In a new space for L.A., a new work for California

Composer John Adams still remembers the first day he saw California, as a fresh-faced Harvard graduate who’d piloted his VW Beetle across the continent through Canada.

“It was a very clear August morning as I drove across the Golden Gate Bridge, coming down the Marin grade, and I saw San Francisco,” Adams said this week by telephone from the offices of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

“I remember it being white -- the city looked so serene and unusual, like a place from another world. And indeed it was,” he said, laughing. “As I soon found out.”

Since that day in 1972, the Massachusetts-born, New England-reared Adams, now 56, has become California’s musical ambassador to the world. He’s moved toward and then away from Minimalism, bringing romanticism and translucent textures to his work of the last decade, including a celebrated violin concerto and the oratorio “El Nino.”

Lincoln Center showcased Adams’ compositions for eight weeks last spring in its first festival devoted to a living composer. Also this year, he won a Pulitzer Prize for “On the Transmigration of Souls,” a piece inspired by the Sept. 11 tragedy that was performed last weekend by the Pacific Symphony and Chorale in Costa Mesa.

Now, Adams has written a composition, “The Dharma at Big Sur,” in which he tries to capture some of the exuberance of his arrival in California. The nearly hourlong piece will be performed tonight by the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the second gala marking the opening of the Walt Disney Concert Hall. (On Nov. 16, his 1981 “Harmonium” will be part of the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s inaugural program at the venue.)

“I felt like the opening of the hall was a real defining moment for California culture,” he said. “I’m an adoptive Californian, and the first moment of encountering the land and the ocean had a very profound imprinting experience on me. A lot of what makes California is people coming here from other parts of the world.”

To find ways to describe that moment musically, Adams read through some of the state’s great literature: Wallace Stegner’s “Angle of Repose,” Henry Miller’s novels, the craggy poems of Robinson Jeffers.

The work whose tone best matched his own feelings for the state was Jack Kerouac’s novel “Big Sur.” Adams has been a fan of the Beats for decades; one of his best memories of his first year in California is having seen Allen Ginsberg walk into a North Beach pub where he was drinking.

“The Beats were not only a counterculture, an alternative to the button-down, conservative world of the Eisenhower era,” he said, “but they were some of the first people to popularize Oriental philosophy and Buddhism. Which were also very profound things to me, part of the astonishment of arriving in California.”

“The Dharma at Big Sur” was also shaped by Adams’ hearing classically trained violinist Tracy Silverman at an Oakland jazz club and writing the violin part with Silverman’s “Kerouacian spirit” in mind. He called the result, which Silverman will be playing at Disney Hall tonight, “the closest thing to a genuine collaboration I’ve ever done with a performer.”

The piece, too, was a collaboration of sorts with Lou Harrison, the maverick California composer who died this year.

“Lou Harrison was one of the first composers I met out here, in the early ‘70s,” he said. “And I became very involved with his theories of different intonation earlier this year. This piece of mine is in ‘just’ intonation” -- meaning the tuning differs from the traditional Western intonation that came in with Bach. “So it has a very different sound.”

While much of Harrison’s work has a slight Asian tone, Adams said “Dharma” recalls Indian music at times, with a conclusion whose sound he compared to an enormous Javanese gamelan. He called the piece a homage to both Harrison and California minimalist pioneer Terry Riley.

“I just heard it today for the first time,” he said. “First rehearsals are so freaky, so I don’t want to make any judgments on it this morning. But I think the piece inhabits a very different emotional world. I don’t know what audiences will feel. They may be so alarmed by its alien sound that they may not like it.”

Some of contemporary California frustrates Adams, who lives in Berkeley and the Sierra: “The mood now is, ‘I have to pay another tax on my SUV?!’ And we want all these undocumented aliens to come and work to pick our lettuce and grapes, but we don’t want them to be able to drive their kids to school.”

But most of these problems are rooted in the culture at large, he said. He’s a West Coast partisan at heart.

“I get very annoyed when I go back East and people say, ‘Oh, Los Angeles -- Mickey Mouse! Arnold Schwarzenegger!’

“We have a profound culture here, and it’s finally beginning to be recognized. There’s something about having Disney Hall and saying to the world, ‘We’ve got it together now.’

“I think this is going to be quite an event.”