Samuel Adams

• Born: 1985 in San Francisco, California

(c) Lenny Gonzalez

Variations

• Composed: 2020, co-commissioned by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic.
• Premiere: These CSO performances are the work’s world premiere.
• Instrumentation: 3 flutes (incl. alto flute, piccolo), 3 oboes, 3 clarinets (incl. 2 bass clarinets), 3 bassoons (incl. contrabassoon), 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, vibraphone, glockenspiel, sandpaper blocks, triangles, crotales, suspended ride cymbal, paper on table, sizzle cymbal, whip, marimba, aerosol can of compressed air, tuned gongs, ratchet, almglocken, tam-tam, 2 pianos, sine wave bass keyboard, strings
• Duration: approx. 18 minutes

Samuel Adams is an American composer whose music weaves acoustic and digital sound into “mesmerizing” (New York Times) orchestrations. Adams grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area (his father is the composer John Adams), where he studied and performed improvised and electronic music. In 2010, he received a master’s degree in composition from The Yale School of Music and moved to Brooklyn, NY, where he taught and performed in various contemporary music ensembles before returning to his native California in 2016.

Sought after by orchestras and contemporary ensembles alike, he has received commissions from a broad range of organizations, including the San Francisco Symphony, Carnegie Hall, New World Symphony, Australian Chamber Orchestra and Spektral Quartet, and he has collaborated with performers and conductors such as Esa-Pekka Salonen, David Robertson and Michael Tilson Thomas; violinists Anthony Marwood, Jennifer Koh and Karen Gomyo; and pianists Emanuel Ax, Sarah Cahill, David Fung and Joyce Yang.

The 2022–23 season highlights several world premieres, including Echo Transcriptions, a new work for electric violin and orchestra commissioned by the Australian Chamber Orchestra for Richard Tognetti. The work was presented on a national tour of Australia in late 2022 and will receive its North American performances in California and Toronto this spring. In February, pianist Conor Hanick and the San Francisco Symphony premiered No Such Spring under the baton of Esa-Pekka Salonen, and this weekend, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra premieres Adams’ Variations, a 2020 orchestral work co-commissioned by the CSO and the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic. Other season highlights include a performance of Adams’ 2017 Chamber Concerto with violinist Karen Gomyo and the release of a new record featuring the Chicago-based Spektral Quartet.

Adams was Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 2015 to 2018 and, in the 2021–22 season, he was the Composer-in-Residence with Het Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. He has held residencies at Civitella Ranieri (Umbria, Italy), Djerassi Resident Artists Program (California), Ucross (Wyoming), and Visby International Centre for Composers (Gotland, Sweden). He is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow and lives and works in Seattle, WA. For more information about Samuel Adams, visit samuelcarladams.com.

Of his Variations, Samuel Adams says: 

I started work on Variations in the summer of 2020, after briefly relocating to Nevada, and completed the score the following January. It was during this period of isolation that emerged a consistent pattern to my life: starting each day at the piano to compose and ending each day with the same long walk in my temporary desert neighborhood. The only variations during this time were found in my environment: the gradual change in the landscape, the swelling number of migrating birds in the fall, and the angle of light on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada.

In many ways, Variations became a mirror of this lived experience. The organic texture and the flow of the music reflect the steely grey expanses of Western Nevada and the rhythmic, almost rippling quality of the peaks and valleys as they roll out east. Yet, while composing the piece—as the light gradually left the northern hemisphere, and the world during the first pandemic winter seemed to gradually close in on itself—the music seemed to, conversely, open up. The 18 minutes uncoil like the fronds of a fern. Each variation grows in duration so that the first variation lasts about a minute and the last about seven, and each variation begins with the same ascending Phrygian scale before venturing into increasingly vast landscapes. The final variation reaches a high plateau, with ecstatic waves of sound cresting and falling to the most extreme ranges of the orchestra before arriving at a brief, ringing coda.

This is the first work I’ve written for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and it was a total joy to create.

For more about Samuel Adams' Variations, CLICK HERE.