Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on February 15, 1947, John Adams began composing when he was 10 and went on to study composition at Harvard University. One of America’s most well-known composers, Adams is often associated with a 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 seemingly constant repetition. In writing music that brings simplicity into the foreground, part of the aim was to make musical structure something with which listeners could easily engage. In the composer’s words, “There’s nothing wrong with entertaining your audience.”  

After Adams earned his master's degree in 1972, he moved to San Francisco, and until 1984 taught composition and directed the New Music Ensemble at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He composed Harmonium, based on poetry by Emily Dickinson and John Donne, around 1980 for the first season of Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. Regarded as one of the exemplars of Adams’ minimalist works, Harmonium received its premiere on April 15, 1981, with the San Francisco Symphony and Chorus under the direction of conductor Edo de Waart. Adams offers a vivid description of the work’s creation: 

Harmonium was composed in 1980 in a small studio on the third floor of an old Victorian house in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Those of my friends who knew both the room and the piece of music were amused that a piece of such spaciousness should emerge from such cramped quarters. The title of the work was all that survived from my initial intention to set poems from Wallace Stevens’s collection of the same name. After I realized that Stevens’s language and rhythmic sense were not my own, I cast far and wide for a text to satisfy a musical image that I had in mind. That image was one of human voices–many of them–riding upon waves of rippling sound. Ultimately I settled on three poems of transcendental vision. “Negative Love” by John Donne examines the qualities of various forms of love, ascending in the manner of Plato’s Symposium, from the carnal to the divine. I viewed this “ascent” as a kind of vector, having both velocity and direction. Musically, this meant a formal shape that began with a single, pulsing note (a D above middle C) that, by the process of accretion, becomes a tone cluster, then a chord, and eventually a huge, calmly rippling current of sound that takes on energy and mass until it eventually crests on an immense cataract of sound some ten minutes later. To date, I still consider “Negative Love” one of the most satisfying architectural experiments in all my work.

The two Dickinson poems show the polar opposites of her poetic voice. “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” is the intimate, hushed Dickinson, whose beyond-the-grave monologue is a sequence of images from a short life, a kind of pastoral elegy expressed through the lens of a slow-motion camera. Like Aaron Copland before me, I unknowingly set the bowdlerized version of the original, being unaware at the time that the poet’s original version differed significantly in syntax from the more smoothed-out, conventional version made by Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

Following the last palpitations of the slow movement the music enters a transition section, a kind of bardo stage between the end of one life and the beginning of a new one. Again, as in “Negative Love,” the music gradually assumes weight, force and speed until it is hurled headlong into the bright, vibrant clangor of “Wild Nights.” Here is the other side of Emily Dickinson, saturated with an intoxicated, ecstatic, pressing urge to dissolve herself in some private and unknowable union of eros and death. The metaphors, at once violent and sexually hypercharged, play upon the image of a “heart in port”, secure and out of danger from the wild storm-tossed sea. So much has been written about Emily Dickinson, and her mysterious persona has been subjected to so much speculative analysis, that it is always a shock to encounter these texts alone and away from any kind of exegesis.