YouSaid · the spoken record

John Adams

lines on the record: 54
first: 2022-12-14
most recent: 2022-12-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I am writing a piano concerto for an amazing young Icelandic pianist named Vikingur Olafsen. I recently wrote a piano concerto with a funny title Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? And he and I have been performing it around the world and I was so thrilled by his playing that I decided I was going to write a special piece for him.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Except on my tax returns. But I think the most easy entrance point into my music is a short orchestral piece called Short Ride in a Fast Machine, which was inspired by a terrifying car ride I had in a sports car. And it's a high energy, enjoyable piece. Very popular piece of mine, gets performance almost every day somewhere in the world. Four minutes long, and I think that's probably an easy way to get into my music, and it has a lot of John Adams in it in terms of the sort of driving pulse and colorful orchestration. And it's fun.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ambition is not a very helpful term. I know people who are ambitious, and you can tell because when you're talking to them, you see in their eyes that they're not even listening to you. They're thinking about their next move or, you know, what the world thinks of them. I certainly do think about what other people think of me, whether they respond to my music. I care deeply about whether my music reaches people. I would say I work hard. I do it not compulsively. I do it just because that's what I do. But I wouldn't call myself ambitious. I think, you know, maybe there was a time in my life when I was young and I was anxious to meet people and make sure they knew about me. But I guess I'm just a little more philosophical now. I think if I have an important body of work and pieces that I've written are good, they will continue on after I'm no longer.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends on what the letter was, I mean, if the letter was as snotty as the one that I wrote Leonard Burns, I don't know if I'd write him back, but I was a freshman at college and just at the most obnoxious point in my life when I had very strong opinions and Leonard Bernstein, you know, he was who he was. He had written a piece that even to this day I find a little kind of saccharine and certainly not a piece that I choose to listen to. I wrote to him and I scolded him for not being more up to date and writing the proper kind of atonal or serial music that I thought one should do when I was 18 years old. And he wrote me back. That's amazing. He said, you know, I have to do what I have to do. This is me. And that was a really important thing for me to hear. I may have not understood it at the time, but as I grew older, I realized, yeah, he was absolutely right. You just have to.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've conducted quite a few of Philip's pieces. It's not very difficult music to perform a lot of the thrill of it is just in the connection with the audience because Phillips music is very simple and very easy to access. So you get a nice buzz from usually a very large audience. Often when I do my own music, I won't have a full haul, but often when I do Phillips music, a lot of people will come, people who wouldn't normally go to a classical concert. I remember doing the world premiere of, I think it was his 12th or 13th symphony. I can't remember with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. And Disney Hall was just absolutely packed each performance because Philip, you know, he's much more known as a much wider audience. People recognize his name than any other classical composer.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm always very frustrated by the low level of inspiration in film composing. I think that film composers market themselves and basically give directors what they want. And a lot of the taste that even the greatest directors, people like Stephen Spielberg have, is just very sort of sentimental and to me rather tacky, which is why most of the film score of music I like comes from France or Italy, not American. These days now, a lot of films don't even have a composer. They have a music consultant. So you'll get a film, let's say, a Cohen Brothers film, which would be a great film, but the music comes from, you know, all different sources, maybe three or four different pop artists or whatever.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very frustrating. So I'm not a film composer. However, there are some directors who have taken my music pieces of mine and put them in their film scores, particularly the Italian director, Luca Guadanino, who used music of mine in several of his films. And that's very satisfying when our sensitive director can do that.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like most Americans, I watch a lot of movies, mostly these days at home. You know, there's some wonderful cable series, many of which come from Scandinavia that I like. And I'm very often asked, you know, why don't you write for films? And the reason I don't write for films is that in order to be an effective film composer, you have to be ready to drop everything you're doing and just focus without sleep for three or four days on a project. And I have a life that was already full of things to do. I have works that I'm commissioned and I am absolutely focused on. I have a life as a conductor. And the few films that I have written scores for, in the end, you know, I will spend a great deal of time working to make music that fits exactly the scene. And then it comes back and the directors change the scene and put the music in another place.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I might watch it, but Oppenheimer has become kind of an obsession with me. I've read the two wonderful biographies of him that have come out in the last 10 or 15 years, and I've read them both numerous times. Oppenheimer actually lived and taught in this city where I live, Berkeley, California. And in many ways, he was very special and mysterious human being, you know, a great, great, brilliant scientist. Poetry and art and music. So I have my own impression of him and I don't know if I'm going to go to a Hollywood movie and see if somebody else's imitation of Oppenheimer. I might, but I kind of doubt it.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The realm was just part of being part of an orchestra. I mean, the most exciting thing to do if you are a clarinet player now would probably to play Klezmer music.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wanted to play the violin. I grew up in a very small town in New Hampshire, and there was a music teacher who came to the public elementary school every two weeks, and he could teach anything. He could teach the piccolo or the violin or the trumpet. And I wanted to learn the violin, but I was told I would have to wait until the fifth grade. And I was restless. My dad played the clarinet, and I reluctantly agreed to have him be my teacher. And I started playing the clarinet. I got very good, very quickly. And the clarinet was sort of my key to getting into the music world while I was in college. I was a substitute clarinet player with the Boston Symphony. But it has a very small amount of literature. It has a couple of great pieces by Mozart and a few by Brahms. And really, most of the rest of the music is in the classroom.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get paid as well as they do in this country. So I think this idea that classical music in America is a dying art, I don't buy that at all.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we do live in a country where popular culture has enormous reach and it also has enormous prestige. But with that said, I have to say that a lot of the greatest classical musicians alive are Americans, either they're American born like Yo Yoma or they came here and have become Americans like Gustavo Dudemel or Yujiwang, you know, despite the fact that we're a country that's literally controlled by popular culture, we have some of the greatest orchestras in the world and we have very, very intelligent audiences. I keep hearing that classical music is dead or that it's dying, but then I go to concerts and I have these incredible experiences, whether I'm conducting or whether I'm just in the audience. It's always a challenge, and if you go to Europe, they have the same problems there. They have problems filling the halls.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Landscape. Of course, now it gets increasingly harder to live here because San Francisco itself has become taken over by tech that's just experiences this unpleasantly hectic urban development which goes hand in hand with a very distressing situation of the unhoused and then my state part of it's burning every summer because of climate change So there's a mixture of delight and extreme disappointment about being a resident of California.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, what is it they say that success has to do with being prepared and then the moment will come and sort of mangling whatever the familiar saw is, but I think that I had all the tools. You know, I had been well trained and I loved this music and I knew it and the opportunity came. It was a young Dutch conductor who was named to succeed Sage Ozawa as conductor of the San Francisco Symphony. I met him. He liked me. He heard some of my music. He offered me a commission. I took it. Peace was a success. And, you know, things started to happen from there. The fact that it was San Francisco, I think, really not critical. It could have happened in St. Louis or Minnesota or wherever. I live here because I'm very strongly affected by the landscape, the California land.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the time. I was a student at Harvard, and I didn't know what San Francisco was. I think I'd read maybe some Alan Ginsburg or Jack Kerouac, but my first musical impression of San Francisco was Jefferson Airplane. You know, and there were a couple of good songs, and they had a great photo on their surrealistic pillow album. I can't really list them as one of the great bands. Many of those bands in the 1960s and 70s became famous because of one or maybe two songs. And then they kind of hobbled along and disappeared. That really was the case with them.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“brought it back in the regular subscription series you know he never put it on a program with WC or Stravinsky and that is still an issue with Felman's music it requires a certain kind of listener it requires a certain shall we say suspension of expectation and it requires a whole kind of acoustical setting so it probably doesn't survive in the sort of more aggressive busy format of standard orchestral concert”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, Morton Feldman, the special thing about him was that he was absolutely unique. The Latin term sui generis, which means just born of himself. He didn't sound like anyone. Each piece was very similar in the sense that the music tended to move very slowly in terms of time. It was very delicate, very sensuous. And when you listen to a Fellman piece, a classic Fellman piece, it's like getting into a warm bath. The bath, though, is sound. It's very erotic in a very exquisite way. It's interesting because my friend Michael Tilson Thomas invited the great classical pianist, Emmanuel Axe, to play a Fellman piece, work for piano and orchestra. And they put it on a special program. It was a program of just contemporary music. And it was wonderful to hear it. But I noticed that he never...”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Light, bluesy, sometimes gospel style piano, but it was Ashley's, I don't know, this very special Americana that you associate with road movies and quiet, anonymous people talking about their relationships or their experience.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I knew Robert Ashley way back in the 1970s because when I first came to California, a friend of mine said, oh, you have to get in touch with Bob Ashley. And at the time Bob was teaching at the Mills College, a very small college in Oakland, California. And to answer your question, I think that one of the things about Ashley is that he's just off the grid when it comes to finding a conventional way to describe it. You know, some people would say that he wrote great operas, but opera isn't really the word. I think maybe Bob used the term opera, but he used it in a sort of wry way. His greatest gifts were really this combination of his texts that he wrote and, of course, this fantastic droll manner of speaking them, they would be accompanied usually by his longtime collaborator, Blue Jean Tyranny, who played and sort of...”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, Miles Davis had a career like Strabinsky or Beethoven or like Picasso. You know, he went through so many periods. He started essentially in the Bop era and then moved into sort of a modal period when he started working with Joe Zavanal and Erbie Hancock. And then his latest period was, you know, it's really hard to find a word for it. I mean, he was strongly influenced by African music, showed his identity with his own race in a very strong way that had never been done before. So, you know, I can't really cherry-pick anything specific. I do know that when I look at my collection of my pieces that I keep going back to, the albums he made with Gil Evans, the Big Band albums Miles Ahead and Sketches of Spain, those really stand out for their incredible beauty and for the lushness of the scoring.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, let's see, I think Abby Road was really the great period. I mean, Sergeant Pepper had a lot of sort of provocative stuff in it. You know, it had synthesizer for the first time, and it was very frankly discussing psychedelic drugs. So it was very popular with my generation. But I think just for pure musical experiences, those albums, the white album and Abby Road was really the peak of their artistic achievement”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, I still like the early ones, very fond of John Wesley Harding. In most cases, it's just individual songs. I think I show my age when I talk about that period because I'm so fond of it. But, you know, it's an interesting thing with pop music that it's so much linked to periods in your life so that somebody who's my age has a very, very strong sentimental attachment to music that you heard when you were 20. I don't know. Maybe this has a lot to do with your recollections of romances or revelations or the drugs you took or the lovers you had. A lot of pop music evokes that. I don't relate to pop music from the 80s, for example, or from the 90s. And I think that's very much a general thing. My parents related to music that was big in the 19th. So you sort of measure by when you were born and the music you listened to”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're asking me about Pierre Boulez's second piano sonata. I think it's just utterly unpleasant experience to listen to. For a while you can be dazzled by the fact that a human being can actually play that. And there are very few human beings can do that. But, you know, it's interesting Buzz wrote another piece, which I think very much typifies what his attitude was. The piece is called, let's see, the farthest reach of the fertile territory, which is actually, it's the name of painting by the artist Paul Clay. But, you know, it represents a period in contemporary music where artists were just pushing the envelope as far as they could in terms of complexity, of density, of fracturing the language. It became sort of like a laboratory rather than seeing music as essentially an act of communication.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I basically walked away from that, walked away from all surrounded me when I was in college. I had to put up a great deal of criticism, including a lot of critics who were running for the major newspapers and magazines, and they had come around thinking that the only way you could write contemporary music was this same sort of very difficult, challenging, rigorous, whatever the adjectives that they love to use, bracing all these things that...”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even to this day, I'm still suffering from that because an uninitiated listener will go to a concert and open the program and see, there's a piece by John Adams. I don't know who this is. He's still living. So it's probably going to be an unpleasant experience. And, you know, that's just something that is the result of years of very difficult, inaccessible, and very often rationally conceived contemporary music. At the same time, that was happening, it was this fantastic explosion of wonderful music in the pop realm. And I had this sort of crisis in my life where I said to myself, why should I surrender the influence that great music can have to a pop artist and have to go and write serial or 12-tone music because that's, you know, what's required of a contemporary component?”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I came of age during what I call the bad old days of contemporary music, and I can't explain why that happened, but sometime in the early part of the 20th century, a lot of very brilliant composers started writing music that was essentially inaccessible to average listeners, whether it was Schoenberg or Varez, or I could name many other composers who listened writing very dissonant music. Later on, composers got interested in fracturing rhythms to the point where you had a composer like John Cage, who essentially devoted his life to sort of atomizing, deconstructing all of the aspects of the musical language, both acoustically and culturally, you know, and that ran its course. The bad part of it was that it made audiences very wary of anything that was new.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With oneself to go back to that very, very personal relationship with one work or with just a group of very valuable pieces, because otherwise we're just flooded with so much information that we end up with very short concentration spans, and we end up with a problem of what do we really value?”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, when I was a kid, it was very hard to get a hold of a recording of something. In those days there was something called the Schwann Catalog of Recorded Music. And, you know, I used to get it at the music store. And there might be one recording of the Mahler Sixth Symphony. That seems hard to believe these days. But, you know, in 1965, 63, a lot of that music was very rare. And I had to send away for it and wait months. So when I got it, it was really, really special. Today, everything is available at all times. All you have to do is have a subscription to Spotify or Amazon music or something, and you can access anything. And the same goes for books. I have a Kindle. I have too much stuff on the Kindle. Nothing is special anymore. So one has to actually make some kind of like a pack.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have to admit 100% satisfying. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that I've never heard these pieces or hardly ever heard them. And when you're a composer, you have to hear something and then realize, oh, that works and that doesn't. And I think the fact that maybe he was just born before his time, you know, he was born in Connecticut in the 1870s and America at that time just was still a very raw country and not ready for a classical experimental composer.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not afraid of either them. I love them. I obviously love Mozart more than Charles Hives. Charles Hives is a very, very unusual figure. You know, he was almost completely unknown in most of the 20th century until Leonard Bernstein, who was very glamorous and very well known, Bernstein kind of brought him to the public notice and he coined this idea that Charles Eis was Abraham Lincoln of music. And of course, Americans love something they can grasp onto, like, oh yeah, I can relate to that. He's the Abraham Lincoln of Music. And Charles Ives was a kind of a hermit. He worked during the days in an insurance firm at which he was very successful, but spent his weekends and his summer vacations composing. And his work is very sentimental, is also very avant-garde for its time. And I've conducted quite a few of his pieces.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So maybe that's what he meant, just the anxiety of is what I do even comparable with great art. And another thing is if I have an idea, has somebody already thought of it before? So those are sort of the neurotic aspects of my life, but I'm no different than anybody else. You know, we just have to deal with those concerns.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Harold Bloom was a very great literary critic, sometimes a little bit of a windbag, but his writings on Coleridge and Shelley and especially on Shakespeare was very important to me. He had a phrase that he coined the anxiety of influence, which is interesting because he himself was not a creator. He was a critic, but he intuited that we creators, whether we're painters or novelists or filmmakers or composers, that we live, so to speak, under the shadow of the greats that preceded us. If you're a poet, you've got all this great literature behind you, whether it's Shakespeare or Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson. And likewise for me, I've got really heavyweight predecessors in Beethoven and Bach and Mahler and Stravin.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't do video games. I know that my music is used in some of them because I get requests for licensing, but I'm not a video game guy. I did authorize use of peace of mind harmony lera. They use opening, I don't know, 20 bars or something. But when I went online to look at it, I noticed that electronically transposed it up a step and added a thrash drum set to it. Like my music wasn't even quite trashy enough, so they had to trash it up some more.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh yes, Shaker Loops is a piece for strings. And the very first version of that I wrote in a kind of experimental way where the conductor would indicate as we went along the changes just by holding up fingers, I could do it and I was able to do a satisfying performance of it. But when another conductor did it, the shape was strangely out of focus. So it's not that the other conductor was incompetent. It was just that I had a very specific way of wanting to do it. So in the later version of it, I froze everything into more traditional notations. So that flexibility is no longer there, but on the other hand, the form of the piece is very satisfying.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Particularly about the women's experience of it. And for that, my collaborator and I, Peter Sellers, we found a lot of texts by women, particularly by Hispanic women from Mexico and Chile that told firsthand the experience of birth. And I like doing that because Handel's Messiah, which of course treats the same material, just comes from the Bible. And that's all guys talking about it. And, you know, really, what do they know about labor and the pain of parturation and motherhood? So I think that makes my oratorial quite different.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I grew up going to church. My mother went to church. I think mostly because she loved to sing in the choir. She was brought up as a Catholic, and then we started going to the Episcopal Church and ended up in the Unitarian church, which is a very New England thing, which is where I grew up in New England. I'm now a practicing Christian. I don't go to church, but I'm very drawn to some of these biblical stories because they're archetypal. reflect in myth and symbolism of the deepest of our human experience. In the case of El Nino, an oratorio that I wrote for the millennium, it's about birth. It's on the surface. It's a story of the nativity of Mary conceiving and giving birth to Jesus and the flight into Egypt. But it's also a larger story. It's about birth.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Preacher talking about Jesus and the man with a withered hand and there was something very musical about the way he kept repeating the term withered hand. It was a very American sounding little clip, I guess you could call it a found object and I mix that in with a slowed down hymn.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're mentioning a very early piece of mine called Christian Zeal and Activity, which dates way back into the nineteenth seventies. That was a period of sort of a bang garden experimental music and found an old hymn book. I think it was a Salvation Army hymn book, and I found it in a, I guess I used bookstore. And the hymns were, they were all classified, you know, Easter, Christis Risen, Advent, et cetera. And then there was a section called Christian Zeal and Activity, which I thought was a wonderful phrase. So I composed the piece and basically what I did was to take the very popular old hymn onward Christian soldiers. And I slowed it up to almost unrecognizable slowness. It was like an iceberg slowly melting. I made a recording off Sunday morning revival.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, as I said earlier, every performer brings something special. You know, if I said there was a perfect version of it, that would probably discourage anyone from taking it up. Certainly Leela's performances and her recordings thrill me. But the other day I receive a video link of a performance by another violinist, Clara Jang, Korean-German violinist, playing a piece of mind that no one except Leela has to this point dared play. And that was a revelation itself.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lila is a very special person. She has immense energy, and that energy is combined with a wonderful sensitivity, lyricism. I could say this, it sounds a little indecent, but I mean, she's the perfect package for my kind of music. She can absolutely groove, get things going in a wonderful, powerful rhythm, but she also has a very deep emotional sensitivity. She's played three major works, actually four major works of mine, one of which I composed specifically for her, and not just the regular violin, but she plays a piece of mine called The Dharma at Big Sur, which is for electric violin, an instrument with six strings that can sound like a regular violin, but also can sound like Jimi Hendrix rocking out.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm lucky enough in that I don't have to follow some prescribed request, or if there is a prescribed request, I simply don't accept it. If I want to do something, whether it's a concerto or an opera or a string quartet, or I even wrote a show once with two dozen pop songs, I do that and then I look around for somebody to commission it.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People were killed, but I came up with the idea of what I called a memory space where the various texts and words and phrases could float, so to speak, in musical space. And the listener would sort of enter into that space the way you might enter into, let's say, a big cathedral in Europe and just be alone and experience your emotions and your thoughts as they unite with these musical objects. And the musical objects came from all different things. The text that I put together came from little handmade signs that family members left around ground zero, hoping that they would find their loved ones. I went to a site online where people would sign in and leave a little memory card remembering someone who had died. And just a long list of the names of the people that had passed away as a Result of those attacks.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I like to think that every single one of my pieces is different. I've often said the one thing I never want to do is brand myself, you know, produce the same sort of predictable piece. And a lot of artists fall into that, especially if they're successful. So every piece of mine is somewhat, not somewhat, but very different from its predecessor or the one that follows it. In the case of the piece that you mentioned on the transmigration of souls, this is a request from the New York Philharmonic to compose a sort of a memorial piece, which was going to be performed exactly a year after the World Trade Center attacks on September 11th. And it was not an assignment that I was terribly happy about because I had other plans and it seemed like it was going to be a very difficult subject matter to deal with, this terrible tragedy and all the”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I grew up in a musical family, my father played the clarinet and the saxophon, and my mother was a very talented singer and actress. She didn't have any formal training, but when I was a kid, I would go to performances of Rogers and Hammestein, Cole Porter, those shows that the local theater groups would put on. In fact, I was even in one of them. I was the little Polynesian boy in South Pacific, and my mother sang Bloody Mary. As they say, with my mother's milk, it was just such a part of my musical DNA. And even though I'm more of a quote unquote classical composer, that really is the deepest part of my identity as a theatrical composer.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a fan of Benjamin Britton, but not particularly of his vocal music. I know for listeners in England that's just an outrage to say that. But, you know, I find most setting of the English language in the classical tradition a little bit pretentious and a little bit stiff. My inspirations have always been great popular music, whether it was Ella Fitzgerald or Stevie Wonder or Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, just the way a great pop artist treats the English language. That's been my model, not Benjamin Britton, not even Handel, even though I love Handel, but it's just a form of musicalized speech that doesn't interest me.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what made Debussee's opera so radical and so revolutionary was that he treated this story and kept it whole and just musicalized the text”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most of my earlier operas had a lot of set pieces, you know, choruses or big chunks of wonderful poetry by Alice Goodman, who wrote my first libretti for Nixon and China and the Death of Klingoffer. So we have in those operas real soliloquies and arias and choruses. But in this case, Anthony Cleopatra, I really wanted to make what I call a musical drama and the interaction between the characters is just it's quicksilver. It's really fast. It's like one of those Preston Sturgis 1930s, fast-moving, fast-evolving dramas. And I didn't really have a model for that in the operatic repertoire. The closest I could think of was the way Claude de Busy treated the Great Play. Paleocen ⁇ lisson, which is by a Belgian playwright, Metrolink.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this takes place in roughly around 30 BC. So if you were 40 years old, you were old back then. I mean, people didn't have very long lifespans. We don't know for sure, but it seems like Cleopatra was probably at that time in her early 30s, maybe mid-30s, and Anthony was probably, or guessing maybe 10 years older. But people lived fast and intense in those days. If you didn't get along with your cousin, you hired an assassin. You know, life was very brutal. And to survive took great determination and ingenuity and craftiness.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I guess my model was just my own life, my parents, people that I've known, people who've had difficulties in their relationships and who have somehow managed to find love.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source