A is for Adams

Well, this has been a bit spotty for pretty much as long as I've had this thing, but I'm going to try something a little new.

It occurred to me that for a music lover in the profession of making music I do a surprisingly small amount of music talk on this page. So the new blog project (I suppose blogject has already been coined and I'd probably have to pay some sort of licensing fee if I wanted to use it myself) is a 26 day (more or less) A-Z of classical composers and why I love them. I'll try to avoid really obvious ones, but that doesn't mean I'll skip someone just because they happen to be famous. When at all possible I'll link in videos or music clips. So let's get things rolling.

John Adams

He's an exciting composer that writes accessible music that doesn't shy away from modern techniques. He works in what I describe as a mutated minimalist style. Early in his career he wrote things that could be labeled as minimalist without a second thought, but as he has progressed his music has expanded. Still present in most of his compositions is the complex and rhythmic pulse of the minimalist but layered on top of that is more harmonic variety and larger orchestrations that are not common in his minimalist kin. He's done most of his work in the orchestral showpiece sort of genre. Not much chamber music, not much solo music. He has written 3 or 4 operas (1 of those 4 I consider more a musical but it's a tough distinction to make in this day and age) and various other stuff.

I came into awareness of Adams largely by accident. I was just starting to get into opera during my senior year of high school and as you might guess, I went to the public library and started at A. Didn't take long to get to "The Death of Klinghoffer", an opera based on the botched terrorist hijacking of a luxury liner in the mid 80s. It got my thoughts flying. This was a political opera that didn't follow any conceptions I may have had in my mind about what opera could do. I found another one in a similar vein, "Nixon in China". This one all about (you guessed it) Nixon's diplomatic trip to China. Again, deeply political. Who sits down and says I want to write an opera about Nixon 10 years after the fact? I was hooked and promptly found as much material as I could by Adams. It's not all grade A, but he is one composer that is always close to the top of my playlist.

I recommend the following

Century Rolls - A piano concerto
Short Ride in a Fast Machine - Orchestral Fanfare sort of piece
Death of Klinghoffer - Opera (available on CD and a cool new DVD version)
Nixon in China - Opera (available on CD)
Doctor Atomic - Opera (Premiered 2005, still living in new opera houses. If you should happen to have the opportunity, make the effort. I hear it's going to be playing in England sometime in 2008. If I'm in Germany by then, I'm going to make the effort.)

And to whet your appetite, here's a bit from Nixon in China. The news aria is one of my favorites in the whole opera.