A Master of Exquisite Composure

John Adams belongs to that elite handful of living composers whose names at least ring a bell with the hoi polloi. Operas such as “Nixon in China” and works like his early “Shaker Loops” and his Violin Concerto have made him one of the most important American composers today.

Even so, within that elite company, Adams occupies a distinct and paradoxical role--as a sort of dean, bad boy, visionary and everyman all rolled into one thoughtful, good-natured package. He often has clever schemes up his sleeve, as when he mixed the influences of serialist Arnold Schoenberg and cartoon composer Carl Stalling in his Chamber Symphony--bouncing the Road Runner through a severe 12-tone composition.

So when the news comes that Adams will be unleashing a new 45-minute orchestral work called “Naive and Sentimental Music”--the world premiere of which will be given Friday by the Los Angeles Philharmonic--irony detectors go up.

In fact, the title comes from an essay written in 1795 by Friedrich von Schiller called “Naive and Sentimental Poetry,” in which Schiller compares the naive artist--true to nature, instinctive, unself-conscious--and the sentimental artist--longing after the purer condition of the former. It points to a central tension that Adams admits gives his own music its juice.

Aligned with Minimalism--the chugging riffs and atmospheric washes first created by LaMonte Young and Terry Riley in the ‘60s, then popularized by Philip Glass and Steve Reich in the ‘70s--Adams, who turns 52 on Monday, has never been an absolutist in that camp. In works like “Shaker Loops” (1978), “Harmonium” (1981), “Grand Pianola Music” (1982) and “Harmonielehre” (1985, his last large-scale orchestra piece), he manipulated a familiar but personalized language of hypnotically repeating phrases and modal harmonies. In “Nixon” and his second opera “Death of Klinghoffer,” he took on social subjects within a mostly Minimalist language.

But a marked shift occurred in his music in the ‘90s. His vocabulary expanded, from the quasi-serialist leanings of the Chamber Symphony, to the dissonance and neo-Romanticism of his Violin Concerto and his piano concerto “‘Century Rolls.”

One recent morning, Adams greeted a reporter at the front door while clutching an essential modern tool--a cordless telephone.

“The contemporary composer at work,” he said, grinning. He is emphatically plugged in, composing on computers in his upstairs study or on the family farm on the Mendocino coast. But the hefty pile of paper on the kitchen counter, the manuscript of “Naive and Sentimental” awaiting the copyist’s final draft, is all done by hand.

He points to the piece with a combination of pride and slight dread. Is waiting for a premiere nerve-racking? “Very much so. I’d prefer to go into the first rehearsal the day I finish, but it doesn’t work that way.”

Adams, born a New Englander and trained at Harvard, has lived in the Bay Area more than 25 years now. He and his wife, photographer Deborah O’Grady, have two teenage children (string players) and a German shorthaired pointer named Calvin. Calvin’s slobbering, deadpan charisma comes to bear as a photographer shoots Adams. The dog insists on getting in the picture.

“He’s a naive and sentimental dog,” the composer jokes. “He doesn’t know how important I am.”

Part of Adams’ charm is a sense that he, too, doesn’t know how important he is. Nonesuch is soon to release a 10-box set of Adams’ music, “The John Adams Earbox,” a retrospective milestone for a young veteran who continues to explore ideas both serious and light, naive and sentimental.

Question: In that few people will know about the Schiller reference, the title “Naive and Sentimental Music” is confrontational, isn’t it?

Answer: Absolutely. [He laughs.] Especially in the era of really hardball, theory-generated music. We’re passing that era now, but certainly it was the one I grew up in, the era of serialists and 12-tone, [the] European postwar, extremely rationalist forms of composition. To have a piece called “Naive and Sentimental Music” is throwing the gauntlet down.

Q: How did you find the title?

A: Maybe 10 years ago, I was reading about Goethe and all the very early [German] Romantic philosophers, [and] this essay by Schiller would be cited. I was attracted to [the phrase] primarily because of its provocative implications.

“Naive” and “sentimental” are terms that, in American 20th century usage, are not positive attributes. If someone’s naive, it means they’re clueless. And “sentimental” refers to someone who buys Hallmark cards. [But] the root of “sentimental” is sentiment, and isn’t that what music should be about? And “naivete” could also mean something quite positive, being childlike or not jaded.

What Jung called the anima, the expressive core, of music, has more or less been appropriated by pop music. So you get the very strange phenomenon of people who listen to [Milton] Babbitt or [Pierre] Boulez or [Iannis] Xenakis or John Cage for a kind of a rationalist pleasure, and yet turn around and listen to country and western or Alanis Morissette, if they’re very young, or David Byrne, if they’re my age, for their emotional pleasure. To me, this seems like an unfortunate and regrettable split.

What I’ve been trying to do as a composer is to regain the anima.

It was controversial when I started, with pieces like “Harmonium,” “Shaker Loops” and even “Nixon in China.” I was getting criticized because I was writing music that was not comprehensible to the common person, and I was getting criticized from the other side, from the sophisticates, for writing music that they felt was emotionally manipulative.

Q: How do you approach a large-scale orchestral piece?

A: I have never had a problem with large structures. In fact, it’s possible that I express myself best in them. That may actually go back to my Minimalist roots, because the way in which a Minimalist piece unfolds does take time. What was a challenge was to figure out, “What am I saying?”

I had been in New York in 1997 and the L.A. Phil came into Avery Fisher [Hall]. It was an interesting day, because the New York Philharmonic had just finished playing a concert with two pieces of mine on it, a matinee. Then there was an hour break and the Los Angeles Philharmonic moved in for a rehearsal. I heard Esa-Pekka [Salonen] go through part of a Bruckner symphony, just tuning the hall.

For some reason, I just had one of those flashes, one of those shocks of recognition. I was ready to write a large-scale orchestra piece. I felt that Esa-Pekka and the L.A. Phil would be the right people to do this. They’re sympathetic, adventurous players. It seemed like the right chemistry.

Q: “Naive” is dedicated to Salonen. Do you have a special rapport with him?

A: We have a great deal of respect for each other. He’s a composer and conductor who has come from something that, stylistically, I rebelled very strongly against, [the] post-serial European style, whose models are composers like Ligeti and Berio and Lutoslawski. I have very little interest in that music. But I was very impressed by the fact that Esa-Pekka could pick my music up and appear to be genuinely excited about it and do it so well, as he did the Chamber Symphony [in 1995] and “Slonimsky’s Earbox” [in 1998].

I also think that the approach he has to the orchestra, to its repertoire and to its relationship with the community is really the wave of the future. If there’s any hope for keeping orchestras from falling into the category of museum [piece], then what [he] represents is critical.

Q: Do you feel a kind of crusader’s zeal in creating new orchestral music, partly to save the medium?

A: Actually, I feel just the opposite. I feel a kind of good-natured pessimism, and definitely a sense of irony. I think that the golden era of orchestral music had its climax around the turn of the century and basically was over by 1950. If you really look at the repertoire with a cold eye, you’re hard-pressed to name even a dozen works written since 1950 that have become universally acknowledged repertoire in the way that the Beethoven symphonies, the Brahms symphonies, “Petrushka” and these things have been.

Now, of course, it does take a long time for works to earn a place in the repertoire. Things could change. But I do think that most of the really important, innovative classical music being written these days is not being written for orchestras. It’s written for specialized ensembles and unique media.

That makes me a transitional figure. I do work in the world of electronic music and samplers. I’ve written for rock band. But at the same time, I can turn around and write 100% orchestral work, and do so with great sincerity. This piece is not an ironic or satirical use of the orchestra, like Frank Zappa might have done.

I started composing seriously around 1975, and I’m a child of the flower generation. I was in college in the late ‘60s. The great issue of my life has been that of accessibility. Accessibility has been a weapon that my critics have wielded against me: “Oh, Adams, he writes accessible music,” which is meant as the worst kind of savage damnation.

But Mozart or Chopin or Bach, or even a work like “Petrushka,” was accessible. It could be appreciated and provide immediate pleasure on first encounter. But somehow, in the course of the 20th century, beginning with Schoenberg, a suspicion began to arise that if a new work was accessible, it had to be lightweight, [that] the its meaning lay on a very thin shell and there was nothing of value underneath.

Q: Is that just a byproduct of the birth of modernism and the intense need to break from the past?

A: To break with the past is a natural, almost requisite need for any artist. It may not look it that the composer of “Harmonielehre” or “Naive and Sentimental Music” had a need to break with the past. But my past is Boulez and Schoenberg and a highly rational, almost scientific view toward making art.

My desire to break with my heritage, my past, was a desire to create a music that had a strong emotional content to it, which turned out to be very provocative. Witness some of the critics, or even the audience response I got in Europe in the ‘80s, where people walked out or booed because they perceived the worst of American consumer culture in my music.

Q: Did they equate you with Disney?

A: Oh, worse. Spielberg. [He laughs.]

Q: How did you respond?

A: It caused me a lot of cognitive dissonance, but I followed my own path, [which also] took me away from Minimalism. My music became quite complex in the early ‘90s, with pieces like the Chamber Symphony. Steve Reich, in his wonderfully guarded way of saying things, said, ‘I hate that piece,’ speaking about the Chamber Symphony.

I’m anxious to hear this new piece. I think it’s kind of an important breakthrough for me. I think I’ve found a harmonious synthesis of all the tendencies of my past music.

Q: Maybe with your Chamber Symphony, hard-line Minimalists felt as if you were in bed with the enemy, in that the Schoenberg connection was so strong.

A: It was a left turn, but it was done with tongue in cheek. The image that sticks in my mind with the Chamber Symphony is the picture of Arnold Schoenberg with Charlie Chaplin posing on the tennis court. I think it’s a very playful response to a piece that I do love--I love the Schoenberg Chamber Symphony, as twisted and weird as it is.

But I don’t view Schoenberg as a deity. In fact, maybe part of my motivation was to prick holes in this terribly self-important armor that Schoenberg created around himself. It’s a very California thing to do, to put the Road Runner in the piece--beep beep. [He laughs.]

Q: Listening to a number of your CDs, it struck me that “Hoodoo Zephyr” from 1993 and the new recording of the 1995 music-theater piece “I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky” are your “pop” albums--albeit twisted versions thereof. Do you view them that way?

A: Well, I don’t really view them as pop albums, and certainly the sales don’t look like pop sales. [He laughs.] But I think that any contemporary composer ought to be free to draw from the music that surrounds [him or her].

For Brahms, that meant Gypsy music and Hungarian music. For Mozart, it was Austrian folk tunes and the kind of music that was sung in cafes. For any contemporary American composer, it basically means pop music, which is the folk music of our time.

Those two pieces were very different in inspiration: “Hoodoo Zephyr” was an idyll, an ideal landscape. “Ceiling/Sky” [based on a libretto by June Jordan about the aftermath of the Northridge earthquake] clearly extols pop influences. I was trying to create a new form of Broadway musical--drawing freely on rap, gospel, blues. There’s even some Minimalism, in the opening. It was severely received when it came out. Maybe a generation or two or three later will look back and see that the music is good and that the story does acutely reflect the life of young urban people in Los Angeles.

Q: The millennium seems to be in the ether. Does it cause you to reflect on things in a different way?

A: From a composer’s point of view, it’s a good time, because every composer I know has a big, fat commission for the year 2000. It will be the year 2001 that everyone will be filing for unemployment.

I shied away from [writing a millennium orchestra piece], but I did decide to write an evening-long work about the birth of Christ. [He laughs.] It’s so politically incorrect. But the myth of the birth of Christ and particularly the characters of Mary and Elizabeth and Joseph are archetypal characters in the way that Lear or Macbeth or Julius Caesar are archetypal characters.

This being 2000--let’s face it, as much as we’d like to say that “BC” stands for “before the common era,” the bottom line is that we’re measuring from that event.

Q: What about music in this epoch; has modernism played itself out?

A: Modernism focuses basically on materials. I use the Beaubourg Museum in Paris [as an example]. It has all the pipes on the outside. That, to me, is modernism--celebrating the material and repressing, in a sense, the expressive impetus. I think that that point of view will continue to exist, but it will be shared with other forces.

One of the major forces now is a pan-cultural view of the world. There’s a great deal of interest among younger artists in Indian sacred art or Chinese opera or myths from Iceland. Of course, this has always gone on. Picasso was deeply influenced by African masks, and Debussy supposedly had his ears and eyes opened [by] gamelan music. Right now, it’s very much the main event.

Q: You’ve transcended the Minimalist moniker by now. But one thing about that group, if it is a group, is it bridged the gap between composers and the public.

A: It [was] a huge watershed. I remember the violence of the response to Minimalism in the classical community back in the ‘70s. I remember trying to do pieces by Steve Reich or my own [pieces] with classical musicians who were incensed because they felt Minimalism was a cheap way of denying the seriousness of high art. And I’ve seen over the past 25 years how audiences--and even performers--have come to accept it.

It’s a major achievement that we have a group of composers whose every new piece has been eagerly anticipated by the public.

Q: Still, it’s a rare breed--a composer who makes a living from composing. Do you sense that that situation could change?

A: No. I think, in any generation, there are only a handful of composers who have been acknowledged enough by the public to actually be able to support themselves by commissions and royalties. And unfortunately, I have to say, they’re not necessarily the greatest composers alive. For every Charles Ives or Schoenberg, there is a Giancarlo Menotti or Roy Harris, someone who is wildly successful and then a generation later nobody has any use for them.

I am extremely grateful and humbled that I’m able to make a living writing music. But in the scale of things, I’m not even a paramecium compared to a rock artist. If my albums sell 20,000 or 30,000 copies over a year or two, which is extremely good for a classical album, that’s a disaster for a rock album. That’s it. They’d have to consider a career in real estate.*