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

“You know, I looked at some of the classical actresses. You can go on YouTube and see different performances. The greatest one is Janice Sussman, who's actually a South African actress. I think she was active in the early 1960s or so. But ultimately, I follow my own vision. And what drew me to these two characters, Anthony and Cleopatra, was the fact that they were older people. One could say they'd been there, done that. Each of them had a background. Each of them had actually had children by other people. So in a way, this is a story about older people. I'm reminded of the great Edward Albin play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf? You know, there's just some really, really knockdown dragout fights between these two people. But in the end, they love each other.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For lack of a better word, I write classical music and the term classical music, of course, it has an odor for younger people because they associate it with older music, older people. But it's actually a very thrilling thing to do because when you write a score, you're essentially making a recipe for something and it changes with every performance. It's not like a recording by a pop group that's always going to be the same. Hence every different iteration of a work of mine is different and different singers and different conductors and different violinists, they give a completely new point of view on something. So the pieces are constantly being reborn.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, writing an opera's hard no matter what I once said to the great architect Frank Gary, you're lucky you can farm out the electrical and the plumbing and concrete to someone else, but we comes, we have to do everything. In this case, I did the libretto and the vocal writing, the sketching, the instrumentation, and I even did the computer setting of the full score. So I was at this for pretty much four years.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the first thing to do with a behemoth like that is to, shall we say, wrestle it to the ground. You know, with Shakespeare, the plays are long. I don't think Anthony and Cleopatra is long as Hamlet, but it's a big, big, sprawling epic that is both political and personal. And it being an opera, we're really mostly focused on the interpersonal relationships. I mean, the reason I chose this opera was because on the one hand, it's about world politics. You know, it's the rise of one civilization and the decline of another, but it's also very intimate because it's about people who are caught up in the maelstrom and have very, very powerful intimacy as well as there being political figures.”
2022-12-14 · Conversations with Tyler · John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source