John Adams

John Adams (born 1947) is the most widely performed American opera composer of his generation and the composer who found a way out of the austerity of academic minimalism into something richer, more theatrical, and more politically engaged. He grew up in New England, studied at Harvard, and moved to San Francisco in 1972, where he joined the New Music scene and eventually became Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony. His encounter with the minimalism of Steve Reich and Philip Glass gave him a structural language; his own temperament — larger, more dramatic, more interested in narrative — gave it direction.

Nixon in China (1987) was the opera that defined his career: the story of Nixon and Kissinger’s 1972 visit to Beijing, with Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and Pat Nixon as characters, in a libretto by Alice Goodman. It treated the events of recent history with the gravity and distance of myth, and it worked — dramatically, musically, critically. The Death of Klinghoffer (1991) followed: the Achille Lauro hijacking and the murder of a Jewish passenger, a subject so politically volatile that productions have been canceled and picketed for three decades. Doctor Atomic (2005) is about Robert Oppenheimer at Trinity, on the eve of the first nuclear test.

His orchestral works — Harmonielehre (1985), the Violin Concerto (1993), City Noir (2009) — are concert staples. Short Ride in a Fast Machine (1986) is probably the most played American fanfare since Copland. Shaker Loops (1978) is where he found his voice: repetitive string music that builds with genuine urgency.

StylePost-minimalist. Tonal, rhythmic, dramatic. Minimalist processes applied to Romantic ambitions — the rigor of repetition pointed toward theatrical climax.

Listen: Nixon in China — Act I, particularly "News Has a Kind of Mystery." Then Harmonielehre. Then Short Ride in a Fast Machine — five minutes that wake a room up.