The John Adams Reader: Essential Writings on an American Composer (review)

Abstract

The John Adams Reader: Essential Writings on an American Composer. Edited by Thomas May. Pompton Plains, NJ: Amadeus Press, 2006. [xviii, 455 p. ISBN 1-57467-132-4. $27.95.] Bibliographical references, indexes. John Adams continues to impress me as one of the most distinctive American composers born after 1945. His earliest works to gain national attention-including the solo piano work Phrygian Gates; the opulent choral-orchestral score, Harmonium; and the near-uncategorizable Grand Pianola Music, for winds and brass, two solo pianos, and three solo female voices-gave a fine account of twenty-something minimalism with its clearly defined harmonic goals and dramatic arcs, both well suited for the concert hall. But not long afterward, Adams began to describe himself as a minimalist who had become bored with minimalism, and expanded the content of his music in nearly every respect. Transitional works such as Harmonielehre (1984) and Nixon in China (1985) continued his dialogue with tonality and Neoromantic grandeur that characterized his earlier orchestral work, but also indicated signs of greater formal and harmonic ambiguity. In the important Violin Concerto (1993) and other works, Adams expanded the rhythmic complexity of his music through dazzling polyrhydims. He also seemed increasingly in control of an ever-expanding harmonic idiom, which has become capable of sustaining diverse expressive possibilities in the more recent Naive and Sentimental Music (1997-98) and El Nino (1999-2000). Adams has celebrated the presence of technology in his music; perhaps the most fascinating example is the combination of orchestral sounds with pre-recorded speech and street sounds in his On the Transmigration of Souls, a memorial piece for the victims of 9/11 that earned him a Pulitzer Prize. But Adams's career has been dogged by critical scorn and even more acrimonious controversy, too. In many of his works-for instance, Grand Pianola Music and Fearful Symmetries (1988)-his music assumes a strident, parodistic tone that, for many critics, tends too far toward the garish and superficial. His second opera, The Death of (1991), depicts the 1985 Palestinian Liberation Organization's hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro and murder of one of its Jewish passengers in order to comment more broadly on the chasmic cultural differences between Jews and Palestinians. This theme was a divisive one in 1991, and became more so after 9/11; some individuals have claimed that Adams confers an unnecessarily heroic quality upon the Palestinian hijackers and is much less sympathetic to the Jewish characters and their plight. (Robert Fink eloquently argues against this viewpoint in Klinghoffer in Brooklyn Heights, Cambridge Opera Journal 17, no. 2 [July 2005]: 173-213.) Shortly after 9/11, a scheduled performance of the opera's choruses by the Boston Symphony Orchestra was cancelled; Adams made a frustrated public protestation, while Richard Taruskin supported the cancellation and condemned the work in a thought-provoking New York Times article. A composer who has so astonished and enraged audiences and critics seems overdue for a book-length treatment. Thomas May, a west-coast-based music journalist who serves as a classical music editor for Amazon and authored the user-friendly Decoding Wagner: An Invitation to His World of Music Drama (Portland: Amadeus Press, 2004), has attempted to create a booklength introduction to the composer with a broad appeal. The book is divided into four parts. In the first, Portraits of the Artist, May assembles a set of articles from newspapers or other general-audience periodicals-one from 2001 and three from 2003-that sketch Adams's career and emphasize his most recent activities. May also conducts two interviews which appear in the book for the first time: one, with Adams, is a wide-ranging look at his early years and traces his development through such recent projects as the opera Doctor Atomic (2005), which tells the story of J. …