|
Born and raised in New England, Adams learned the clarinet from his father and played in marching bands and community orchestras during his formative years. He began composing at age ten and heard his first orchestral pieces performed while still a teenager. The intellectual and artistic traditions of New England, including his studies at Harvard University and attendance at Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts, helped shape him as an artist and thinker. After earning two degrees from Harvard, he moved to Northern California in 1971 and has since lived in the San Francisco Bay area.
Adams taught at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music for ten years before becoming composer-in-residence of the San Francisco Symphony (1982-85), and creator of the orchestra’s highly successful and controversial “New and Unusual Music” series. Several of Adams’s landmark orchestral works were written for and premiered by the San Francisco Symphony, including Harmonium (1981), Grand Pianola Music (1982), Harmonielehre (1985), and El Dorado (1991).
In 1985, Adams began a collaboration with the poet Alice Goodman and stage director Peter Sellars that resulted in two groundbreaking operas: Nixon in China (1987) and The Death of Klinghoffer (1991). Produced worldwide, these works are among the most performed operas of the last two decades. Three further stage collaborations with Sellars followed: the 1995 “songplay”, I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, with a libretto by June Jordan; El Niño (2000), a multilingual retelling of the Nativity story, composed for the celebration of the millennium; and Doctor Atomic (2005), about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the creation of the first atomic bomb. Commissioned by the San Francisco Opera and premiered there in 2005, Doctor Atomic was subsequently presented by the Lyric Opera in Chicago, the Netherlands Opera and, in an entirely new production directed by Penny Woolcock, at the Metropolitan Opera and English National Opera.
A Flowering Tree, inspired by Mozart’s Magic Flute and premiered in Vienna in 2006, is based on a folk tale from southern India, and it shares similar themes with its Mozartian model: youth, love, and the emergence of moral consciousness. The new Nonesuch recording of that opera features the composer conducting the original cast with the London Symphony Orchestra and the Schola Cantorum of Caracas.
Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls, composed for the New York Philharmonic in 2002, to commemorate the first anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Music, and the recording on Nonesuch won a rare “triple crown” of Grammy Awards: “Best Classical Recording”, “Best Orchestral Performance”, and “Best Classical Contemporary Composition”.
In 2003, a film version of The Death of Klinghoffer, Adams’s second opera, was directed by Penny Woolcock for Channel Four TV, and released in theaters, on television, and on DVD. The film, for which the composer conducted the London Symphony Orchestra, made its American debut at the Sundance Film Festival and won such international prizes as the Prix Italia and the Vienna TV Award. Wonders Are Many, a film by Jon Else about the creation and premiere of the opera Doctor Atomic, premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, and was a New York Times Critics’ Pick in 2008.
Other recent Adams works include: Dharma at Big Sur for electric violin and orchestra, inspired by literary impressions of the Californian landscape by such writers as Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and Henry Miller; Doctor Atomic Symphony, an orchestra work drawn from the opera; Son of Chamber Symphony (choreographed as Joyride by Mark Morris); and the new String Quartet, written for the Saint Lawrence String Quartet and premiered at the Juilliard School in early 2009. In October of 2009 Gustavo Dudamel began his tenure as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic with a premiere of Adams’ City Noir in a concert telecast worldwide and now available on a DGG DVD.
Harvard University has twice given Adams significant awards: in 2004 he received the Centennial Medal of the university’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences “for contributions to society,” and in 2007 he received the Harvard Arts Medal. He has received from Northwestern University both the 2004 Michael Ludwig Nemmers Prize in Music Composition (the first ever awarded) and in 2008 an honorary doctorate. Honored with a proclamation by governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California for his distinguished service to the arts in his adopted home state, he has also been awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Cambridge and an honorary membership in Phi Beta Kappa. He was recognized by his home city of Berkeley, California, for his 60th birthday. He was also a 2009 recipient of the NEA Opera Awards.
In 1985, Nonesuch Records released Adams’s Harmonielehre, a landmark recording of American symphonic music. Since then, Nonesuch has released first recordings of all of his works, both symphonic and theatrical. Nonesuch’s ten-disc set, The John Adams Earbox, documents his recorded music through 2000. Adams’s works are among the very few written in our own time that have achieved repertory status, appearing regularly on programs by orchestras throughout the world.
Hallelujah Junction – Adams’s volume of memoirs and commentary on American musical life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) was named one of the “most notable books of 2008” by the New York Times and was winner in the creative nonfiction category of the Northern California Book Awards. In its August 25th issue of 2008 The New Yorker Magazine published an extended excerpt from the book under the title “Sonic Youth,” covering Adams’s early years in San Francisco. The John Adams Reader: Essential Writings on an American Composer, edited by Tom May and published by Amadeus Press, is a 400-page summary of writings about Adams and his music, and the first in-depth anthology of texts dealing with more than 30 years of the composer’s creative life.
John Adams is an active conductor, appearing with the world’s greatest orchestras and with programs combining his own works with others by composers as diverse as Debussy, Strauss, Sibelius, Stravinsky, Ravel, Ives, and Ellington, as well as his contemporaries Zappa, Reich, Glass, and Michael Gordon. As a guest conductor in the U.S. and Europe, he has conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and London Symphony Orchestra, among others.
Adams has also received critical acclaim for his creative programming at the most important music venues in the world. In April and May of 2003, Lincoln Center presented a festival titled “John Adams: An American Master”, the most extensive festival that the venue has ever devoted to a living composer. As Artist-in-Association with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, he regularly conducted the orchestra at London’s Barbican Centre and the annual BBC Proms concerts at Albert Hall. This past season Adams was Composer of the Year with the Pittsburgh Symphony He is currently Creative Chair of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where, among other activities he curated the “West Coast/Left Coast” festival, a successor to the hugely popular “Minimalist Jukebox” he devised and curated in 2006. In March of this year he leads the London Symphony Orchestra in two different programs featuring music by Stravinsky, Ravel, Debussy, Sibelius, Britten and his own music in concerts at the Barbican and on tour in Paris.
The official John Adams website is www.earbox.com. The music of John Adams is published by Boosey & Hawkes and Associated Music Publishers.
January 2010
|
