Sospeso performs Road Movies by John Adams at the Orensanz Center on January 9, for the second volume of Sospeso Xponential.

One of America’s most admired and frequently performed composers, John Adams was born February 15, 1947 in Worcester, Massachusetts. His father, a painter and amateur musician, moved the family first to Woodstock, Vermont and then, in 1955, to a small town in central New Hampshire, where Adams grew up, attending school in the city of Concord and traveling south to Boston for music lessons. The cultural and intellectual life of New England, particularly the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Harvard University had a deep effect on his development. He began the study of music theory and composition at the age of ten while at the same time learning the clarinet from his father, an amateur musician with whom he played in marching bands and small orchestras during his teens. Adams’s first orchestral work, written when he was fourteen, was performed by a community orchestra where he also began to learn the craft of conducting. Adams attended Harvard College during the turbulent years of the late 1960’s. He continued his conducting and composing studies there while at the same time becoming more and more influenced by the revolution in rock and jazz that was blossoming during the years of the Vietnam conflict.

After six years of Harvard and studies with Leon Kirchner, Adams moved in 1971 to San Francisco where he quickly became involved in that city's characteristically wild and unpredictable musical life. At first his activities strongly reflected his interest in the aesthetics of John Cage. In concerts that he produced and conducted for the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and for the San Francisco Symphony’s "New and Unusual Music" series he brought experimental music stars such as Gavin Bryars, Robert Ashley, Cornelius Cardew, Meredith Monk and Alvin Lucier to the attention of San Francisco audiences. At the same time, between the 1970’s and 1980’s, Adams’s own interest in live electronic music led to compositions, collaborations and public events that helped define the "West Coast" sensibility in contemporary music. With composers and performers such as Ingram Marshall, Daniel Lenz, Paul Dresher, Morton Subotnick and Joan LaBarbara, Adams made influential concerts and festivals that brought new technology and avant garde performance practice to a newly evolved state. Adams’s first important instrumental works date from the late 1970’s. Among them is the ground-breaking Phrygian Gates for piano (1977), a work that has established the canon for piano works in the Minimalist genre (and has since been recorded in seven different versions).

An even more influential work, Shaker Loops for string ensemble, followed in 1978. In both Phrygian Gates and Shaker Loops the hallmarks of the Adams style made their first, most striking appearance: a fast, almost electrically energized sense of pulse; a brilliantly rippling, continually modulated surface of wave-like patterns; and the creation of broad, meticulously designed formal arches that can embrace extremely contrasting emotional states. This last aspect, the powerful emotional quality of most of his music, made Adams a particularly controversial composer during the 1980’s, a period when Western art music was just beginning to emerge from the cooler aesthetics of late Modernism. While Adams first became known for his Minimalist works, his subsequent output has matured into a language that is as protean and unpredictable as it is technically masterful. While the essential features of Minimalism—steady pulsation, extended tonal centers and the reiteration and manipulation of small motivic cells—continue to inform his later music, his expressive and formal style has become one of enormous range and mutability. Over the years he has contributed signal works in almost every imaginable musical form from dance and video to opera, musical comedy, pop songs, concertos, chamber music, sound tracks and even several award-winning television commercials. Few living composers have worked so successfully and made such a lasting contribution in so many genres.

Adams’s interest in orchestral music dates back to his childhood experiences playing in community orchestras in New Hampshire and his first experiences of hearing the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Over the years his intimate knowledge of the orchestra has become enhanced by his extensive experience as a conductor. Adams’s orchestral works are among the select handful that have gained repertoire status during the last quarter century. Between 1980 and 1990 Adams produced a string of orchestral works, many of them premiered and first recorded by the San Francisco Symphony under their then music director, Edo de Waart. Among them were Common Tones in Simple Time (1979-80), Harmonium (1981), Grand Pianola Music (1982), Harmonielehre (1985), The Chairman Dances (1986) and the popular fanfare for orchestra, Short Ride in a Fast Machine. The success of these works help to initiate a revolution in symphonic music that continued into the following decade. Within ten years of Adams’s first works in this genre, he had become America’s most frequently performed living composer of concert music. More recent orchestral works from the 1990’s include El Dorado (1991), the Violin Concerto (1993), a piano concerto entitled Century Rolls (1996), and the mammoth fifty-minute Naive and Sentimental Music (1998-99).

The event that brought Adams’s name to the largest of all his audiences was not an orchestral work but rather his first opera. In 1985 he had begun a collaboration with the poet Alice Goodman and stage director Peter Sellars that was to result in one of the most provocative creations in the recent history of music theater: Nixon in China. First presented by the Houston Grand Opera in October of 1987, Nixon in China took political, historical and mythic themes of American life and fused them into a musical, theatrical and poetic unity that was at once heroic and banal, comic and tragic. Nixon in China was performed over seventy times in the following few years, was televised internationally in a PBS production, and it won an Emmy and a Grammy. The Nonesuch recording was named one of the "10 most important recordings of the decade" by Time Magazine.

Between 1989 and 1991 Adams and Alice Goodman created a second opera also based on a contemporary event. The Death of Klinghoffer, premiered in Brussels, Belgium in March of 1991 while the Gulf War still raged, took its title and central action from the 1984 hijacking of the Italian cruiseliner Achille Lauro by a small group of young Palestinian terrorists. The hijacking of the several hundred American and European passengers and the assassination of Leon Klinghoffer, a wheelchair-bound American Jew, becomes the raw material for a musical and choreographic passion play that moves between moments of deep mediation and graphic brutality. The original production, staged again by Peter Sellars with choreography by the Mark Morris Company, played in Lyon, Vienna, Brooklyn and San Francisco. The political sensitivity of the subject matter remained an issue of debate and frequent misunderstanding thoughout these performances—the San Francisco performances were picketed—and the work has been seldom staged since 1992, but concert performances of the choruses and arias have continued to affect audiences on both sides of the Atlantic.

A third stage work, I Was Looking At The Ceiling And Then I Saw The Sky, an "earthquake/romance" with a libretto by the poet June Jordan and staging by Sellars, opened in May of 1995 in Berkeley, California. The story, told in twenty five pop songs accompanied by an eight-piece rock band, is both a love comedy and a biting social satire about the lives of seven young Americans of varied ethnicities, all living in Los Angeles at the moment of the devastating Northridge earthquake. The original Sellars production of Ceiling/Sky played in an extended five-month tour of Montreal, New York, Edinburgh, Helsinki, Paris and Hamburg. The Nonesuch CD features performances by some of the major new stars in American music theater, including Audra MacDonald, Marin Mazzie, Welly Yang and Darius de Haas.

In December of 2000 his latest large-scale work, How Could This Happen (A Nativity Oratorio), was presented for the first time at Theatre du Chatelet in Paris. This full-evening work with texts ranging from the Gnostic Gospels to Latin American poetry, will mark the fourth collaboration with Peter Sellars. Further performances took place in San Francisco (January 2000) and Berlin (April 2000). In 1985 John Adams entered into a partnership with Nonesuch Records which guaranteed him exclusive first-rights recordings of all of his works. This made him one of the very few composers since Stravinsky to enjoy the support of a major record label. Beginning with the 1985 San Francisco Symphony CD of Harmonielehre, Nonesuch has produced composer-supervised (and often composer-conducted) recordings of virtually all of his music. Two of these albums have won Grammy’s for Adams in the category of "Best Contemporary Composition: Nixon in China and El Dorado. Several others, including The Wound-Dresser, Violin Concerto, The Death of Klinghoffer and Gnarly Buttons, have been nominated in the same and other categories. Recordings on other labels include an all-Adams CD conducted by Simon Rattle on EMI, the original Harmonium recording on ECM New Series, an all-Adams album on BMG performed by the Ensemble Modern, and a forthcoming second recording of the Violin Concerto with Robert McDuffie on Telarc.

In the fall of 1999 Nonesuch released The John Adams Earbox, a 10-CD compilation that comprises almost all of the composer’s music over a twenty year period. A 90-minute documentary film by Tony Palmer, entitled Hail Bop!, first aired on Channel Four in England in 1998 and has since been televised in both Europe and the US. Adams continues an active double life as a composer/conductor, and has appeared as guest conductor with many of the world’s greatest orchestras. In recent seasons he has appeared as guest conductor with the the London Symphony Orchestra, the Oslo Philharmonic, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic and the Chicago Symphony. In addition has served as music director of the Cabrillo Festival, the Ojai Festival and he held the post of Creative Chair with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra from 1988-90. An honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa, Adams has also been a recipient of the California Governor's Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts and was the 1995 recipient of the Cyril Magnin Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts in San Francisco. His Chamber Symphony received the 1994 Royal Philharmonic Award. He was elected in 1994 to serve as Chief Marshall for the Harvard University Commencement, and in 1995 he was made a Chevalier of the Institute of Arts & Letters by the Ministry of Culture of France. In 1997 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was named "Composer of the Year" by Musical America Magazine. His Violin Concerto received the 1995 Grawameyer Award in music composition.

John Adams lives with his wife, the photographer Deborah O’Grady, their two children, Emily and Sam, in Berkeley, California.

From Mr. Adams' website, www.earbox.com.