John Adams

American composer John Adams was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1947. His New England childhood was filled with music. His father was a clarinetist, and his mother a singer who performed with big bands and in musicals. His grandfather ran a music hall where young Adams heard jazz great Duke Ellington play. Adams’ father gave him his first clarinet lessons, and the boy was soon playing with community orchestras and a marching band.

At ten years old, Adams started to take composition and music theory lessons, and wrote his first musical compositions. Before long, he was conducting a community orchestra sponsored by the local New Hampshire State Mental Hospital. This orchestra performed one of his compositions when Adams was just fourteen, before an audience of mental patients.

Adams went to Harvard in 1965 on a scholarship, earning both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. There, he and other students were trained in twelve-tone composition methods pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg. After moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1972, Adams took a job at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he conducted the New Music Ensemble. There, he began to rebel against his training. He sought inspiration first in the work of avant-garde composer John Cage, then in the new music of minimalist composers like Terry Riley and Steve Reich.

In 1978, Adams became the New Music Advisor to the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. From 1982–1985, he served as the Symphony’s Composer in Residence, premiering many works through its New and Unusual Music Series. Some of Adams’ breakout works from this period include Shaker Loops (1978) Grand Pianola Music (1982), and Harmonielehre (1985). Today, Adams is acclaimed for his ability to write music that fuses minimalist techniques, American popular music, and nineteenth-century symphonic language. His work has drawn on influences as diverse as minimalism, big band, Mozart, funk, Schoenberg, rock and ragtime.

In 1983, Adams met a young director named Peter Sellars, who wanted to create an opera about Richard Nixon’s historic 1972 trip to China. Sellars’ friend, poet Alice Goodman, wrote the brilliant libretto, Adams penned the vital score, and Sellars directed the production. Nixon in China premiered in 1987 at Houston Grand Opera. It got good reviews, was broadcast on television, and won the Pulitzer Prize. Adams’ operatic career had been launched.

From 1989 to 1991, Goodman, Sellars and Adams collaborated on another opera: The Death of Klinghoffer, about the murder of an elderly Jewish man by Palestinian terrorists on the hijacked ocean liner Achille Lauro. The opera sparked controversy, and San Francisco performances were picketed.

But Adams did not stop composing dramatic music. In 1995, he wrote the “songplay” I was Looking at the Ceiling and then I Saw the Sky with poet June Jordan. A meditation on the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the score incorporated pop, gospel, hip hop and funk. In 2000, Adams and Sellars collaborated on El Niño, a retelling of the Nativity story based on Latin-American poetry, medieval mystery plays, the Bible and other sources. In 2002, Adams composed On the Transmigration of Souls, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic to commemorate the World Trade Center attacks. The work won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Music, and its recording on Nonesuch records won three Grammies.

In 2002, Pamela Rosenberg, then General Director of the San Francisco Opera, asked Adams to write an opera for her company. She wanted to commission an American version of the Faust legend, and thought the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer might be a good subject. Adams didn’t consider Oppenheimer a Faustian figure, but he liked the idea of writing an opera about the atomic bomb. He started composing Doctor Atomic’s score in January 2004 and finished in June 2005. The making of the first production is chronicled in Jon Else’s 2007 documentary Wonders Are Many.

Other important Adams compositions have included Chamber Symphony (1992), Century Rolls (1996), Slominsky’s Earbox (1996), El Dorado (1998), Naïve and Sentimental Music (1997–1998), My Father Knew Charles Ives (2003), and The Dharma at Big Sur (2003). In 2006, Adams’ opera A Flowering Tree premiered at the MuseumsQuartier in Vienna. In addition, Adams has appeared as a conductor with many of the world’s most prestigious orchestras.

Adams’ honors are too numerous to list, but they have included three Pulitzer Prizes for Music, and Musical America’s 1997 Composer of the Year. He has received an Honorary Doctorate from Cambridge University, the Royal Philharmonic Award, and honors from Harvard University, Northwestern University, the Governor of California and the City of Berkeley. His memoir A Rhythm Among Harmonies is due to be released in 2008.