Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on February 15, 1947, John Adams began composing when he was just ten years old and went on to study composition at Harvard University. He is one of America's most well-known composers, often associated with the compositional style known as minimalism. Unlike the strongly profiled musical architecture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, minimalist works evolve through a process described as “phase shifting,” in which music changes almost imperceptibly within the context of seemingly constant repetition. In writing music that brings simplicity into the foreground, the aim was partly to make musical structure engaging. In the composer's own words, “There's nothing wrong with entertaining your audience.”

After Adams earned his master’s degree in 1972, he moved to San Francisco, where he taught composition and directed the New Music Ensemble at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music until 1984. A year after he arrived in the city, he wrote American Standard, reportedly named after American Standard brand appliances. As Adams reports in his autobiography, British composers Gavin Bryars and Cornelius Cardew—founder of the Scratch Orchestra, a collaborative ensemble open to amateurs and collective improvisation—fascinated him. “Cardew’s ideas from his ‘Scratch’ period were fresh, playful, and humanistic,” Adams wrote. “American Standard, my response to this ‘people’s aesthetic,’ had three movements, each of which was a deconstruction of a ‘standard’ American musical form. ‘John Philip Sousa,’ the first movement, was obviously a march. The centerpiece, ‘Christian Zeal and Activity,’ was a familiar hymn tune suspended in the ether. And ‘Sentimentals’ was a trope of an old familiar jazz tune. I treated each of these forms radically.”

Adam’s New Music Ensemble performed American Standard at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on March 23, 1973. The performance was released commercially, produced by Brian Eno for Eno’s Obscure Records label. Adams later withdrew the piece from publication; today, only the second movement, “Christian Zeal and Activity,” is performed. Adams noted it was an arrangement of “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and further instructed the conductor to incorporate “sonic found objects” into the composition. The 1973 recording features an excerpt from a “late-night AM radio talk show in which an abusive host argued about God with a patient man who eventually identified himself as a preacher.” In 1986, Edo de Waart recorded “Christian Zeal and Activity” with a fragmented and looped recording of a sermon about a miracle of Jesus—healing a man with a withered hand—asking, “Why would Jesus have been drawn to a withered hand?” The 2010 movie “Shutter Island” featured de Waart’s version.