John Adams Interview In Salon - Video
Bonnie GibbonsKevin Berger of Salon has an interesting interview with John Adams in conjunction with the release of the composer’s autobiography, “Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life.”
Some interesting moments concern the inspiration Adams took from Wagner:
I was driving through the Sierras and I was listening to a cassette of “Dawn and Siegfried’s Rhine Journey” from “Gotterdammerung.” This is sort of surprising because at that time I was deep into John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen and doing a lot of electronic music.
I’d always been interested in orchestra music, having grown up with it, and I was suddenly just seized by the emotional tone of the music, the emotional sincerity of the music. It suddenly illuminated me and made me realize how much of the avant-garde that I’d been involved in had become dead as far as feeling was concerned. The one thing Cage really forbade was expression of feelings. He was the world’s most lovely, gentle person in his human interactions. But when it came to art, things were absolutely cold. And so much of avant-garde music was.
Here we have this great tradition of jazz and pop music in America, where feeling is everything. If you think of late Coltrane, like “A Love Supreme,” it’s just this 40-minute exhalation of raw feeling. I thought to myself, “Why is it that contemporary classical music has to be devoid of feeling?” By hearing Wagner and realizing what had been lost, I think I suddenly very vaguely saw my future. (John Adams)
Other topics include the composer’s annoyance with the meme that he writes “CNN operas,” and a response to accusations of anti-Semitism in “The Death of Klinghoffer:”
I invite them to meditate on the libretto and the music. Because most people who’ve spent serious time with it, and not come with enormous prejudicial baggage, are moved by the human feeling in the work, and the feeling extends to both the Palestinians and the Jews. You can see why it’s so hard to solve these problems like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because people are so completely locked into their positions.
In full disclosure I must tell you that I’m only superficially familiar with the operas of Adams and not a huge fan of minimalism in general. I hope John and David will have a spare moment to comment.
Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life by John Adams
The autobiography of American composer John Adams
Reader Comments (64)
I've read most of Hallelujah Junction and would definitely recommend it, although The John Adams Reader would be my choice for a single book on Adams. Hallelujah Junction does contain about four full pages on my favorite of his works, Harmonielehre, and his reference to it as a "symphony". Many other writers have called Harmonielehre a "symphony", but this is the first time I've seen Adams apply the word. The entire 40 minute work has now been posted on youtube using the Simon Rattle recording, plus there is a posting of about the final four minutes taken from the Tony Palmer documentary on Adams titled "Hail Bop". This excerpt was recorded for the film by Edo DeWaart and the Netherlands Radio Symphony and is superior to either Rattle's or DeWaart's earlier CD's. There is also now an iTunes download of Harmonielehre with David Robertson and the St Louis Symphony from 2007, also superior to either CD. If there is such a thing as "The Great American Symphony", Harmonielehre is it.
I enjoyed the videoclip on Adams (above) and heard nothing to disagree with.
I was going to post the Harmonielehre video but it's broken up into sixe parts so I'll just post the URL for the search results on YouTube where you can easily find each part:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Adams+harmonielehre&search_type=&aq=f
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Kevin Berger is the former features editor for Salon. He oversaw the Environment & Science section, including the popular Atoms & Eden series about science.
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The entire work of 40 minutes was posted on YouTube by Simon Rattle, the recording, the more a display of the last four minutes taken by Tony Palmer Documentary Bop Adams entitled "Hail
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