John Adams

Saturday 17 August 2013 11:10AM (view full episode)

John Adams occupies a unique position in the world of American music and is known as a composer, conductor and creative thinker. He's in Australia to conduct several of his works including a brand new saxophone concerto. He also talks about his interest in composing works on religious themes.
Sydney Symphony Orchestra concerts
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra concerts

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Transcription of a conversation between Andrew Ford and John Adams, recorded August 2013

Andrew Ford: The saxophone concerto which Sydney is about to hear is the first piece since your violin concerto to have the word 'concerto' in the title. Is this significant?

John Adams: I wouldn't attach too much meaning to that. I generally stay away from conventional titles, simply because I love language. In 2003 I wrote a concerto for amplified violin, a six-stringed amplified violin, and the title of that piece is The Dharma at Big Sur, which I think is a much more interesting title than 'Violin Concerto No 2'. But I don't know, in the case of the sax concerto, there are so few of them that just the concept of a saxophone concerto is shocking enough to the classical music world.

Andrew Ford: Of course it is an established classical instrument, but it's much more associated with jazz, for obvious reasons. I know it was invented by a Belgian, but it really seems like an American instrument. Is that something which you respond to?

John Adams: I think that Adolphe Sax—who invented the saxophone as an instrument that was intended to be performed in military bands and should have the sound of a brass instrument but the agility of a woodwind instrument—I think he would have been shocked if he'd known that the saxophone became the emblematic instrument of this whole new art form called jazz. And then of course it was adopted in blues and R&B and all kinds of commercial music.

So it's an amazing instrument, and it's actually kind of puzzling and disturbing in a way that it has not been used more in the classical repertoire. I think I can count on the fingers of one hand the pieces of music, mostly by Ravel and Prokofiev and Leonard Bernstein, that feature a famous saxophone solo. So I think it's high time that the instrument be acknowledged for a sound that can be incorporated into the symphonic repertoire.

Andrew Ford: Yes, it is quite versatile as well, isn't it, because it can blend with all sorts of other instruments. So you've got a very useful instrument, it seems to me, when you have a saxophone, and if you make it the solo instrument you can presumably pit it against other instruments in the orchestra to change its colour.

John Adams: Yes, and of course the thing is the saxophone does have this sound that immediately makes people think of jazz or popular music, so when we hear it the imagination takes a certain leap, and for that reason I've used it in many pieces of mine. I mean, Nixon in China has a saxophone quartet that plays through all three hours of that opera, and I have written for it in three or four other orchestral works as well.

Andrew Ford: Yes, and Berg of course uses it, come to think of it, doesn't he, in Lulu very effectively.

John Adams: He does, yes, but it's in a very kind of cautious and careful way. He doesn't really let it rip, and the best thing about the saxophone is just letting it wail.

Andrew Ford: Yes. And anyway, Berg uses it to denote sleaze.

John Adams: Yes.

Andrew Ford: And he's not the only composer to have done so. So what was the approach you took to your saxophone concerto? What can we expect to hear?

John Adams: I had met this fantastic American virtuoso Tim McAllister, because the LA Philharmonic hired him to play a very difficult solo part in a recent work of mine, City Noir, which is kind of a symphony inspired by noir film scores, and I had written a very jittery and virtuosic solo part for the jazz saxophone. And it was very hard to find somebody who could play that post-bop sound but also read the music and count and be in the orchestra. And fortunately they found this fellow and I was astonished by him and got to know him. And when he mentioned to me that in high school he had been a stunt bike rider and done all these incredibly dangerous things on a bicycle in competitions, I thought, now, this is somebody I really have to write a concerto for.

Andrew Ford: And you weren't tempted to increase his role with stunt riding as well?

John Adams: No, he leaves the bike backstage.

Andrew Ford: We look forward to hearing the piece. I'd like to ask you, John Adams, about another one of your recent pieces, The Gospel According to the Other Mary, which Australia hasn't heard yet but I hope it's not too long. I was reading something about the piece, about your revisions to it, and I thought it might be interesting for our listeners to know a bit about how you approach your work and particularly how you approach your work after you think you've finished it and then you hear it and then you realise the proportions are wrong or something like that. How does that process work?

John Adams: Well, I can't tell you how I approach a work initially. If I knew how I made something, first of all it would take all the mystery out of creating something, and secondly I'd probably write a lot more pieces because it would be no struggle. But the struggle is really essential to the creative process. And I liken the beginning of a new work to being in a completely dark room stumbling around, feeling for the light switch. It's that unknowable, that experience of trying to form a piece. I mean, you have very, very vague images and rhythmic ideas, but you really don't know its genotype. And part of composing is getting to know your materials and then watching them grow.

As far as hearing a piece performed and discovering that the form is too long or not long enough or needs revision, that's just part of the critical process. I think I have a pretty high batting average. I don't often make massive structural changes in my works. But in the dramatic one something may fit and feel perfectly right in your studio, but you get it out into the real world with real singers and real human beings struggling to play these difficult passages or sing these complex lines, and you often discover that you have to shrink something or expand it.

Andrew Ford: So it's to do with timing as much as anything then?

John Adams: You know, it's a very visceral kind of thing. I don't think it's something that you can intellectually judge in advance. Musicians are…we are organisms. We have brains, highly refined brains for certain things, you know, pitch and rhythm and colour and texture, but how a piece feels on the large meta level, its emotional flow, its ups and downs, those are very tricky things. Sometimes I've heard a bad performance of a piece of mine and I've thought it was the fault of the piece and I've thought, oh, I have to go back and spend God knows how many hours and money to fix this. And then I hear some other performer do the same piece and it sounds perfect. So it's a really, really very unknowable situation.

Andrew Ford: Yes. I might suggest that in matters of timing it can be almost split-second stuff, if it's the difference between one performer and another.

John Adams: Yes, it is, and of course it's a funny thing in classical music because in classical music, particularly let's say the Beethoven Fidelio overture, which is also on my Sydney program, I mean, the differences between one performance and another are like matters of 1% or 2% really. Maybe somebody takes a radically slow tempo, like Leonard Bernstein did for this particular overture. But when you compare that to how one jazz performance differs from another, or one Indian master playing a raga from another, where the creativity is so much part of the moment, classical music is kind of a frozen art form with very little room to wriggle in. Nonetheless, when we go and hear the same piece played by different performers, just that little 5% difference from one to another is something that we savour.

Andrew Ford: Yes, and you know when you've heard a great performance, don't you, and it's in that 5%, it's in the detail.

John Adams: It is, exactly. So it's kind of like some sort of fine Japanese flower arrangement where just the slightest little adjustment of a leaf or a blossom makes the difference between something absolutely banal and mediocre and something that's just magical.

Andrew Ford: You're listening to The Music Show on RN, and my guest is the composer John Adams who is talking to us on the phone from just outside San Francisco.

Coming back to The Gospel According to the Other Mary, and of course I haven't heard it yet, I've only read about it, but it seems to be in a line with other works of yours, particularly El Niño, but works which have…I hesitate to use the word 'religious' intent, but a sort of spiritual side to them, and I wonder whether you could talk about this.

John Adams: I guess the stage works that you are speaking of, I would probably include my second opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, which although it leads to a terrorist event, the hijacking of a cruise ship and the murder of an American Jew by Palestinian hijackers, the general feeling of the opera has a kind of grave, oracular, almost sacred tone.

And then there's my nativity oratorio, El Niño, which I composed in the year 2000, which tells the story of Christ's birth, Mary's conception and Christ's birth and the flight into Egypt, but it does it in a very whimsical way by using women's poetry from the Middle Ages and from contemporary Latin America.

And in the piece that you mentioned, the new oratorio, which I view as a companion piece to the nativity oratorio, which is the story of the passion and includes the raising of Lazarus and the crucifixion and resurrection. With that said, I have to admit that I'm not a particularly conventionally religious person. I was brought up in the Protestant religion in New England, I went to church with my mother, but I don't belong to a church and I don't think religiously. But these stories have immense meaning to me, and I find great psychological drama in them, I find spiritual drama, and I guess ultimately I find some very deep personal meaning which I can't even articulate in words, and that draws me to these subjects. But that said, I doubt I will ever write another piece of that sort. If I go back to composing another opera or oratorio I suspect it will be a secular subject.

Andrew Ford: But even with some of the secular subjects, even in Doctor Atomic there's the big John Donne set piece, and in A Flowering Tree, although it is not a religious story, there is this important spiritual dimension to it. And I'm just wondering whether there is some sort of connection between music, musical expression and what we could broadly call spirituality, in your mind at least.

John Adams: We hear here in the US this tedious phrase over and over again 'the death of classical music', and we are constantly being reminded of how off-the-radar what we do is and it's not important, it's not important like rock 'n' roll or like the movies, television or whatever, but I feel that classical music, whether it's Beethoven or Bach or Mahler or Stravinsky or what I do, can speak to the essence of the human experience in a way that other musical art forms can't. And that's a very sublime expression. It's complicated, it involves effort, but it's also immensely emotional.

Right after September 11, 2001, in the weeks that followed the events in New York City, I was curious to read about how many people felt they needed to listen to classical music. I mean, more people than normally listened to classical music. And it was an admission of the fact that there was a deep psychological and spiritual need that could only be satisfied by the kind of sublime expression that classical music provides. And that's why I do it, and that's why the people that I know that are classical music performers or composers devote their life to it.

Andrew Ford: John Adams, I think that's a good moment to stop. Thank you very much indeed for talking to me again on today's Music Show. It's been good to catch up.

John Adams: It's a pleasure.


Andrew Ford
Penny Lomax

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