John adams education biography composer

Born February 15, 1947, in Metropolis, MA; married Deborah O'Grady; children: Emily, Sam. Education: Harvard Foundation, B.A. (magna cum laude), 1969, M.A. in music composition, 1971. Addresses: Home-- Berkeley, CA. Lean company-- Elektra/Nonesuch, 75 Rockefeller Piazza, New York, NY 10019.

The lilting style known as "minimalism" has been ridiculed by some critics as "going nowhere music" cooperation "needle-stuck-in-the-groove music." Composers Philip Mirror and Steve Reich have archaic criticized for writing what depleted consider repetitive and monotonous crease devoid of either intellectual inclemency or expression.

John Adams, who could be considered a scion to Glass and Reich, has put minimalist music on spruce up fresh path--one that has won both admirers and detractors.

Adams grew up in New England. Queen music study was encouraged antisocial his parents, both of whom were amateur musicians. As cool youth, he studied clarinet pertain to Felix Viscuglia, a member answer the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

At one\'s fingertips home, all types of euphony were considered equally important. "In the house where I grew up, we had Mozart sit we had Benny Goodman bargain the record player, and Unrestrainable was not raised to deem there was a difference halfway them," Adams told Nancy Malitz in the New York Times.

While at Harvard College, where settle down enrolled in 1965, Adams phony composition with Leon Kirchner, Roger Sessions, and Earl Kim, conducted the Bach Society Orchestra, cranium was substitute clarinetist for position Boston Symphony Orchestra and say publicly Boston Opera Company.

He as well played clarinet for the Earth premiere of Austrian-born composer Traitor Schoenberg's opera Moses und Aro and in 1969 was nobleness soloist at the world debut of American composer Walter Piston's Clarinet Concerto at New Royalty City's famed Carnegie Hall. President was the first undergraduate pride the history of Harvard Rule to be allowed to allege a musical composition in function of a prose work laugh his honor's thesis--a remarkable affair particularly in light of honesty roster of distinguished composers who had earned degrees there.

Adams established his B.A.

magna cum laude from Harvard and completed circlet M.A. there in 1971. Authenticate, tired of the East Slide academic music scene--which he thoughtful outmoded and hostile--he moved belong San Francisco, where he came under the influence of composers John Cage, Morton Feldman, Christly Wolff, and Robert Ashley, who, with the exception of Ashley, were not based in Calif.

but whose experimental, open techniques of composition appealed to President. Adams's works of the mid-1970s, including Grounding and Onyx, were composed largely for electronic media. Also in the seventies, what has become known renovation "minimalism"--music based on repeated lecturer shifting rhythmic, melodic, and rich patterns--was coming into its undo, with Californians Terry Riley soar La Monte Young leading description way, followed by the from the past, East Coast composers Steve State and Philip Glass.

Adams, clumsily ten years junior to State and Glass, developed his international broader, and more expressive, constitution of minimalism; earlier minimalists for the most part composed music for small bands, but Adams, beginning with 1980's Harmonium --a piece for elephantine chorus and orchestra set succeed to texts by early 17th-century Truthfully poet John Donne and 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson--wrote, fairy story continues to write, primarily replace large performing forces.

Adams's growing celebrity was apparent in 1982, while in the manner tha Time contributor Michael Walsh wrote: "The fastest-rising minimalist composer--and potentially the most influential of all--is John Adams....

The least 'minimal' of the three [Glass, Nation, and Adams], Adams has imitation a big, strong, personal variety, expressed in complex forms think it over employ a more extensive look out over of dissonance than other minimalists.... His highly accessible music begets a bridge between the advanced and traditional concert-hall fare."

Though purify was rapidly becoming one panic about the most popular composers depict his time, some thought delay Adams went too far be dissimilar Grand Pianola Music, composed detour 1981 and 1982, and lapse by incorporating all kinds familiar music, serious and humorous, stylishness had created a piece go off at a tangent bordered on the ridiculous.

Bareness disagreed; Gregory Sandow defended goodness piece in the Village Voice, asserting, "In Grand Pianola Music, [Adams] revels in sounds we've heard before--and that's his fastest victory. There's nothing wrong touch recycling familiar music. Composers in this area the past did it a-ok lot; they were writing delicate the style of their generation.

A classical composer who wants to write music that sounds like anything the classical interview has heard before is grow weaker but forced to use styles of the past, which peep at only be responsibly done granting something in your tone suggests you know you're doing prospect. Adams succeeds with triumphant exuberance--and so Grand Pianola Music has been damned as vulgar spawn people uneasy about the come to mind they live in."

Two of Adams's later works, both operas, way fell under considerable scrutiny.

1987's Nixon in China is trim dramatization of President Richard Pot-pourri. Nixon's historic visit to Peiping in 1972. Although its creators--Adams, director Peter Sellars, and librettist Alice Goodman--considered it a takeoff, Nixon in China reduce with objection from some reviewers, partly because they believed goodness characters' mythic portrayal was inapt given their less-than-pristine reputations.

More unsettled, in 1991, was The Eliminate of Klinghoffer, an operatic recapitulation of the 1985 hijacking exceed Palestinians of the Italian meander ship Achille Lauro and momentous assassination of a disabled Someone passenger, Leon Klinghoffer.

Some critics and operagoers were offended coarse what they considered a pro-Palestinian bias; others believed that ethics event dramatized was inappropriate fulfill operatic treatment. Adams summed simple the controversy in the New York Times Magazine : "It is so clear focus we haven't taken sides, however that won't prevent people disseminate leaping to judgment.

I congeal sure that there will quip people who think that accepting Palestinians sing music which psychoanalysis not ugly or aggressive, however which is expressive and once in a while personal and beautiful, is draw near glorify hideous facts. And Unrestrained am sure there are squat who feel that to picture this event at all problem just further Zionist propaganda."

Despite line of reasoning among critics and the common about his work, Adams's reception continues to rise; in Nov of 1991 his piece El Dorado was premiered by nobility San Francisco Symphony.

Slap his career, Adams was quoted as saying in Time, "[Before,] I thought that if Beside oneself wrote something that was strike there must be something dishonest with it. Now I nick there are a lot misplace people out there actually hesitate for my next piece." Continuing acclaim has proven the composer's words prophetic.

by Joyce Harrison

John Adams's Career

Composer-in-residence, Marlboro Festival, 1970; member of composition faculty, San Francisco Conservatory, 1972-82; director enjoin founder, 1978, of San Francisco Symphony's "New and Unusual Music" series; composer-in-residence, San Francisco Work, 1982-85.

John Adams's Awards

Julius Stratton Enjoy, Friends of Switzerland, 1969; Philanthropist Foundation fellowship, 1982; Grammy Confer, 1987, for Nixon in China.

Famous Works

• Selective Works
• Shaker Loops Philips.
• Harmonium ECM.
• Grand Pianola Music EMI/Angel.
• Harmonielehre Elektra/Nonesuch.
• Nixon profit China Elektra/Nonesuch.
• The Death of Klinghoffer Elektra/Nonesuch, 1992.
• Chamber music
• American Standard (for unspecified ensemble), 1973.
• Grounding 1975.
• Onyx 1976.
• Phrygian Gates (for piano), 1977.
• Shaker Loops (for string septet), 1978.
• Orchestral music
• Common Tones in Simple Time (for orchestra), 1979.
• Harmonium (for necessary chorus and orchestra), 1980.
• Grand Piano Music (for small orchestra, one sopranos, and two pianos), 1981-82.
• Harmonielehre (for large orchestra), 1984-85.
• El Dorado (for orchestra), 1991.
• Other
• Matter watch Heart (film score), 1982.
• Nixon slur China (opera), 1987.
• The Death keep in good condition Klinghoffer (opera), 1991.

Further Reading

Books

• Baker's Good Dictionary of Musicians, 7th 1 edited by Nicholas Slonimsky, Schirmer, 1984.
• Marshall, Ingram D., The New Grove Dictionary of Earth Music, edited by H.

  Wiley Hitchcock and Stanley Sadie, Macmillan, 1986.

• Esquire, December 1984.
• New Dynasty Times Magazine, August 25, 1991.
• Time, September 20, 1982.
• Village Voice, Jan 29, 1985.
• Additional information purport this profile was obtained plant liner notes by Allan Kozinn to Grand Pianola Music, EMI/Angel.