John Adams

Born: February 15, 1947, Worcester, Massachusetts

Harmonielehre

• Composed: 1984
  
• Premiere: March 21, 1985, San Francisco, Edo de Waart conducting.
• Instrumentation: 4 flutes (incl. 3 piccolos), 3 oboes (incl. English horn), 4 clarinets (incl. 2 bass clarinets), 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, 2 tubas, timpani, bass drum, bell tree, chimes, crotales, crash cymbals, glockenspiel, gong, marimbas, sizzle cymbal, suspended cymbals, tam-tam, triangles, tubular bells, vibraphone, xylophone, 2 harps, celeste, piano, strings
• CSO notable performances: First/Most Recent: September 2014, Louis Langrée conducting. 
• Duration: approx. 40 minutes

John Adams is one of today’s most acclaimed composers. Audiences have responded enthusiastically to his music, and he enjoys a success not seen by an American composer since the zenith of Aaron Copland’s career: a recent survey of major orchestras conducted by the League of American Orchestras found John Adams to be the most frequently performed living American composer; he won five Grammy Awards between 1989 and 2004; he received the University of Louisville’s prestigious Grawemeyer Award in 1995 for his Violin Concerto; in 1997, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and named “Composer of the Year” by Musical America magazine; he was made a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture; in 2003, he received the Pulitzer Prize for On the Transmigration of Souls, written for the New York Philharmonic in commemoration of the first anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks; from 2003 to 2007, Adams held the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall, and since 2009 he has been Creative Chair with the LA Philharmonic; in 2004, he was awarded the Centennial Medal of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences “for contributions to society,” and, in 2019, he became the first American composer to receive the Erasmus Prize “for notable contributions to European culture, society and social science.” He has been granted honorary doctorates from the Royal Academy of Music (London), Juilliard School, and Cambridge, Harvard, Yale and Northwestern universities; honorary membership in Phi Beta Kappa; and the California Governor’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts. In June 2023, the Library of Congress announced that it was acquiring Adams’ manuscripts and papers for its Music Division, which also holds the papers of Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, George and Ira Gershwin, Martha Graham, Charles Mingus, Neil Simon and other distinguished American artists.

John Adams was born into a musical family in Worcester, Massachusetts, on February 15, 1947; as a boy, he lived in Woodstock, Vermont and in New Hampshire. From his father, he learned the clarinet and went on to become an accomplished performer on that instrument, playing with the New Hampshire Philharmonic and Sarah Caldwell’s Boston Opera Orchestra, and appearing as soloist in the first performances of Walter Piston’s Clarinet Concerto in Boston, New York and Washington. (Adams first met Piston as a neighbor of his family in Woodstock and received encouragement, advice and understanding from the older composer, one of this country’s most respected composers.) Adams’ professional focus shifted from the clarinet to composition during his undergraduate study at Harvard, where his principal teacher was Leon Kirchner; he was the first Harvard student allowed to submit a musical composition as his senior thesis.

Rather than following the expected route for a gifted young composer, which often led through Europe, Adams chose to stay in America. In 1972, he settled in California to join the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where his duties included directing the New Music Ensemble, leading the student orchestra, teaching composition, and administering a graduate program in analysis and history. In 1978, he became associated with the San Francisco Symphony and conductor Edo de Waart in an evaluation of that ensemble’s involvement with contemporary music. Two years later, he helped to institute the Symphony’s “New and Unusual Music” series, which subsequently served as the model for the “Meet the Composer” program, sponsored by the Exxon Corporation, Rockefeller Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, which placed composers-in-residence with several major American orchestras; Adams served as Resident Composer with the San Francisco Symphony from 1979 to 1985. Adams has also established an international conducting career in his own and other works as Conductor and Music Advisor of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Artistic Director and Conductor of the Ojai and Cabrillo Music Festivals in California, and guest conductor with the orchestras of New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, London, Amsterdam and other major music centers.

In his compositions through the early 1990s, Adams was closely allied with the style known as “Minimalism,” which utilizes repetitive melodic patterns, consonant harmonies, motoric rhythms and a deliberate striving for aural beauty. Unlike some other Minimalist music, however, which can be static and intentionally uneventful, the best of Adams’ early works (Grand Pianola Music, Shaker Loops, Harmonium, the brilliant Harmonielehre, the acclaimed operas Nixon in China [1987] and The Death of Klinghoffer [1991]) are marked by a sense of determined forward motion and inexorable formal growth, and by frequent allusions to a wide range of 20th-century idioms, both popular and serious. His links with traditional music were further strengthened by consistent use of conventional instruments and predominantly consonant harmony, this latter technique producing what he calls “sustained resonance,” the quality of common chords to reinforce and amplify each other to create an enveloping mass of sound. Adams’ compositions of recent years incorporate more aggressive harmonic idioms and more elaborate contrapuntal textures to create an idiom he distinguishes from that of his earlier music as “more dangerous, but also more fertile, more capable of expressive depth and emotional flexibility.”

Adams’ creative catalog is large, varied, expressively ambitious and overtly referential, with few scores having traditional generic titles or subjects—nine operas (the most recent are Girls of the Golden West [2017], based on actual characters from the California Gold Rush, and Antony and Cleopatra [2022], adapted from Shakespeare), some 20 orchestral works, concertos for piano (Eros Piano, Century Rolls, Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?), violin (The Dharma at Big Sur, Scheherazade 2), string quartet (Absolute Jest) and the jazz-influenced Saxophone Concerto (Adams’ father played alto sax in swing bands), chamber music, oratorio (The Gospel According to the Other Mary) and other large-scale choral compositions, piano pieces, film scores, and arrangements and orchestrations.

In the liner notes for the Nonesuch recording of Harmonielehre, Adams provided the following information about his composition:

“Harmonielehre was created after a terribly frustrating fallow period, during which I composed every day for a year, and nothing worthwhile came out of it. I think that what was going on inside of me was a multi-faceted crisis about understanding myself as an artist and a human being, and about my relationship to my own music and to contemporary music in general. I can remember the day that I just sat down at the piano and hit those shocking opening chords. I’d just had a dream the night before in which I saw myself driving across the San Francisco Bay Bridge and, looking out, saw a huge tanker in the bay. It was an image of immense power and gravity and mass. And while I was observing this tanker, it suddenly took off like a rocket ship with an enormous force of levitation. As it rose out of the water, I could see a beautiful brownish-orange oxide on the bottom part of its hull. When I woke up the next morning, the image of those huge chords came to me, and the piece was off like an explosion. After a year of no progress at all, Harmonielehre now came very quickly; I wrote this 40-minute work in about three months.

“The first movement of Harmonielehre, which lasts about 17 minutes, is architectonically monolithic and is, in fact, a single-movement symphony in itself, concluding with the same chords in the same disposition with which it began. But I didn’t predetermine that. I’m not the kind of composer who prescribes or pre-visages the entire structure of a piece in advance. I like to feel that each composition is a voyage of discovery—on a personal, psychological, spiritual, as well as a technical level.... I find composing to be a journey through the underworld. And the reason I often have heroic endings in my pieces—something that is terribly anachronistic today—is that I’m totally amazed to have emerged from the tunnel into the light. The act of composing is the creation of the light for me—it really is like a biblical trial.

“The second movement is about such a trial. It is titled ‘The Anfortas Wound,’ which refers to the medieval grail-questing King Anfortas, who was wounded due to pride, to hubris, and the wound caused impotence. ‘The Anfortas Wound’ is a piece about sickness and infirmity, both physical and spiritual. Wagner describes the wound Anfortas received in battle as being in his side and hence gives it a Christian allusion; but in the original French version of the story, it’s in his testicles. So, to me, it’s a creativity wound—of re-creation, of pro-creation. In a sense, the entire movement is a musical scenario about impotence and spiritual sickness. But when I completed it, I felt I’d somehow confronted my darker side, and the darker side of life, too.

“To me, the last two movements of Harmonielehre are a pair—‘The Anfortas Wound’ exists under a bad sign, it has to do with an existence that is without grace. And then in the third movement, grace appears for no reason at all...that’s just the way grace is, the unmerited bestowal of blessing on man. The light at the end of the tunnel appears in this third movement, titled ‘Meister Eckhardt and Quackie,’ combining the great medieval theologian with a sobriquet for my daughter, Emily. The first generating image for Harmonielehre was that dream of the tanker taking off, and the second was that of Meister Eckhardt floating through the firmament with a baby on his shoulders as she whispers the secret of grace into his ear. Part III begins with the evocation of that latter image.... At the end of Harmonielehre there’s an extended passage during which a tremendous harmonic struggle takes place. Finally, E-flat wins through its strength, and the moment seems like an epiphany.

“The title of the piece refers to the Harmonielehre, or ‘Theory of Harmony,’ of Schoenberg, his exhaustive and very personal study of harmony. It’s always struck me as significant that Schoenberg produced this book at the same time—1910—he was making his radical break with the whole tradition of European harmony. I am strongly attracted to the whole sensibility of that epoch with its combination of sensuality and intellectual energy. And although my use of tonal principles is vastly different from Schoenberg’s, there are moments in my Harmonielehre which evoke the language and sensibility of the music he wrote around that time. Schoenberg dedicated his Harmonielehre to Mahler, and so I suppose that, on a far more modest level, my own Harmonielehre is a kind of dedication to Schoenberg. The other shade of the meaning of the title has to do with harmony in the larger sense, in the sense of spiritual and psychological harmony. The secret that Quackie whispers into Meister Eckhardt’s ear in Part III is also about harmony. Experienced on this level, the whole piece is a kind of allegory about that quest for grace.”

—Dr. Richard E. Rodda