Music Credits: “Common Tones in Simple Time” and “Short Ride in a Fast Machine” composed by John Adams, from the cd The Chairman Dances, performed by the San Francisco Symphony. “Mr. Premier, Distinguished Guests” from Nixon in China, composed by John Adams, libretto by Alice Goodman, performed by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. “On the Transmigration of Souls,” composed by John Adams, from the cd, On the Transmigration of Souls, performed by the New York Philharmonic. Jo Reed: You’re listening to “Common Tones in Simple Time,” an early composition by John Adams. And this is Art Works, the weekly podcast produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed. The musical output of John Adams is both prolific and varied; it ranges from compositions for orchestra, chamber ensemble, and chorus. In fact, he won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for the chorus On the Transmigration of Souls. Adams also writes for solo instruments and composes operas. There’s Nixon in China, Doctor Atomic,or The Death of Klinghoffer, to name a few. John Adams is also a highly sought-after conductor who has been instrumental in bringing new audiences to music. He created the New and Unusual Music series at the San Francisco Symphony, established the annual In Your Ear festival at New York’s Carnegie Hall, and now serves as creative chair for the Los Angeles Philharmonic.  In 2009, the National Endowment for the Arts recognized John Adams’s contribution to the field by presenting him with an Opera Honor. It was a little like a homecoming, because John Adams and the Arts Endowment go way, way back. It’s a relationship that can be traced to the beginning of John Adams’s career. ­­John Adams: That’s right. My very first orchestra piece, a piece called “Common Tones in Simple Time” which I composed in—I guess it was—1979. I paid for the parts and the production with a commission from the National Endowment for the Arts, so I can say that they were instrumental in getting me going. [Excerpt from “Common Tones in Simple Time”] Jo Reed: What was the impact of that grant at that stage of your career? John Adams: Yeah, that was remarkable time. I remember very clearly that the NEA was giving out small grants to a lot of composers. So I’ve been living in the San Francisco Bay area for 40 years or so, and I remember that month. That it—not only was it prestigious to those of us who were emerging—to use a kind word; many of us were completely unknown. And of course, you know, just the money was very helpful in my case: producing an orchestra piece and getting the parts copied and all the materials duplicated. I forget what the grant was for; it was maybe $2500 or something, but that was big news in those days. Jo Reed: And I would also imagine there’s an affirmation that comes with that. John Adams: Oh, absolutely. Financial support, which is obviously critical for the arts. But in some ways even more important is the imprimatur: the knowledge that the people of the country, who are being represented through the National Endowment for the Arts, that they are proud of their artists. And that the National Endowment exists because we have a great culture and we always have and it continues to be rich. And that by receiving support from the National Endowment for the Arts makes me, as an American composer, feel that I'm a part of my society and what I do is profoundly valued. And I remember going to Washington and serving on an NEA panel and looking at compositions that were coming in from everywhere—from Alaska and the Dakotas and Georgia, as well as New York and San Francisco—and feeling, you know, that I really was a citizen and really part of a large entity. Jo Reed: There are many challenges for artists clearly. Making a living as an artist is so difficult but I think there are particular challenges for—and I’m using inverted commas here but—‘serious musicians and composers’ to make their own way. It’s almost impossible to conceive of that without government or foundation funding. John Adams: That’s right. There are people who feel that if an artist’s work doesn’t pay for itself, there’s something wrong with it. And anyone who’s got even the remotest knowledge about cultural history knows that many of the greatest works of art—whether they’re Beethoven symphonies or Michelangelo sculptures or poetry or whatever—was the result of enlightened patronage. And art, very often, doesn’t pay for itself. So you know, we as artists are always looking for support; we’re looking for some form of patronage. Because what we do—it can’t compete in the marketplace with material that is made strictly for profit. Jo Reed: Which can put the arts in a kind of a difficult position because in tough times, let’s face it, funding for the arts is often the first to go which, you know, of course, is very short sighted. John Adams: Well arts, unfortunately, are frequently the first political football that you get whenever there’s, you know, an argument about budget. But if you look at the economy, particularly in a city like San Francisco where I live, the arts really are—they are a real generator of revenue and civic activity. You know, the activity around a concert hall, for example Davies Hall in San Francisco, it’s buzzing. And the fact that people come into the city and go to these concerts and have dinner in the neighborhood—frequently, it’s the arts that are responsible for enormous upswings in neighborhoods. Jo Reed: Yes, I completely agree. And certainly the agency has been trying to focus attention on that more and more and, I think, successfully so that’s a good thing. You know, initially you began composing instrumental work and you obviously still do. But I think to the general public, you’re known primarily for your operas, for oratorio like On the Transmigration of Souls. That was probably compounded when you got a 2009 Opera Honor from the National Endowment for the Arts. Are you working on another opera or is that in your future somewhere? John Adams: I am. I actually just broke off of work on it just to come over and talk to you this afternoon. This is not at all a ‘John Adams opera.’ It’s not about a contemporary event; it’s about the California Gold Rush. But there are so many resonances between what happened in 1850 and what’s going on in San Francisco and Silicon Valley now that it’s actually a very timely topic. Jo Reed: You know, I’m so curious that the first opera you wrote was Nixon in China and that it was commissioned by the Houston Opera. But you had never written anything for voice. So how did this come about? I mean why did they ask and what made you say yes? John Adams: Well, I do think that David Gockley, who was the general director of the Houston Grand Opera at the time, took a really wild risk in commissioning me. The three of us—the team that made the opera: Alice Goodman, the librettist, and Peter Sellars, the stage director. We were all really puppies. You know, Alice had, of course, never written a libretto and as you say, I’d never written anything for solo voice. I’d written a piece called Harmonium which was for chorus. You know, I think Peter had the idea of the Nixon in China theme. And Nixon was still alive, and he was in the process of kind of trying to rebuild his legacy as an international statesman. So, you know, there was a lot of curiosity just about the idea of an opera about Nixon and Mao. And we have to remember that in 1985, minimalism was still fairly new and controversial. And at that time, I was kind of identified as a minimalist or a second-generation minimalist composer. So, I think, it was all the themes seemed to point to something that if not successful, at least could be controversial. [Excerpt from Nixon in China] Jo Reed: Music in general is, of course, a collaboration. You’re facing at least one other person who will manifest the music, if not an entire orchestra. But opera, even more so, because you’re dealing with the librettist, you’re dealing with the designers and the director and the light, etcetera, so on and so on and so on. How was that process for you? John Adams: Well, I worked on Nixon in China for two years almost every day. And as you said, I had no experience with opera. The only experience I’d had was, you know, watching my mother, when I was a kid, act in community productions of South Pacific, and Carousel, and Oklahoma. And, you know, when I was in college, I conducted a few operas in the dining room of our dorm. But my only experience with opera was what I’d learned by listening to recordings and studying scores. And I think I—if you look absolutely with cold eyes at the score of Nixon in China, you can see that, particularly in the vocal writing, I was on a very steep learning curve, and I think there are issues of balance. You know, I wrote for this really burly orchestra with saxophones and lots of brass and synthesizers, and the singers needed to be amplified to be heard. But you know, there was just something about it. It was like the charm of the beginner. It had enough vitality, and it had this—and still has this—great libretto. I think Alice Goodman’s libretto is so full of wit and humor and intelligence and historical perspective; I really do think it’s one of the great opera librettos. And it’s an opera that’s stayed around. People produce it every year, and I’m very pleased. For all its beginner problems, it’s one of my favorite pieces, and I love hearing it and love conducting it. Jo Reed: Is there a difference when you compose between composing just for instruments and composing for voice and instruments? John Adams: Well, of course with voice, you’re dealing with a text, and I’m extremely critical about the text I set. I read a great deal, and I have very high demands for what it is that I’m going to set. And, you know, I feel actually that one of the problems with a lot of contemporary American opera is that the composers haven’t been demanding enough about the libretti. I prefer verse or poetry, not because I want it to be singsong or neat but, because a poet is actually more thoughtful. To compress a thought or an image into verse means that you’re going an extra step in terms of meaning and art and form. So that’s why I think if my operas have been successful, it’s because not only is the music good--if it is good—but also what’s actually being said is very eloquent and very important. Jo Reed: You grew up playing the clarinet. Your father played the clarinet, correct? John Adams: That’s right. Jo Reed: Which I’m assuming is partly why you picked up that instrument. John Adams: I wanted to play the violin. I lived in a very small town in New Hampshire, and we had a jack-of-all-trades music teacher who came to the school once every two weeks and taught <laughs> flute and clarinet and violin and trumpet. And I wanted to play the violin, but I was too little. And so I reluctantly agreed to learn the clarinet from my dad. Nobody wanted to take music lesson from their parents, but I did. And it turned out, he was a wonderful teacher, and I became a very good clarinet player even before I was out of high school. Jo Reed: How did you come to composing then? What was the drive? What was the motivation? John Adams: You know, I’ve told this story so many times, I’m almost suspicious of it <laughs>. You know, I wonder if it’s really true, but I do think it is true, though. That when I was in the third grade, it was 1956, and it was the 200th anniversary of Mozart’s birth. And we had a very, very sophisticated teacher in this little school where I went, and she read to the class a child’s biography of Mozart. And I do very clearly remember being completely jazzed by that idea of a little boy who could write symphonies and concertos. And so I went home and tried to do that and, of course, you know, realized immediately that I didn’t have the technical equipment. But my parents were very sensitive and very perceptive, and they found me a teacher. There was actually somebody within a half-hour drive of where we lived who could teach me to write melodies and eventually harmony and counterpoint. Jo Reed: You went to Harvard and when you came out of there, what was going on musically? John Adams: Well, I graduated undergraduate from Harvard in 1969, and then I stayed on for two more years. And that was a period of enormous fluxes in society and in the arts, as well. I mean, obviously, it was the worst part of the Vietnam War and the counterculture movement and, you know, there were riots in the street. It was a thrilling and also very upsetting time to be alive. But it was also an interesting and very upset time in the arts, as well. You know, they may have been related. The society was in a state of tumult and I think the arts were. So we had, on the one hand, in contemporary music, we had this legacy coming in from Europe in the form of Schoenberg and the people that followed him. Boulez was very, very controversial and very prestigious at the time. Stockhausen was well known. Of course, then, he became a real media star when he had his picture on the cover of the Sgt. Pepper album <laughs>. So particularly in the universities, there was a lot of pressure towards continuing the Schoenberg legacy: atonal music. Pretty soon, computers came in and that added to this whole kind of cerebral, almost mathematical attitude towards musical composition. And then there was John Cage, and there was this kind of radical, free-spirited movement which was very peculiarly American. And then, you know, at the same time, we were all listening to fantastically wonderful rock music because that was the era of the birth of rock. And not only rock but also jazz was in a very interesting moment. Coltrane had started out as this kind of straight ahead bop-sax player and by the end of his life was playing these long improvisations that, frankly, I couldn't even understand. So it was a confusing time if you were impressionable and serious about wanting to be a composer, as I was. I felt myself being pulled violently between John Cage on one side and Elliott Carter and Pierre Boulez on the other. Jo Reed: In Hallelujah Junction, you write about a breakthrough that came while you were driving in the mid-70s in the mountains, and you were listening to Wagner. What happened? John Adams: <laughs> Well, fortunately, I stayed on the road. Jo Reed: <laughs> John Adams: And I'm here to tell about it. Yeah, that's really a typically American experience that you have your breakthrough while you're driving. <laughs> Jo Reed: I've had them many times. <laughs> John Adams: Yes, right. I had a lot of moments of breakthroughs. But that particular one was very evocative, first of all, because of where I was. I was in this gorgeous setting up in the Sierras on a, probably, a summer evening. And the realization I just had, there were two things. One had to do with harmony—tonal harmony—and its enormous expressive potential. And the other had to do, simply, with the seriousness of the music. And I don't mean, by serious, that it wasn't also sensual and beautiful, which of course it was. But, you know, I had been through a period where I was doing a lot of aleatoric events and toying with random tossing of dice—the sort of things that Cage and his school had done. And I always had worried that there was something fundamentally meaningless about it. And, of course, Cage loved to talk about the delight of something being meaningless. And I think my realization was that music really has meaning, and that if audiences get alienated from new music, it's because they find it meaningless. Now, I don't mean that a composer should dumb down his or her music, in any way. But I believe that if you are sincere and serious about the meaning of what you're creating, then that meaning will emerge and be conveyed to the listener. Because the bottom line is that music is fundamentally about feeling. Obviously, we get great intellectual and sensory pleasure from music. But the most important aspect—the most powerful issue or thing about music—is that it is feeling. It's raw feeling which one person communicates to another either by composing it or singing it or performing it. But there's something about just being in the presence of that raw emotion that you get when you hear an opera or a Mahler symphony or a Beethoven piano concerto that has intense meaning for people. Jo Reed: How do you keep a balance, now, between composing and conducting? John Adams: I consider myself essentially a composer who conducts, and I've never, at any point in my life, ever had a confusion about that. Mostly I learned conducting just by watching other conductors, and that’s frequently the case. You can learn the basics of, you know, how to beat six and four and five but most everything else has to do with your—as we say—‘on-the-job training.’ You have to get out there in front of the orchestra and make your mistakes and just do it over and over again and always listen. I will say, though, that my experience of playing in an orchestra when I was younger—I substituted with the Boston Symphony while I was still an undergraduate at Harvard—it gave me a very special insight into what it’s like on the other side of the podium; what it’s like to be in an orchestra where your part only gives you a fraction of information as to what’s going on. And I’m unusually sensitive to the sort of collective psychology of, you know, 80 or 100 musicians. And I think more than anything else, musicians—well they want to be inspired, but they also don’t want to have their time wasted. People understand when something’s necessary, and then they also know when a conductor’s wasting their time. Jo Reed: Yeah, you think about the years of training it takes to be, what, the fourth violinist in an orchestra. It’s really quite amazing. John Adams: I look at a group of musicians and think, “Okay. If Malcolm Gladwell’s theory that it takes 10,000 hours to master anything is true. Then if I’m standing in front of 50 musicians, that’s 500,000 hours of collective time in a practice room.” So when you think about that, you have to be somewhat awed and full of respect for the people you’re working with. Jo Reed: Do you prefer conducting your own work or conducting the work of other composers? Or does it not matter? John Adams: Well, I love to conduct other music. Not only the classics, but also I do a lot of conducting of living composers. And lately, over the last—well actually the truth is all my career, I've been conducting young composers. Just, I did a whole program with the Los Angeles Philharmonic of world premieres by composers in their late 20s or early 30s. And, you know, the older I get, the more something like that means to me. Because it means that, you know, I'm able to lend my years of experience and, hopefully, my artistic judgments to help midwifing a new piece into the world. Jo Reed: Your work references, often, our culture, history, current events: in Ceiling Sky, in The Death of Klinghoffer, in Doctor Atomic, and so on. And sometimes you get kind of smacked by critics for it. John Adams: Well, I think all creative artists, particularly anyone who has something provocative or hopefully new to say, has to put up with criticism. And I wish I could say that I don't read the reviews but, of course, everybody reads their reviews—even people who claim they don't. And I wish I could say, “They—it's just water off my back and I'm not bothered by them,” but of course I'm bothered by them. I remember a couple of years ago, a review of a concert I did in which the first line was, "It's common knowledge that composers make bad conductors." Jo Reed: <laughs> John Adams: And, you know <laughs> Jo Reed: I'm sorry. John Adams: I thought, "Well, where does that come from? Where does a statement like that come from? Is this a universally held belief, or is this just somebody who's got a bone to pick? And is there any way I can respond to that?" But, generally, the only way you can respond is to just keep on doing what you do. And I notice, both in reading, you know, biographies of artists in the past and also watching people that I've watched during my own life, is that fashion comes and goes. Somebody might be the ‘cat's pajamas’ one year and then a couple of years later, nobody's interested in this artist, and then suddenly, they've rediscovered him or her. So things come in, you know, hills and valleys, and the older you get, you learn to weather it. And the most important thing is that you have to remind yourself that you really have this only one life to live—unless you're a cat <laughs>—and you only get one chance to get it right. So I try to make my pieces as good as I can make them. And I take them back and I refine them and I revise them. And even pieces that are 40-years-old now, I'm still fussing with and working on to make them as good as they can be. Jo Reed: Someone said—and I really can't remember who—that one of art's oldest functions is to serve memory. And I think that's right. And you got the Pulitzer Prize for On the Transmigration of Souls, which did just that; it served memory. Tell me the story behind that piece. John Adams: Well, I was asked by the New York Philharmonic to do this piece. And it was, obviously, a very last-minute request, because in the classical music world, things move at iceberg speed, you know, and people plan three or four years in advance. So I got this request like six or eight months before the premiere. They wanted a piece to celebrate the anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks. And I didn't want to do it, but I thought that, “If you're going to be a composer and really part of the civic fabric of your country, and you've received a request, particularly from an institution as august as the New York Philharmonic, you really need to take it seriously and see if there's something in you that you can give.” I just thought that the event, itself, had been so over-exposed in the media. And it was such a raw wound in the national psyche that I just was doubtful that anybody could write a piece of music that wouldn't, in one way or another, be an embarrassment. So I opted to write an extremely intimate piece for 200 performers. So the number of performers was given to me; you know, they had a chorus and an orchestra and wanted me to write for that large group. But I made it a very intimate piece. [Excerpt from On the Transmigration of Souls] I don't know how successful a piece it is. I would say it's not my favorite piece, not like Nixon in China or El Niño or Harmonielehre or some of my favorite pieces. But it's a piece that continues to get performed, and there are people who respond to it in a very deep level—a very emotional level. And so, just for that alone, I'm grateful that I did it. Jo Reed: I always find it fascinating how people can hear and see works of art so differently. John Adams: Art is as varied and as different in experiences as individual people are. What's wonderful about art is that it can be as different as all the people on the planet. Go to like a big airport or maybe go to a baseball stadium, and you look around and you see 10,000 or 20 or 30,000 people. And each one of those people has a different story to tell, a different DNA, a different inclination. So there's going to be a different kind of art for each one of these people. Jo Reed: Okay. John Adams, thank you so much. John Adams: Thanks a lot. Jo Reed: I appreciate it. John Adams: Great pleasure. Jo Reed: That’s composer, conductor, and 2009 NEA Opera Honoree John Adams. You've been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.