John Adams

American composer John Coolidge Adams (b. 1947, Worcester, MA) has created some of the most provocative artistic statements of our age. Adams’s controversial operas about real-life recent events contributed to a reinvigoration of contemporary opera in America. While the composer’s stage works have generated much scholarly and critical interest, the breadth of scholarship on Adams’s music expands beyond the operas. Early instrumental works have been the subject of scholarly discussion about the evolution of musical minimalism to postminimalism. Interviews and Adams’s autobiography offer insight into the many musical tributaries that have informed the composer’s life: big band jazz heard at the family’s dance hall in New Hampshire; musical theater sung by Adams’s mother in community productions; classical music as a clarinetist in youth symphonies; rock and roll; and the New England landscapes that would long inspire Adams. At Harvard University, Adams studied composition with Leon Kirchner, a former student of Arnold Schoenberg. Kirchner introduced Adams to the rigors of academic serialism and also to the problem, which would later plague Adams, of how to balance instinct with method. In 1971, after completing degrees (BA and MA) in music composition, Adams relocated to northern California. Adams joined the San Francisco experimental music scene and eventually established a voice as a distinctly American composer. Much scholarship has been devoted to the plurality of Adams’s stylistic impulses. Phrygian Gates (1977) and China Gates (1977) were the composer’s first works in the strict minimalist style. Soon thereafter, Adams began to integrate compositional techniques drawn from pre-Baroque to late-19th-century Romantic styles. Shaker Loops (1978), Harmonium (1981), and Harmonielehre (1984–1985) resulted. In 1985, Adams began composing the opera Nixon in China (1987) in collaboration with director Peter Sellars and librettist Alice Goodman, discovering a penchant for text setting. Their next opera, The Death of Klinghoffer (1991), proved to be a critical minefield, giving rise to a series of polemical debates about music, politics, and representation. After Klinghoffer, Adams composed primarily instrumental works using increasingly chromatic and modal idioms. In the early 2000s, Adams returned to grand opera with Doctor Atomic (2005) and continued to compose stage works, including A Flowering Tree (2006), The Gospel According to the Other Mary (2012), and Girls of the Golden West (2017), all in collaboration with Sellars. Adams’s focus on subjects of living memory in both the operas and instrumental works, such as On the Transmigration of Souls (2002), transformed the contemporary classical repertoire, making Adams a principal figure in late-20th and early-twenty-first-century American music.