Other Mary." [61], Many of Adams's ideas in composition are a reaction to the philosophy of serialism and its depictions of "the composer as scientist". [75], More recently, The New York Times writer Anthony Tommasini commended Adams for his work conducting the American Composers Orchestra. John Adams’ Development as a Composer Can Be Charted in String Music. Official John Adams Composer John Adams 2019-09-09T11:11:28-08:00. Though his father did not actually know American composer Charles Ives, Adams saw many similarities between the two men's lives and between their lives and his own, including their love of small-town New England life and their unfulfilled musical dreams. I n the contemporary music world, writing opera tends to generate the sexiest headlines and, at least temporarily, to garner more widespread attention. John Adams died on July 4th, 1826, exactly 50 years after signing the Declaration of Independence which he helped to write. [24], After graduating, Adams received a copy of John Cage's book Silence: Lectures and Writings from his mother. From Memory Spaces. Largely shaken of his loyalty to modernism, he was inspired to move to San Francisco,[22] where he taught at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music from 1972 until 1982,[25] teaching classes and directing the school's New Music Ensemble. On the Transmigration of Souls is scored for orchestra, chorus, and children's choir, accompanied by taped readings of the names of the victims mixed with the sounds of the city. [27] He also wrote American Standard, composed of three movements, a march, a hymn, and a jazz ballad, which was recorded and released on Obscure Records in 1975. The music of Adams is usually categorized as minimalist or post-minimalist, although in an interview he said that his music is part of the 'post-style' era at the end of the twentieth century. [37] He has also served as artistic director and conductor of the Ojai and Cabrillo Music Festivals in California. Nothing in his classic New England training or early career suggested he would become affiliated with or brilliantly expand the once controversial musical language of minimalism. As an adolescent, he lived in Woodstock, Vermont for five years before moving to East Concord, New Hampshire, and his family spent summers on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee, where his grandfather ran a dance hall.Adams' family didn't own a television, and didn't … The Erasmus Prize, one of Europe’s most prestigious cultural honors, will be awarded this year to John Adams. [15] Adams also played baseball as a boy. Bach, and Johannes Brahms, who "were standing at the end of an era and were embracing all of the evolutions that occurred over the previous thirty to fifty years". amplified) soprano accompanied by an ensemble of "electric" strings, keyboards, harp, and percussion. In The Dharma at Big Sur, Adams draws from literary texts such as Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and Henry Miller to illustrate the California landscape. A guide to John Adams's music Read more Adams, whose 70th birthday this week will be celebrated with a concert at the Barbican, still has a special affection for Nixon in China . Hallelujah Junction (1996) is a three-movement composition for two piano, which employs variations of a repeated two-note rhythm. [65], Some of Adams's compositions are an amalgamation of different styles. He also played in various local orchestras, concert bands, and marching bands while a student. Adams' third opera, Doctor Atomic (2005), is about physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project, and the creation and testing of the first atomic bomb. [72] James Wierzbicki for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch described Adams's score as the weak point in an otherwise well-staged performance, noting the music as "inappropriately placid", "cliché-ridden in the abstract" and "[trafficked] heavily in Adams's worn-out Minimalist clichés". Comparing Shaker Loops to the minimalist composer Terry Riley's piece In C, Adams remarked: ... rather than set up small engines of motivic materials and let them run free in a kind of random play of counterpoint, I used the fabric of continually repeating cells to forge large architectonic shapes, creating a web of activity that, even within the course of a single movement, was more detailed, more varied, and knew both light and dark, serenity and turbulence. "[79] Adams and Klinghoffer librettist Alice Goodman criticized the decision,[80] and Adams rejected a request to substitute a performance of Harmonium, saying: "The reason that I asked them not to do Harmonium was that I felt that Klinghoffer is a serious and humane work, and it's also a work about which many people have made prejudicial judgments without even hearing it. The libretto of Doctor Atomic, written by Peter Sellars, draws on original source material, including personal memoirs, recorded interviews, technical manuals of nuclear physics, declassified government documents, and the poetry of the Bhagavad Gita, John Donne, Charles Baudelaire, and Muriel Rukeyser. The Wound-Dresser is scored for baritone voice, two flutes (or two piccolos), two oboes, clarinet, bass clarinet, two bassoons, two horns, trumpet (or piccolo trumpet), timpani, synthesizer, and strings. Written in three movements, the work is inspired by an unlikely combination of sources: Arnold Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony No. [54][55][56], Adams' most recent opera, Girls of the Golden West (2017), with a libretto by Sellars based on historical sources, is set in mining camps during the California Gold Rush of the 1850s. Daines, Matthew. In 1979, Adams became the New Music Adviser for the San Francisco Symphony and created the symphony's New and Unusual Music concerts. "[85] A week after watching a Met performance of the opera, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said "there was nothing anti-Semitic about the opera," and characterized the portrayal of the Klinghoffers as "very strong, very brave", and the terrorists as "bullies and irrational". [17][18] Adams began composing at the age of ten and first heard his music performed as a teenager. By David Schiff in the Atlantic Monthly, April 2003. The pulse was best known from Terry Riley's early composition In C, and slowly more and more composers used it as a common practice. [60] While Adams employs minimalist techniques, such as repeating patterns, he is not a strict follower of the movement. Born in Massachusetts in 1947, composer John Adams was raised in Vermont and New Hampshire. © 2021 Dead or Kicking / All Rights Reserved. In the early 1970s, Adams wrote several pieces of electronic music for a homemade modular synthesizer he called the "Studebaker". One example is Grand Pianola Music (1981–82), a humorous piece that purposely draws its content from musical cliches. [58] He is married to photographer Deborah O'Grady, with whom he has a daughter, Emily, and a son, the composer Samuel Carl Adams.[16][59]. During this time, Adams established an international career as a conductor. Without dance, the electronic piece alone is called Light Over Water. "[81] In response to an article by the San Francisco Chronicle's David Wiegand[82] denouncing the BSO decision, musicologist and critic Richard Taruskin accused the work of catering to "anti-American, anti-Semitic and anti-bourgeois" prejudices. His works stand out among contemporary classical compositions for their depth of expression, brilliance of sound, and the profoundly humanist nature of their themes. Before 1977. 16 talking about this. ... Jake Heggie is the American composer … Characters include Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty, Edward Teller, General Leslie Groves, and Robert Wilson. [68] When Adams commented on his own characterization of particular minimalist music, he stated that he went joyriding on "those Great Prairies of non-event". [67], In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Adams started to add a new character to his music, which he called "the Trickster". Gershon believes that Adams is the perfect composer to curate West Coast, Left Coast because he is so, well, not like a composer. [43] The piece incorporates a wide range of texts, including biblical texts as well as poems by Hispanic poets like Rosario Castellanos, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Gabriela Mistral, Vicente Huidobro, and Rubén Darío. In many respects, Adams was like his father, John Adams. At this point, Adams began to experiment with electronic music, and his experiences are reflected in the writing of Phrygian Gates (1977–78), in which the constant shifting between modules in Lydian mode and Phrygian mode refers to activating electronic gates rather than architectural ones. John Adams, Soundtrack: Shutter Island. At first release, Nixon in China received mostly negative press feedback. The two-act opera was commissioned as part of the Vienna New Crowned Hope Festival to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth. For the formerly Alaska-based composer, see, Jonathan W. Bernard, "Minimalism, Postminimalism, and the Resurgence of Tonality in Recent American Music", 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship, I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, The Death of Klinghoffer § Controversy and allegations of antisemitism, BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award, "BBC Music – A minimal guide to minimalism", "John Adams | American composer and conductor", "Symphony guide: John Adams's Harmonielehre", "John Adams' Memory Space: 'On The Transmigration Of Souls, "Protests Greet Metropolitan Opera's Premiere of, "John Adams in conversation with Sarah Willis", "Why John Adams Won't Write an Opera About President Trump", "I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky", "Symphony premieres Adams' splendid 'Ives' / A funny and touching musical memoir", "John Adams and Peter Sellars Again Joining Forces for New Opera", "SF Symphony Plays Mahler and Samuel Carl Adams", "The Trickster of Modern Music : Composer John Adams Keeps Reinventing Himself, to Wilder and Wilder Applause", "Beyond Minimalism: The Later Works of John Adams. During this time, Adams also wrote The Chairman Dances (1985), which he described as an "'out-take' of Act III of Nixon in China", to fulfill a long-delayed commission for the Milwaukee Symphony. John Coolidge Adams (born February 15, 1947) is an American composer and conductor of classical music and opera, with strong roots in minimalism. [51][52] The libretto by Peter Sellars draws its texts from the Old Testament and New Testament of the Bible and from Rosario Castellanos, Rubén Darío, Dorothy Day, Louise Erdrich, Hildegard von Bingen, June Jordan, and Primo Levi. We haven't heard any unfortunate news about John Adams having the coronavirus (COVID-19). [24][25] As his, he wrote The Electric Wake for "electric" (i.e. [63], Adams experienced a musical epiphany after reading John Cage's book Silence (1973), which he claimed "dropped into [his] psyche like a time bomb". The Trickster allowed Adams to use the repetitive style and rhythmic drive of minimalism, yet poke fun at it at the same time. (1969) and an M.A. BSO managing director Mark Volpe remarked of the decision: "We originally programmed the choruses from John Adams' The Death of Klinghoffer because we believe in it as a work of art, and we still hold that conviction. With Paul Giamatti, Laura Linney, John Dossett, Stephen Dillane. [44] It won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Music[45] as well as the 2005 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Composition. John Adams to receive Erasmus Prize for 2019. From 1988 to 1990, he served as conductor and music advisor for the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. John Adams, in full John Coolidge Adams, (born Feb. 15, 1947, Worcester, Mass., U.S.), American composer and conductor whose works were among the most performed of contemporary classical music.. Adams became proficient on the clarinet at an early age (sometimes freelancing with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and performing with other groups) and by his teenage years was composing. ... [Tanglewood Festival Chorus members] explained that it was a purely human reason, and that it wasn't in the least bit a criticism of the work. John Adams was born on February 15, 1947 in Worcester, Massachusetts, USA as John Coolidge Adams. Theater Koblenz, a 501-seat theater built in 1787, became one of the growing number of German houses to present the operas of the American composer John Adams… Adams used the same phrase for the title of his 2008 memoir. [66], Adams, like other minimalists of his time (e.g. "John Adams: A Portrait and a Concert of American Music". [70] The New York Times called 1996's Hallelujah Junction "a two-piano work played with appealingly sharp edges", and 2001's American Berserk "a short, volatile solo piano work". "[77] In response to these accusations of antisemitism, composer and Oberlin College professor Conrad Cummings wrote a letter to the editor defending Klinghoffer as "the closest analogue to the experience of Bach's audience attending his most demanding works", and noted that, as a person of Jewish descent, he "found nothing anti-Semitic about the work". Adams' next piece, Chamber Symphony (1992), is for a 15-member chamber orchestra. John Adams, in full John Coolidge Adams, was born in Worcester, Massachusetts on February 15, 1947. [10], In addition to the Pulitzer, Adams has received the Erasmus Prize, five Grammy Awards, the Harvard Arts Medal, France's Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and six honorary doctorates. Adams' next opera, A Flowering Tree (2006) with libretto by Adams and Sellars, is based on a folktale from the Kannada language of southern India as translated by A.K. John Coolidge Adams (born February 15, 1947) is an American composer with strong roots in minimalism. Adams wrote two orchestral pieces in 1988: Fearful Symmetries, a 25-minute work in the same style as Nixon in China, and The Wound-Dresser, a setting of Walt Whitman's 1865 poem of the same title, written when Whitman was volunteering at a military hospital during the American Civil War. [32] A commission from the symphony resulted in Adams' large, three-movement choral symphony Harmonium (1980–81) setting texts by John Donne and Emily Dickinson. John Adams does not have the coronavirus. John is alive and kicking and is currently 74 years old.Please ignore rumors and hoaxes.If you have any unfortunate news that this page should be update with, please let us know using this form. "The Death of Klinghoffer by John Adams". That summer, he wrote the score for Matter of Heart, a documentary about psychoanalyst Carl Jung, a score he later derided as being "of stunning mediocrity". On the same day as the death of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams' death was a double blow to the number of remaining Founding Fathers with only one signee of the Declaration of Independence left alive. [18], Adams was the first student at Harvard to be allowed to write a musical composition for his senior thesis. Next month, Adams turns 72. John Adams Biography John Adams 2019-09-09T11:08:17-08:00 Composer, conductor, and creative thinker – John Adams occupies a unique position in the world of American music. Birthday: February 15, 1947How Old - Age: 74. [7] He has written several operas, notably Nixon in China (1987), which recounts Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China;[8] the controversial The Death of Klinghoffer (1991), based on the hijacking of the passenger liner Achille Lauro by the Palestinian Liberation Front in 1985 and the hijackers' murder of Leon Klinghoffer;[9] and Doctor Atomic (2005), which covers J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project, and the building of the first atomic bomb. Written for the Los Angeles Philharmonic to celebrate the opening of Disney Hall in 2003, The Dharma at Big Sur (2003) is a two-movement work for solo electric six-string violin and orchestra. Richardson, John. [21] Adams also became engrossed by the strict modernism of the 20th century (such as that of Boulez) while at Harvard, and believed that music had to continue progressing, to the extent that he once wrote a letter to Leonard Bernstein criticizing the supposed stylistic reactionism of Chichester Psalms. Recently Passed Away Celebrities and Famous People. The life of one of the USA's Founding Fathers, its second President, and his role in the nation's first 50 years. Adams explained that working with synthesizers caused a "diatonic conversion", a reversion to the belief that tonality was a force of nature. Inspired by musicals, Adams referred to the piece as a "songplay in two acts". The concert, which took place in April 2007 at Carnegie Hall, was a celebratory performance of Adams's work on his sixtieth birthday. [83], A 2014 revival by the Metropolitan Opera reignited debate. Nothing in his classic New England training or early career suggested he would become affiliated with or brilliantly expand the once controversial musical language of minimalism. John Adams: A composer scavenging for his art. Two years later, Adams extracted music from the opera to create the three-movement Doctor Atomic Symphony. John Coolidge Adams (born February 15, 1947) is an American composer and conductor of classical music and opera, with strong roots in minimalism. [26] However, a performance could not be put together at the time, and Adams has never heard the piece performed. From 1985 to 1987, Adams composed his first opera, Nixon in China, with libretto by Alice Goodman, based on Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China. Adams associated modern examples of suffering and injustice towards women around the world, with acts in Tahrir Square during the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, Kabul, and comments from The Rush Limbaugh Show. 1, Op. Adams's breakthrough as a composer came when he moved to the west coast – his home ever since. ", "Nixon in China review – a gripping human drama", "Doing Everything but Playing the Music. "[57], Adams was married to Hawley Currens, a music teacher, from 1970 to 1974. Sellars described the opera this way: "These true stories of the Forty-Niners [a name for people who took part in the 1849 Gold Rush] are overwhelming in their heroism, passion and cruelty, telling tales of racial conflicts, colorful and humorous exploits, political strife and struggles to build anew a life and to decide what it would mean to be American. [28], Adams served as musical producer for a number of series for PBS, including the award-winning series, The Adams Chronicles in 1976 and 1977. [78], After the September 11 attacks in 2001, performances by the Boston Symphony Orchestra of excerpts from Klinghoffer were canceled. John Adams, who may be America's best-known classical composer these days, is also an accomplished conductor, and he appeared in both roles Thursday … Discovering Music, 1947-1965: Adams grows up in New England, where his father, a jazz clarinetist in bands, teaches his son the instrument. [86], This article is about the California-based composer. The opera has generated controversy, including allegations that it is antisemitic and glorifies terrorism. It is a powerful and important opera. After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the New York Philharmonic commissioned Adams to write a memorial piece for the victims of the attacks. John Adams Death Fact Check. The official Facebook page of composer, conductor, and author John Adams is run by the music publisher Boosey & Hawkes. His orchestral work Become Ocean was awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music. [36] He also wrote the short orchestral fanfare Short Ride in a Fast Machine (1986). [16], In the third grade, Adams took up the clarinet, initially taking lessons from his father, Carl Adams, and later with Boston Symphony Orchestra bass clarinetist Felix Viscuglia. John Luther Adams (born January 23, 1953) is an American composer whose music is inspired by nature, especially the landscapes of Alaska, where he lived from 1978 to 2014. He is known for his work on Shutter Island (2010), Run Lola Run (1998) and Call Me by Your Name (2017). The next year, he finished Shaker Loops, a string septet based on an earlier, unsuccessful string quartet called Wavemaker. By Thomas May. Adams has subsequently worked with Sellars on all of his operas. Shaker Loops has been described as "hauntingly ethereal", while 1999's Naïve and Sentimental Music has been called "an exploration of a marvelously extended spinning melody". Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The opera marked the first collaboration between Adams and theatre director Peter Sellars, who had proposed it to Adams in 1983. [69], Adams won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2003 for his 9/11 memorial piece, On the Transmigration of Souls. Jonathan Bernard highlighted this adoption by comparing Phrygian Gates, written in 1977, and Fearful Symmetries written eleven years later in 1988. Adams professes his love of other genres other than classical music; his parents were jazz musicians, and he has also listened to rock music, albeit only passively. The resulting piece, On the Transmigration of Souls, was premiered around the first anniversary of the attacks. And in this book, really a tribute to Mr. Adams, some sixty writers have written on some aspect of John Adams life. [40] Adams received the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition for his violin concerto.[41]. John Adams, our second president (1797-1801), was a Harvard-educated lawyer, a two-term vice president and a very quotable man. [29], In 1977, Adams wrote the half-hour-long solo piano piece Phrygian Gates, which he later called "my first mature composition, my official 'opus one'",[30] as well as its much shorter companion piece, China Gates. After an eighteen-month period of writer's block, Adams wrote his three-movement, orchestral piece Harmonielehre (1984–85), which he described as "a statement of belief in the power of tonality at a time when I was uncertain about its future. The intervals between the notes remain the same through much of the piece. Ramanujan about a young girl who discovers that she has the magic ability to transform into a flowering tree. His works include Short Ride in a Fast Machine (1986), On the Transmigration of Souls (2002), a choral piece commemorating the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks (for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003), and Shaker Loops (1978), a minimalist four-movement work for strings. [76], The opera The Death of Klinghoffer has been criticized as antisemitic by some, including by the Klinghoffer family. [64] Cage posed fundamental questions about what music was, and regarded all types of sounds as viable sources of music. Written to celebrate the millennium, El Niño (2000) is an "oratorio about birth in general and about the Nativity in specific". Donal Henahan, writing in The New York Times, called the Houston Grand Opera world premiere of the work "worth a few giggles but hardly a strong candidate for the standard repertory" and "visually striking but coy and insubstantial". Robert Hugill for Music and Vision called the production "astonishing ... nearly twenty years after its premier",[74] while The Guardian's Fiona Maddocks praised the score's "diverse and subtle palette" and Adams' "rhythmic ingenuity". From 2011 to 2013, Adams wrote his two-act Passion oratorio, The Gospel According to the Other Mary, a decade after his Nativity oratorio, El Niño.