Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
John Adams
John Coolidge Adams was born in Worcester, Massachusetts,
on February 15, 1947, and now lives in Berkeley, California.
Violin Concerto
1.--
2. Chaconne: "Body through which the dream flows"
3. Toccare
Adams began his Violin Concerto on 7 January 1993. The official
completion date of the score was 1 November 1993, although
some changes of detail continued to arrive for two or three weeks
after that and a few were made during rehearsal. The work was a joint
commission by the Minnesota Orchestra, the London Symphony, and the New
York City Ballet. The first performance was given in Minneapolis on 19
January 1994 by Jorja Fleezanis with Edo de Waart and the Minnesota
Orchestra. Partly in collaboration with the violinist Gidon Kremer, who had
been chosen to give the first performance with the London Symphony, Adams
made some further revisions after the first performance. Adams dedicated
the work to the late David Huntley of the publishing firm Boosey & Hawkes:
American composers in recent years had no better friend. Adams has written:
"[David Huntley] died not long after the premiere .... An arduous trip from
New York to Minneapolis to attend the premiere during one of the coldest
winters on record turned out to be the last of his many travels, a labor of
love that I hope was at least partially rewarded by this dedication and by this
piece."
Solo violin, two flutes (two doubling piccolo and alto flute), two oboes (two
doubling English horn), two clarinets (two doubling bass clarinet), two
bassoons, two horns, trumpet, marimba, two low tom-toms, five roto toms, tubular
bells, three bongos, two congas, two bass drums, suspended cymbal, tambourine,
three high timbales, guiro, vibraphone (bowed), claves, high cowbell,
timpani, two synthesizers (Yamaha SY-99 and Kurzweil K-2000), and strings.
John Adams's father was a good amateur clarinetist and saxophonist. The
clarinet was John's first instrument, too, though he chose to hone his skills
to professional level: my first awareness of him was as a member of Sarah
Caldwell's opera orchestra in Boston and as an occasional substitute in the
Boston Symphony. He was then a student at Harvard. His principal mentor
there was Leon Kirchner, for whose teaching, charged with imagination and
intellectual vigor, Adams still feels profound gratitude. As a graduation
present, his parents gave him John Cage's Silence, a collection of
lectures and writings of which Jill Johnston said when it appeared in 1962 that
"those who read [it] should find it difficult to curl up inside any comfortable
box made before picking up the book." It certainly called into question
everything that his musical experiences so far stood for. "I don't think my
parents knew what they were giving," Adams reflected years later. He found "the
seductiveness of Cage's reasoning "irresistible," a condition hardly disturbed
by his finding the holes in Cage's arguments. Something that particularly
stirred him was Cage's emphasis on the importance of sound itself as a physical
entity as distinct from the emphasis, standard in teaching and criticism, on the
organization of sound.
Harvard graduates tended typically to think about going to Europe on
a Fulbright or a Paine Travelling Fellowship, but Adams now wanted to
remove himself from that world. His response was to go 3,000 miles in the
opposite direction, to California. At first he worked in an Oakland warehouse;
then, in 1972, he joined the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory, where he
taught composition, founded a new-music ensemble, conducted the orchestra, and
ran a graduate program in analysis and history.
When Edo de Waart became the San Francisco Symphony's music director in 1977,
he let it be known that he would be glad of some help in
guiding him through the unfamiliar territory of current American music.
Someone proposed John Adams, and a warm professional and personal friendship was
born. Adams's work as de Waart's new-music adviser was so effective
that the relationship became the model for the composer-in-residence program
established at many American orchestras in the 1980s. Adams himself
became the San Francisco Symphony's first composer-in-residence, serving
in that capacity for four years.
De Waart arranged for the Symphony to tender Adams a commission,
and Adams responded with Harmonium, choral settings of John Donne and
Emily Dickinson. At the time, Adams was known in the profession, although
not very widely, and in the Bay Area's new-music community. At the premiere of
Harmonium, Adams was cheered no less than the distinguished pianist who
played the Emperor Concerto, and after that his life was never the
same. His next San Francisco commission, Grand Pianola Music, got him
entree with the New York Philharmonic and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of
Amsterdam. In 1985 de Waart introduced an enormously difficult
and ambitious score, Harmonielehre, named for Arnold Schoenberg's
searching treatise of 1911, which Adams has described as a sort of Talmud of
Western music theory. Orchestras everywhere, as far afield as Japan, Australia,
and the Soviet Union, took up Harmonielehre, and the extraordinary
success of that dauntingly difficult thirty-eight-minute work gave the lie to
the received wisdom according to which only short and easy new pieces were
admitted into the working repertory.
Harmonielehre, particularly in its powerful slow movement (called
"The Anfortas Wound"), also showed that Adams had a lyric and expressive gift
that singled him out among his colleagues of no matter what compositional
school. This component of Adams's artistic personality was further stretched
and developed in his opera Nixon in China, a remarkable amalgam of wit
and emotional poignancy. Just as "The Anfortas Wound" was the departure strip
for the most deeply touching portions of Nixon in China (Pat Nixon's
aria in Act II and all of the introspective closing scene), so Nixon
became the launching place for Adams's second opera, The Death of
Klinghoffer, whose subject is the hijacking of the Achille Lauro.
Since then, he has expanded his language and consolidated his position with such
works as The Wound-Dresser
(after Whitman), El Dorado, Fearful Symmetries, the Chamber
Symphony, and the "song play" for pop singers and rock band, I Was Looking
at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky.
When he first went to California, Adams was deeply involved with the
work of John Cage and some of the younger figures of the then avant-garde,
Robert Ashley, Alvin Lucier, and Christian Wolff. During a three-year immersion
with electronic music he built his own synthesizer. Paradoxically it
was that immersion and his involvement with technical points of tuning that
led to what he called his "diatonic conversion. It made me realize the
resonant power of consonance. There's such a lack of resonance in atonal
music with all the upper partials clashing against each other. There's seldom a
sense of depth or of sympathetic vibration. The composers that mean the most to
me are those whose music is music of sustained resonance." Adams's own purest
essay in consonant minimalism is an orchestral work named Common Tones
in Simple Time (1980), music that still leaves me dazzled with the lustre of
its sound, enchanted by the purr of its engine, delightfully jolted by its
powerful lifts into new harmonies, and happy in its deep calm.
At the time of Harmonium, the examples he cited were Beethoven,
Sibelius "for sure" (particularly the Seventh Symphony), "the orchestral
Wagner," early Stravinsky, Steve Reich. By the time he wrote
Harmonielehre, he was ready to add early Schoenberg, particularly
Gurrelieder. But even then,
Adams voiced reservations about the relentlessly consonant, low-metabolism
way of composing that was then coming to be known as minimalism: "[It]
really can be a bore. You get those Great Prairies of non-event, but that
highly polished, perfectly resonant sound is wonderful." In the years since
Common Tones in Simple Times, Adams has sought--and found--a world of
richer harmonic possibilities and has dared ventures into a language "of greater
synthesis and ambiguity. The territory... is far more dangerous, but also
more fertile, more capable of expressive depth and emotional flexibility."
Adams's mature music is a celebration of this stretching, a celebration of
event, of wonderfully satisfying, room-filling sonority, of energy born of the
force of harmonic movement.
The idea that there should be an Adams violin concerto was born in Jorja
Fleezanis's mind on Tuesday evening, 26 March 1985, when she heard John
Adams's Harmonielehre on the radio. The week before, Edo de Waart and
the San Francisco Symphony, where Fleezanis was then associate concertmaster,
had given the first performances of that remarkable score. Harmonielehre
is an exceedingly difficult piece to play, and during the rehearsals,
performances, and the recording sessions that followed, Fleezanis had been too
busy counting to get a coherent impression of the work. At that time, San
Francisco Symphony broadcasts were heard locally on the Tuesday after the
previous week's concerts. When Fleezanis had a chance to experience
Harmonielehre from the outside, she found it a knockout. The moment the
broadcast was over, she picked up the telephone, called Adams, and asked him to
write her a violin concerto.
Much happened over the following eight years. De Waart, Adams's first
champion among major conductors, left San Francisco for Minneapolis. San
Francisco was still interested in commissioning the Violin Concerto, but
naturally enough, when Fleezanis became concertmaster of the Minnesota
Orchestra, San Francisco's plans for an Adams commission changed. (The
work Adams wrote for San Francisco instead was El Dorado.) De Waart,
however, reopened the question of the Violin Concerto at his new post, and
eventually a triple commission from the Minnesota Orchestra, the New York
City Ballet (for choreography by Peter Martins), and the London Symphony
Orchestra was arranged.
On 7 January 1993, at 8:19 P.M., Fleezanis received a fax from Adams
with the words "Wir haben es angefangen" (We have begun it) and an A-minor chord
about five octaves deep. (Adams had previously told her that
the work would be in A minor and had promised it would be "drenchingly
beautiful.") In March 1993, by way of a preview, Adams sent Fleezanis the
score and tape of his Chamber Symphony, which is full of virtuoso solos for
the concertmaster. She got her first look at the Concerto a month later when
she visited Adams in Berkeley.
Although 7 January 1993 was the date the first notes went down on
paper, Adams had had the Violin Concerto steadily in his mind since completing
his second opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, and El Dorado in
1991. In part, the virtuoso violin writing in the Chamber Symphony, written in
1992, can be seen as the composer's limbering-up exercise for the Concerto. In
no way did Adams approach the task lightly; indeed, to begin with he found it
quite intimidating. For one thing, so many composers--Beethoven, Mendelssohn,
Schumann, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, Elgar, Stravinsky, Berg,
Schoenberg, just to begin a list--had written just one violin concerto.
"These," Adams remarks, "tend to be among their greatest works, so unless
one is completely historically indifferent, which I can't say I am, one tends
to tread lightly."
At the same time, Adams was excited by the challenge: "The violin
commands incredible lyric intensity and has a fantastic capacity to deliver a
white-hot message." He himself is not a violinist, and for a time he made use
of an ingenious device patented by the composer Donald Martino, a T-square
that corresponds to a violin's fingerboard, with lines to represent the four
strings and with the positions of all the notes marked on those lines.
The Martino T-square is a great help--up to a point. It can help you
determine, for example, whether a certain chord can be reached at all by a
violinist with the normal quota of four fingers and a thumb. But it is one
thing to be able to reach a chord and quite another to play it in the middle
of a rapid and active passage. Nor does the T-square help you with the fact
that some chords, though theoretically possible, simply do not "sound" and
would come across as colorless or feeble. At some point the composer has to
come to terms with the violin as it really is.
In this instance, Fleezanis eventually came to replace the T-square, and
in so doing, she--and later, Gidon Kremer--became part of the succession
of violinist collaborators that began when Ferdinand David worked with
Mendelssohn on his concerto. Adams wanted to write a truly violinistic
piece. Suggestions, emendations, counter-suggestions flew back and forth by
phone and fax between Berkeley and Edina, Minnesota. Sometimes three
alternative new versions of a passage would arrive by fax, and Fleezanis would
play the various solutions back over the phone, sometimes into Adams's
answering machine.
To begin with, Adams had imagined a two-movement concerto lasting
a little over twenty minutes, something on the scale of the Stravinsky Concerto.
The idea was to have a highly energetic first movement and then a
contrasting slow movement, a chaconne, a set of variations over a repeated
bass or harmonic pattern. Adams, thinking of Bach's great chaconne for solo
violin and the finale of the Brahms Fourth Symphony, imagined a movement
that would begin quietly but get "wilder and wilder and more ornate. It was
a grand idea, but somehow I never found the right material to justify the
form." Musical material always makes its desires known, makes its own laws,
and controls its own destiny. Thus the chaconne became, as Adams has said,
"a more enclosed piece, a kind of dreamy, filmy, almost diaphanous slow
movement" in the middle of the work, which, in its final form, has the
familiar shape of fast-slow-fast. Partly for that reason, the Concerto also came
to be a larger work than Adams had originally foreseen: "I was trying at first
to avoid a collision with destiny; nevertheless it came out big." It also turned
out to be an important contribution to the repertory: just three years after
the premiere, it had entered the repertory of more than a dozen violinists.
The first music we hear is a figuration in the orchestra--eight notes
rising, to begin with--whose presence is constant enough to give us a sense
of regularity, but whose details keep changing. The solo violin lays a
wonderfully free melody across this pattern. "Composed rhapsodizing," Fleezanis
calls it, and this sense of freedom, of something being invented on the spot
and born out of the very spirit of the violin, the contrast between this and
the firm dance floor provided by the orchestra, is characteristic of the
Concerto throughout. From time to time a clarinet or some other instrument will
step forward with a solo, but essentially the show is in the endlessly inventive
and evolving violin part. (As well as endlessly inventive, the violin part is
virtually non-stop in all three movements.) It is wave motion enormously
magnified; just three or four great surges define the flow of the whole
movement. There are occasional changes of speed, and near the end, Adams winds
the rhythmic coil tighter by changing from four beats in a measure to just
three. This switch occurs in the orchestra; the violin sets up a spicy rhythmic
dissonance by staying firmly in four. This friction of three against four is one
of the simplest of the cross-rhythms that enliven this Concerto.
With a brilliant passage for the flute, the orchestra makes its exit, and
the violin begins a cadenza. After a brief coda at a more spacious tempo and
with the solo instrument now muted, the music flows directly into the second
movement. This has a title: Chaconne: "Body through which the dream
flows," a phrase taken from a poem by Robert Hass. A chaconne is, as Adams
puts it, "a highly identifiable musical artifact"--the Pachelbel Canon is
probably the most familiar example to most people--and the recognition factor
is definitely part of Adams's plan.
Chaconne and passacaglia basses in Baroque and earlier music were generally
cliches that outlined basic harmonic progressions. Adams's six-measure
repeated bass is likewise a cliche (he found it in the article on ground bass
in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians): virtually a
quotation of the bass Pachelbel used. In Pachelbel's day--and also in 1993 for
Adams--the point was to show what fresh things could be done on ground trod so
often before. (The literary critic Harry Levin has remarked that quotation,
allusion, and collage are of the essence of twentieth-century art.)
But while in Baroque music these basses usually stayed at the same pitch
and kept their rhythmic shape (as usual, Bach is the exception, at least with
respect to constancy of pitch), this bass begins to travel after the third
variation. At first the rhythm changes, and the pattern which took six measures
to traverse when we first heard it is now expanded to nine. Later it will, for
example, be compressed to four. Part of what makes this fresh and delightful
is that these augmentations and diminutions, instead of being managed by
simple devices such as doubling or halving, involve unusual arithmetic
proportions such as 4:5. Adams owes some of these rhythmic ideas to his study
of the music of one of the great American eccentrics, Conlon Nancarrow,
who died in 1997.
In this movement, too, there is contrast between firmness and freedom
(the body and the dream) as the familiar bass is beautifully disturbed by the
violin melodies that float and soar freely across it, by changes in meter and
harmony, and by the softly shimmering sound of the synthesizers in the
orchestra. Something comparable happens in the harmony as well. The bass,
at first, outlines the simplest imaginable major-key harmonies, but later,
though it always remains recognizable, it moves into other, less familiar
modes. (Computer technology now allows a composer to "translate" a melody
from major into minor or into any other mode with a single keystroke.) The
Chaconne is the movement that underwent the biggest changes in the course
of composition. In its original form--and this probably goes back to the stage
when Adams thought of it as the finale--the solo violin part was extraordinarily
active, all luxuriant tendrils and coils, like something from an Ornette Coleman
solo; the revisions allow much more room for expressive lyric
melody.
The finale is titled "Toccare." This is an Italian verb meaning both to
touch and to play a keyboard instrument--the French toucher does similar
double duty--and we are more familiar with toccata, the noun derived
from it. In post-Baroque music, a toccata is usually a brilliant display piece
with a steady rat-tat of sixteenth-notes, and this Toccare is a finale in that
spirit. Part of Adams's preparation for the writing of the Violin Concerto had
involved intense listening to performances of bowed stringed instruments out-
side the Western classical tradition, such as the work of the extraordinary
Indian virtuoso, Dr. L. Subramaniam, and here we find inventive and daring
fiddle pyrotechnics on that order. Adams's wife, the photographer Deborah
O'Grady, referred to the fast movements of the Chamber Symphony as "caffeine
music"--one of the most characteristic features of the Adams-O'Grady
house is the aroma of fresh and strong coffee--and this heady, high-spirited
finale is definitely of that ilk. And no nonsense about decaf, either.
