Adams, John (1947-…), is a popular American composer and orchestra conductor. Adams began his career composing in the Minimalist style, which emphasizes repeated rhythms and short melodic passages. He later turned to a more Romantic style. By the 1980’s, Adams’s music had become perhaps the most frequently performed of any living American composer. Adams won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for music for On the Transmigration of Souls, a composition for orchestra and two choruses.
Adams has conducted many of the world’s major symphony orchestras. As a conductor, he has concentrated on American composers of the 1900’s, especially Charles Ives, as well as his own works.
Adams’s best-known composition is the opera Nixon in China (1987), dealing with a visit by President Richard M. Nixon to China in 1972. Adams’s opera The Death of Klinghoffer (1991) is based on the real-life 1985 hijacking of a cruise ship by Palestinian terrorists. The two operas put Adams in the forefront of composers exploring current events through music theater. Adams also composed the opera Doctor Atomic (2005), about the development of the first atomic bomb. He adapted A Flowering Tree (2006) from a folk tale of southern India. Girls of the Golden West (2017) is set in California in 1851 and 1852.
Adams’s first important Minimalist composition was Shaker Loops (1978), written for seven stringed instruments. He revised it for orchestra in 1983. Adams’s most popular works include Harmonium (1981) for chorus and orchestra; Grand Pianola Music (1982) for two sopranos, two pianos, and orchestra; and Harmonielehre (1985) for orchestra. Adams also composed the popular fanfare for orchestra Short Ride in a Fast Machine (1986). His other works include Violin Concerto (1993) and Century Rolls (1997), a piano concerto inspired by piano roll music of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. Naive and Sentimental Music (1999) is a work for large orchestra. Adams composed Scheherazade.2 (2015) for violin and orchestra.
John Coolidge Adams was born on Feb. 15, 1947, in Worcester, Massachusetts. He received B.A. and M.A. degrees from Harvard University in 1969 and 1971. Adams taught at the San Francisco Conservatory from 1972 to 1982. He was composer-in-residence for the San Francisco Symphony in the mid-1980’s, writing his first popular works for that orchestra. In 2009, Adams became the creative chair of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In that position, he will compose works and develop creative ideas for the orchestra. Adams discussed his life in music in the memoir Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life (2008).
See also Classical music (Minimalism).
