Alex Ross. Servant of Harmony

Servant of Harmony
John Adams brings modern music out of its impasse
Part 1

Alex Ross

Publication date: July 23, 2003

Highway #1, along the California coast, north of San Francisco, becomes so picturesque that it attracts the eye like a work of art. Such a landscape could be the fruit of the efforts of a miracle worker, fascinated by unexpected effects and able to connect the incompatible. Soft, sloping meadows are adjacent to sheer cliffs, giant sequoias extend their crowns over narrow patches of sandy shore. Huge cliffs rising from the ocean resemble the silhouettes of sea schooners. Here and there, looking thoughtfully at the blue surface, lonely cows rest peacefully. Side roads branching off the highway climb the hills in intricate zigzags, beckoning the idle driver. One such road, called Meyers Grade, is particularly attractive; it branches off Highway #1 after the town of Jenner. The route is so steep that when you climb it, your head is spinning from the distortion of perspective. The Pacific Ocean in the rearview mirror appears as a blue hill rising above a green valley.

Not far from here is Brushy Ridge, home of the wooded home of John Adams, perhaps America's most imaginative composer. If I had to describe his music in one metaphor, I would say that it is like Highway #1: a kind of newfound paradise in the form of a series of recognizable elements connected in a bizarre order. The garish bravado of Hollywood fanfare gives way to dizzying rhythmic shifts; the swirling clouds of Wagnerian harmonies dissipate with the sounds of a saxophone quartet. Adams is not the only composer to combine academic musical training with a sensitivity to pop culture, but he is the only one who has achieved an organic synthesis of these seemingly irreconcilable elements. His music, despite some diversity, is very harmonious; it is permeated with a certain muffled rumble, reminiscent of the rustle of tires rolling on fresh asphalt, and evokes the feeling of solid ground under your feet. Perhaps this gives her special strength. His first opera Nixon in China , re-staged in London last spring, was a triumphant success. The recently written orchestral play Naïve and Sentimental Music ("Naive and Sentimental Music") has now gone on tour to American cities. premiered at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris On Christmas Eve, Adams' two-hour Christmas oratorio El Niño , and was performed in San Francisco the following week. The composer wrote a significant part of this oratorio last summer in his forest house.

Brushy Ridge is located where the Meyers Grade Road ends. Although Adams gave me detailed instructions on how to find his house, the last leg of the journey was not without difficulty. The road, not marked on the map, forks in the middle of the forest; one branch leads to a winery, the other to a nondescript structure of corrugated metal that could attract the attention of FBI agents looking for clandestine arsenals. Adams' house sits on top of a rocky hill. A comfortable but unpretentious abode, where freedom-loving hippies could probably indulge in communion with nature.

I go into the house - the composer is sleeping on the couch with an open volume of Allen Ginsberg's poems at the head of the bed. He wakes up, rubs his eyes, apologizes for the non-existent mess and starts making coffee. For his fifty-three years old, Adams looks quite young; he has a friendly face, bordered by a short-cropped silver beard. The eyes either flash brightly with curiosity, or become clouded with slight sadness. He is an avid bookworm and is not averse to stunning his interlocutor with an unexpected question about a book that interests him - about Ginsberg, for example. If you were to see him in Berkeley, where he spends most of the year, you might mistake him for a UCLA professor—one of those plaid-shirted intellectuals who sits at the Cheese Board on Shattuck Avenue, consuming organic food. pizza and making notes in the margins of Wittgenstein's book.

When Adams lives in Brushy Ridge, his wife (Deborah O'Grady, a photographer) and their teenage children, Emily and Sam, often come to visit him on the weekends. But for the most part he is alone here, and when someone appears in the house, it takes the composer several minutes to return from heaven to earth. He may give the impression of a naive person, but if this is naivety, then it is honed on the touchstone of gullibility. Adams speaks slowly, in a soft tone, pausing every now and then, searching for the right word. At times he bursts into unexpectedly harsh laughter, accompanied by clapping his hands and an amusing roll of his eyes. Behind his restraint one can feel the pressure of hidden energy. He tries to talk as little as possible about his work, but it is difficult to get rid of the feeling that in some way his consciousness (or subconscious) always remains chained to what is his life’s work. After a couple of hours of conversation, he becomes increasingly anxious: I suspect he is worried about the unfinished score left on his desk. But before he gets back to work, he introduces me to his property, which covers forty acres of land. Adams nods to the unused watering hoses laid in the forest: this place used to be a flower farm. After greeting his neighbor, he carries on a non-committal conversation about the water supply - or more precisely, about the detrimental effect that the newly built winery is having on him.

We cross a steep ravine and Adams leads me to a large, modern building that looks like a warehouse. “This is my composing shed,” he says. There is a long tradition that instructs the composer to work in the forest. Gustav Mahler wrote many of his symphonies in a hut built according to his designs; Adams, on the other hand, can lay claim to being the musician working in history's largest composer's barn. He lifts the hanging door and we enter a house, part of which is rented to a neighbor who is a lumberjack. The building smells of freshly cut sequoias. Adams leads me into a smaller room where there is a computer; Sheets of music paper are scattered around the MIDI keyboard. Flicking the keys, he commands the computer to play the aria Pues mi Dios ha nacido a penar , that is, “For the Lord was born to suffer,” which opens the second part of his new oratorio. In a soft, slightly wary manner, the computer produces a sinuous, quite Adamsian melody of long breathing, unfolding against a backdrop of soothing chords. Somewhere in the fiftieth bar, all this remains is a modest monophonic line. The composer looks at the floor, resting his chin in his hands. Then he gets to work, plunging into silence, from which he must extract the missing sounds.

It's a strange thing to do - composing music in America in the 21st century. Besides the fact that this work, which requires time, solitude and concentration, is difficult in itself, the composer must have inexhaustible faith in his own abilities in order to immerse himself in the process of creation again and again. You might have to be a little crazy to do this. When a work is completed, what remains in the hands of the author is not a material object - say, a painting that can be hung on the wall, or a novel that can be read in one sitting - but a string of abstract icons, intended for other musicians to learn them and performed the play. You have to bring it to the public eye, and very few people take seriously (or even notice) what you do. In America there is a common view of classical music as a dead or alien form of expression; it comes to the point that jazz fans present their favorite thesis as an obvious truth: “Jazz is American classical music.” What can you say to this? That American classical music is American classical music? Making such statements is the same as admitting defeat. Composers cannot but be saddened by this state of affairs.

One often hears that American composers are becoming accustomed to solitude and coming to terms with their role as professional outcasts. A prime example of a musician with a similar outlook was Charles Ives, the failed Beethoven of American music, who earned his living working for an insurance company and, in his spare time, created radical collages of distorted hymns and marches. Wilfrid Mellers, in his classic book Music in Newly Found Land, writes about Ives: “The integrity of Ives’s nature is inseparable from his inherent courage as an experimenter as a true pioneer.” These grades look good on paper, but ultimately they serve as excuses for failure. Ives, for all his enormous talent, only occasionally made attempts to attract the attention of listeners, and he felt most comfortable when he was doing his favorite thing alone. Some of his followers, making a virtue out of necessity, learned to boast of their obscurity and the “inaccessibility” of their works; they proclaim themselves experimenters, pioneers, amateur composers and misanthropes. But there was a time (mostly in the 1930s and 1940s) when the boundaries between classical and popular music seemed quite fluid: Copland listened to Ellington, Ellington listened to Ravel, Bernstein listened to both, as well as everyone else. However, after the Second World War, the European doctrine of atonality, which swept the North American continent with the speed of a virus, drove composers into university reservations.

In the 1960s, the winds of change blew in, and a group of young American composers moved in a new, unknown direction. The musical style they developed was called minimalism, and - due to a curious combination of circumstances - the tendencies that led to the marginalization of the creators of serious music in America became much less noticeable. A West Bank visionary named LaMonte Young, captivated by the dodecaphone-pointillistic music of Anton Webern, composed a String Trio in 1958, in which each consonance lasted several minutes, as if hanging in the air. Californian Terry Riley applied Young's "long sound" method to simple chords, such as the C major triad. His revolutionary opus In C , based on the principle of repeatability (repetition of small cells of sound fabric), made minimalism almost the central channel of American music. Steve Reich (Reich) perfected this composition technique, Philip Glass popularized it, and 60s rock stars mastered its basics. Group The Velvet Underground found its signature sound by adopting the long, fluttering low sounds of John Cale's alto, who played in Young's ensemble. Brian Eno used minimalist techniques to create "background music". It was from this source that the electronic sounds that swept across the world through dance clubs were drawn.

So American classical music is alive and well. Moreover, it is thriving and finding application in the most unexpected places. And since the minimalists quite accidentally attracted a huge new audience to modern music, it means that there are other opportunities that are just waiting in the wings. In the 1970s, when Steve Reich sold hundreds of thousands of records with his Music for Eighteen Musicians, he destroyed a persistent modernist myth by demonstrating that music could break new ground without being esoteric. And when, around the same time, John Adams began to write serious concert works based on the technique of minimalism, he was able to prove that classical forms are capable of absorbing almost everything in the world. Minimalism was for him the art of fusion, a way to connect together all the sounds inherent in America, taken in an extremely wide range. He felt like an heir to Copland's popularizing mission, but without the hint of urban snobbery. In his interpretation, open prairies became modern landscapes, permeated with sadness, illuminated by red neon light and immersed in the blue of the television screen.

Last June, when I visited Adams for the first time at his home in Brushy Ridge, he offered some thoughts about the composer's relationship with popular culture. “I like to think of culture as a collection of symbols through which we understand each other because we share them with everyone,” he said. “We communicate by pointing to symbols that are common to us. It could be a Woody Allen movie.” , or a John Lennon poem, or a line from a pop hit... Even in my youth, I realized that dodecaphonic music (and in a sense, all modern musical creativity) has moved so far from everyday experience that it is no longer visible on the national radar monitor "I would be glad if someone said: 'Look at that gas station in the moonlight - it's pure John Adams!'"

To be continued

The New Yorker , January 8, 2001
Translation by Joseph Friedman