John Adams

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0:12Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which the world's leading artistic figures reveal the most important influences and experiences that inspired their own creativity. I'm John Wilson, and my guest in this episode is the composer and conductor John Adams. Emerging alongside Philip Glass, Steve Reich and the other musical minimalists of the early 1970s, his reputation grew with symphonic work and operas that tackle recent history, including Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghofer and Dr. Atomic. The winner of five Grammy Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for Music, John Adams is one of America's greatest and most performed living composers.

0:53John Adams, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you. You were born in 1947 in Massachusetts into a very musical family from what I understand. Both parents were performers? Well, they were amateurs. My father played clarinet and saxophone and he played in small town swing bands during the 30s and 40s. And my mother was a very talented actress and singer. I mean, she never did anything beyond local amateur productions. But I think, you know, I have musical talent. Most of it comes from her. Neither of them were able to go to college because of the Great Depression. My father was able to go for two years but then had to drop out.

1:34But I think in part because of that, they placed extraordinary value on cultural things. So they were always reading books and there was music in the house all the time. Did they have any ambitions for you musically? Was it just about enjoyment and appreciation? You know, it was amazing because I decided I wanted to be a composer when I was about 10 years old. And our third grade teacher read us a child's biography of Mozart. And I was just enchanted by the story of this young boy who could write symphonies. And I went home and got some paper and a straight edge and drew five lines. And then, much to my horror, I realized I didn't know what to do.

2:14And my parents, they were very sensitive to this. And they found me a teacher. And I started studying harmony and counterpoint and started writing my own melodies when I was really young. And in our hometown, which is in northern New England, there was the state mental hospital. And that hospital sponsored an amateur orchestra. A lot of people from the community, my high school English teacher and our doctor played in the orchestra. And it was that orchestra that played my first orchestra piece. I think I was about 13, 14 at the time. my first audience was a room full of about 200 severely mentally disabled people.

3:00And they loved it. They loved it. And what was the response? Oh, there were tears running down their face. You have to just imagine what their lives were like. And they were able to come into this gymnasium and hear this amateur orchestra, you know, play a Sousa march selections from Oklahoma, and then this piece by this kid. And they were so moved by it. And I think that was a formative moment for me to realise that music is fundamentally about communicating feeling. It was the emotional response above everything else then. The emotional response was, I would say, profound because these people were so hungry for the communication they were getting from the live music.

3:45And that was your public debut as a composer? That was your first audience. I guess you could call it that, yeah. Do you think you've been chasing that emotional response ever since? I do, and it was very controversial when I was in college and in the years right after college because that was what I call the bad old days of contemporary music when music had become very intellectual. And there was enormous prestige accorded to music that was created according to what, Systems 12-tone or John Cage flipping corns or whatever. Or Boulez or Schoenberg, that sort of thing. Absolutely.

4:26And it is interesting if you think about how contemporary music sort of went down the rabbit hole during the 20th century at the same time that popular music just took over. You know, it was very controversial to write the sort of pieces that I wrote. my first big successful piece I wrote in 1980, a piece called Harmonium, which has become kind of a standard at the proms. I think it's been done four or five times there.

4:56It is a very emotionally explicit piece. It doesn't tie itself in structural obscurity.

5:16On This Cultural Life, John Adams, I asked my guest to choose the most significant creative influences and experiences that inspired their own work. And your first choice is the American composer and conductor, Leonard Bernstein. So when did you first come across Bernstein? Well, it seems almost predictable that I, as an American, would mention Bernstein, but he was inescapable. When I was a kid, he was at his peak in a way. It was still the black and white period of television, and he was doing the very famous young people's concerts. And you have to understand how profoundly effective that was.

5:54He was a glamorous, charismatic man who was also brilliant. He could think of ways to clarify or articulate basically sometimes very complicated perceptions about music and make them accessible to a young audience. Plus, it was just the idea that there would be an American who could be a composer and also a conductor and love jazz, love Mahler. You know, that was exactly how I imagined my life. And so if those television programs, the young people's concerts, they started in 1958. So I guess by that time you'd already decided to become a composer. I would have been about 10 years old at the time.

6:39We didn't have a television. So I had to watch these programs in the homes of my friends because my parents were afraid if we had a television, I would stop reading books. Of course, if my mother knew that it was Leonard Bernstein, she would have run out and bought a television because she adored him too. They were lessons, these televised programmes, lessons in the art of classical music. What did he teach you in particular? Well, each programme was different. He had a programme about Beethoven's Fifth. He had a programme on jazz. He did a programme on emotion and music. Just a memorable programme where he focused on a phrase from the Tchaikovsky Fourth Symphony.

7:21which I'll never forget. Did you ever feel that you wanted something more than anything else in the world, and you said so, and they said, no, you can't have it, and again you said louder and more excited, I want it, and again louder, I want it, until it seemed that something would break in your head and there's nothing left to do but cry. Well, that's like this music. Listen.

7:48I want it I want it I want it You know, he wrote these scripts, like, overnight in the midst of this very, very busy career. It's kind of a remarkable thing, what he did. Now listen to the orchestra play it and see if you don't feel something like those emotions.

8:14Were you aware that he was also a composer? I think later on I eventually realized he was a composer. What's always enchanted me is his theatre music. I mean, I think West Side Story is just the absolute peak of American theatre music. Tonight, tonight, the world is wild and bright Going back, shooting sparks into space Bernstein was obviously feeding into your creative imagination. Did he influence the sort of music that you were composing at that time? Well, you know, it's funny. When I was in my first year at Harvard, I got very influenced by the avant-garde at the time, particularly the European avant-garde like Pierre Boulez.

9:03And I heard the Chichester Psalms by Bernstein.

9:15And I was appalled by it because, you know, he was still writing tonal music. And so I wrote him a really snotty letter. You know, I didn't know him. I'd never met him and criticized him for writing such retro music in 1965 or whenever it was. And amazing enough, he responded. He wrote me a letter back and said, basically, I hear you, but I have to do what I have to do. I have to do what I naturally feel. And much to my horror, after he died, his letters were all sent to the Library of Congress. And I got a phone call from them saying, gee, we have a copy of his response to you, but we don't have your original letter.

9:57Could you send it to us? I said, no way. I didn't have it anyway, but I was embarrassed by it. But thinking back on it, what he said was something that it took me another 10 years to realize was right. You have to do what you have to do. And I think that part of the tragedy of what happened with contemporary music was composers were writing music that really a lot of them didn't even feel they wanted to. Given that he was one of the American musical greats and was being criticized by a young undergraduate, was his tone polite in response there? Oh, it was very polite. And, you know, if the same thing happened to me, I would probably go out of my way to respond.

10:39Now, I'm not inviting your listeners to flood me with letters, but we take those things very seriously when we're older. In your memoir, Hallelujah Junction, you recall inventing a musical alter ego, a composer called Bruce Craigmore. What was that all about? This is during the more hectic period of my early adolescence when my imagination was running over time. I lived in a very rural village in northern New England, and none of my playmates knew anything about classical music. So I had a very isolated life aside from my home. And I invented this character who was a composer and a conductor and went around the world conducting his own music.

11:24I drew pictures of him. I drew his programs this week with the Vienna Philharmonic, next week with the New York Philharmonic. I think, you know, it was somewhat influenced by Bernstein. But the interesting thing is that my life turned out to be virtually what I had imagined. Do they not call that manifesting?

11:53Your next choice for this cultural life is the composer and band leader, Duke Ellington.

12:01Why have you chosen him? Well, Duke Ellington has meant a great many things to me. First of all, American music would be impossible without black culture. And whether it was Copland or Ives or obviously Bernstein, even Steve Reich, heavily influenced by African drumming. So Ellington is key in that sense. There are other things about Ellington that I love. The fact that like Stravinsky, like Picasso, his life continued to evolve. And every period in his life was amazing and original. Early music that he wrote in the 20s was really raunchy, very provocative, you know, lock your daughter up kind of music.

12:52And then the great period of the big bands in the 40s.

13:05And then at the end of his life, his sacred music.

13:13So he had a life very much like Beethoven in that sense. Last of all, he's had a great influence on the way I treat the orchestra. masses of instruments, the brass, the saxophones, the rhythm section.

13:33You know, the thing about Ellington's music is that it's just so optimistic and so up, and I think I was influenced by it.

13:48My grandfather, my mother's stepfather, owned a dance hall in the state of New Hampshire. And several times when I was growing up, Ellington came through with his band. So I was able to not just stand right in front of the band, but at one point I actually went and sat on the piano bench next to Ellington. What age was that? I think I was probably in my late teens at the time. You felt the power of the band. Yes, and, you know, they weren't amplified. To stand in front of that band and feel the massive power of that sound had a huge effect on how I treated the orchestra.

14:30Did you talk to him? No, it was just a few words. He was running a show. He was busy. And what are your go-to Ellington tunes then? I'm very fond of the period of the 60s. There's a wonderful song that is not that well known. It's an arrangement called The Tattooed Bride, and it's on an album called Masterpieces.

14:57You enrolled at Harvard University in the mid-60s, and this is a time, of course, great political turmoil, anti-Vietnam protests, the Woodstock Festival in 1969. How involved were you in the American political counterculture at the time? Well, it was impossible not to be. And the Vietnam War affected all of us male students. The army was after me, really, really sincerely wanted to send me to Vietnam. So I was involved for a whole year of trying to figure out how to avoid the draft. It wasn't cowardice. It was just that it was, you know, the war was wrong. And all of us understood that. How did you avoid it then?

15:40I avoided it by using a large amount of controlled substances and making myself sleepless for three or four nights before each one of my physicals. So I basically presented myself as a physical wreck. I'm not proud of it, but... You drugged yourself? Yeah. I mean, with over-the-counter stuff. Nothing too serious. It was the period of LSD, and I did all of that. The first trip was astonishing and the last one was horrific. We all went through that period. And did it shape your compositional process as well? Did it influence you musically? You know, it's hard to say. That was the period of the wonderful blossoming of rock.

16:25You could turn on the AM radio at any time of the day and hear a dozen phenomenally wonderful songs, one right after the other. I would say it probably brought me to the realization that the obscurity and the complexity of avant-garde music, something that I was trying to grapple with because I still wanted to be a composer, you know, I would leave the classroom depressed and very frustrated and then go back and hear coming out of a dorm window Jimi Hendrix or Eric Clapton. and think, well, there's something wrong with this picture and I think I have to find a way to be a composer and have the kind of expressive freedom that these guys have.

17:26Your next choice, John Adams, is not a creative individual or a cultural work, but a state, the state of California. And you moved to San Francisco after graduating from Harvard. So what led you west? I had lived my entire life, 22 years in New England, and I was restless. I'd been reading about the beatniks. I'd been reading beat poetry, and it just seemed like an interesting place to go. So I went out there with my first wife at the time, and I found the San Francisco Bay Area to be very right for me. I loved the landscape. I loved the way the ocean collides with the coast. I loved the cultural mix.

18:11It was wonderful to come to San Francisco and be surrounded by people from other cultures. So socially it was very different in terms of the geography as well. We think of New England and particularly in the autumn those amazing golden leaves everywhere. You go to California and it's golden sunshine. Do you think that fed in the light of California? I actually do think that my relationship to the landscape has had a huge effect on my music, particularly that I, you know, if I'm good at anything, I think it's at large scale musical structures. You know, I was very influenced by early minimalism, by the early pieces of Steve Reich, particularly Reich, but also Philip Glass and Terry Riley.

18:51and the experience of being in that kind of landscape in Northern California and particularly, I have to say it, but it's such an American thing of being in a car, of driving. I have a piece for Violin and Piano called Road Movies and that experience, and particularly my early work of sort of driving across the landscape and seeing maybe a barn in the distance or a mountain or a tree or something and it comes closer to you and then it's gone and something else comes. You can feel that experience in a lot of my early music.

19:37You say that when you arrived in California, you started listening to Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and those people who you then became associated with as a young composer, as a minimalist. That's right. Did you welcome that term? Well, I think Steve is very proud of it because in a way, you know, he was the person who did the most critical work at the very beginning in terms of stripping the language down.

20:08I define musical minimalism very simply. It's my definition, but I think it works. I think that it's identifiable by three things. The first is that it is tonal, but the movement between harmonies is very slow. You know, in a Bach chorale, you've got movement from one chord to the next every note. But in a piece of classic minimalism, you could sometimes have a matter of eight or ten minutes between a harmony moving. That's the first thing. The second thing is that the structures are built through repetition of small motives. And the third thing is that it has a regular pulse. and this was a very provocative challenge to contemporary music, to the tradition of Schoenberg and Stockhausen and Boulez, all of the big names of contemporary music.

21:00And when this music first came out, it was ridiculed severely. I remember there was a New York critic who, whenever he went to a concert of minimalist music, he said, well, I checked my brain at the door along with my coat. But, you know, it was this dismissive thing that the music didn't provide any intellectual challenge. But in the end, we found that it provides different kinds of challenges. They're intellectual as well as expressive. And you've moved on from minimalism. I mean, can I suggest that you maybe you kept hold of that pulse, but also reached back to, I guess, some of the stuff you were listening to as a child, the late Romantic symphonies, that kind of thing, and you had more of a dramatic approach to composition.

21:42Well, I think from the start, I was restless. I loved the fact that the music was tonal. I particularly loved the fact that it was accessible and that audiences responded to it. But I felt that it was also, because of its rigor, that it was very emotionally limited, and I wanted to find a way to write a music that had the potential for great dramatic change.

22:11I've always been inspired by Mahler and the way that he tried to just embrace this entire human existence in his works.

22:39Your next choice for this cultural life is the novelist Charles Dickens. It's a funny choice, isn't it? Well, you tell us why. I'll tell you why. It's a very specific reason. When I was in my 30s, I read Dickens for the first time. I read Bleak House twice, Martin Chuzzlewit, Our Mutual Friend, a couple of others. And what struck me about Dickens was the fact that he could be an utterly original artist who could embrace both lofty thought with humor and also with sentimentality and who was accessible to a very, very wide bandwidth of the population and hence had enormous cultural influence. And in my field, contemporary classical music, I feel that composers over the past hundred years have surrendered that potential, starting with Schoenberg right up to today.