The music of John Adams is usually categorized as minimalist or post-minimalist although in interview he has categorised himself as a 'post-style' composer. While Adams employs minimalist techniques, such as repeating patterns, he is not a strict follower of the movement. Adams was born ten years after Steve Reich and Philip Glass, and his writing is more developmental and directionalized, containing climaxes and other elements of Romanticism. Comparing Shaker Loops to minimalist composer Terry Riley's piece In C, Adams says,

rather than set up small engines of motivic materials and let them run free in a kind of random play of counterpoint, I used the fabric of continually repeating cells to forge large architectonic shapes, creating a web of activity that, even within the course of a single movement, was more detailed, more varied, and knew both light and dark, serenity and turbulence.[7]

Many of Adams's ideas in composition are a reaction to the philosophy of serialism and its depictions of "the composer as scientist."[8] The Darmstadt school of twelve tone composition was dominant during the time that Adams was receiving his college education, and he compared class to a "mausoleum where we would sit and count tone-rows in Webern."[9][page needed] By the time he graduated, he was disillusioned with what he saw as the restrained feeling and inaccessibility of serialism.

Adams experienced a musical epiphany after reading John Cage's book Silence (1973), which he claimed "dropped into [his] psyche like a time bomb."[10] Cage posed fundamental questions about what music was, and regarded all types of sounds as viable sources of music. This perspective offered to Adams a liberating alternative to the rule-based techniques of serialism. At this point Adams began to experiment with electronic music, and his experiences are reflected in the writing of Phrygian Gates (1977–78), in which the constant shifting between modules in Lydian mode and Phrygian mode refers to activating electronic gates rather than architectural ones. Adams explained that working with synthesizers caused a "diatonic conversion," a reversion to the belief that tonality was a force of nature.[11]

Minimalism offered the final solution to Adams's creative dilemma. Adams was attracted to its pulsating and diatonic sound, which provided an underlying rhetoric on top of which he could express what he wanted in his compositions. Although some of his pieces sound similar to those written by minimalist composers, Adams actually rejects the idea of mechanistic procedure-based or process music; what Adams took away from minimalism was tonality and/or modality, and the rhythmic energy from repetition.

John Adams, Phrygian Gates, mm 21–40 (1977)

Some of Adams's compositions are an amalgamation of different styles. One example is Grand Pianola Music (1981–82), a humorous piece that purposely draws its content from musical cliches. In The Dharma at Big Sur, Adam's draws from literary texts such as Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder and Henry Miller to illustrate the California landscape. Adams professes his love of other genres other than classical music; his parents were jazz musicians, and he has also listened to rock music, albeit only passively. Adams once claimed that originality wasn't an urgent concern for him the way it was necessary for the minimalists, and compared his position to that of Gustav Mahler, J. S. Bach, and Johannes Brahms, who "were standing at the end of an era and were embracing all of the evolutions that occurred over the previous thirty to fifty years."[12][page needed]

Style and analysis

John Adams, Fearful Symmetries, mm 197–202 (1988)

Adams, like other minimalists of his time (e.g. Philip Glass), used a steady pulse that defines and controls the music. The pulse was best known from Terry Riley's early composition In C, and slowly more and more composers used it as a common practice. Jonathan Bernard highlighted this adoption by comparing Phrygian Gates, written in 1977, and Fearful Symmetries written eleven years later in 1988.[13]

Violin Concerto, Mvt. III "Toccare"

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Adams started to add a new character to his music, something he called "the Trickster." The Trickster allowed Adams to use the repetitive style and rhythmic drive of minimalism, yet poke fun at it at the same time.[citation needed] When Adams commented on his own characterization of particular minimalist music, he stated that he went joyriding on "those Great Prairies of non-event."[14]

John Adams, Violin Concerto, III "Toccare" (1993)

Oddly enough, his music of the 1990s slowly starts to incorporate it more and more to the point where one critic believes this slowly increasing incorporation of minimalism "represents a coming to terms with minimalism according to a decidedly tonal slant: pulse and repetition have been transmuted, by a kind of reverse-chronological alchemy, into devices of familiar from earlier eras, such as moto perpetuo and ostinato."[this quote needs a citation] The third movement of the Violin Concerto, titled "Toccare", portrays this transition.

Adams begins the movement with a repeated, scale-like eight-note melody in the violin and going into the second measure, it appears as if he will continue this, but instead of starting at the bottom again, the violin continues upward. From here, there are fewer instances of repletion and more moving up and down in a pulse like fashion. The orchestra on the other hand is more repetitive and pulse like: the left hand[clarification

needed] continually plays the high A and it is not until the fifth measure where another note is added, but the A continues to be played throughout always on the off beat. It is this pulsing A, played as an eighth note as opposed to a sixteenth note, that pokes fun at the minimalist, yet Adams still uses the pulse (i.e. alternating eighth notes between the right and left hand,[clarification needed] creating a sixteenth note feeling) as an engine for the movement.

John Adams and Minimalism

John Adams' music should not be labeled as minimalist. He was born a generation after famous minimalists such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich, and despite minimalism's audible influences in harmony, such as in the aforementioned Phrygian Gates, Adams described his music as "post-minimalist", as he does not strictly follow minimalist techniques. His compositions tend to be more directional and climactic,

possessing qualities of Romanticism, rather than the smooth soundscapes characterizing those of Philip Glass.

Adams, John (John Coolidge Adams), 1947–, American composer, b. Worcester, Mass. A clarinetist, he studied composition at Harvard (B.A. 1969, M.A. 1971). Often regarded as the most outstanding, technically adept, and influential composer of his generation, Adams has written in numerous genres, bringing to his compositions a keen sense of the theatrical and the vernacular. His distinctive sound is a mixture of post-minimalism with an intensely emotional expansiveness and a range of expressive tonal elements reminiscent of late romanticism and early modernism. Strong and vivid, his music can exhibit both a wittily life-affirming sense of fun and a decidedly contemporary aura of grief and horror.

Read more: Adams, John, American composer | Infoplease.com http://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/people/adams-john-american-composer.html#ixzz3ML7dCpLc

Although his early compositions were in an academic style, Adams soon began drawing on much broader sources, including pop, jazz, electronic music, and minimalism. His use of minimalist techniques—characterized by repetition and simplicity—came to be tempered by expressive, even neo-Romantic, elements. His works encompass a wide range of genres and include Shaker Loops (1978), chamber music for string septet; Harmonium (1980), a cantata for chorus and orchestra using the poetry of John Donne and Emily Dickinson; Grand Pianola Music (1981–82), a reworking of early 20th-century American popular music for instrumental ensemble, three sopranos, and two pianos; Harmonielehre (1984–85), for orchestra, an homage to Arnold Schoenberg, whose music was the antithesis of minimalism; and Wound-Dresser (1988), for baritone and orchestra, a work based on Walt Whitman’s poems about his experience as a nurse in the American Civil War. One of Adams’s especially popular orchestral works was the fanfare Short Ride in a Fast Machine (1986). The recording of another popular orchestral work, El Dorado (1991), won a 1997 Grammy Award. Later large-scale works include the Violin Concerto (1993) and My Father Knew Charles Ives (2003), for orchestra, which alludes to Ives’s works and compositional methods.

Adams’s most ambitious works, however, were his operas. The first two were created in collaboration with the director Peter Sellars, the poet Alice Goodman, and the choreographer Mark Morris. Nixon in China (1987) took as its subject the visit of U.S. Pres. Richard M. Nixon to China in 1972. The Death of Klinghoffer (1991) was based on the hijacking by Palestinian terrorists of the cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985 and the killing of a disabled Jewish passenger. The composer’s third opera, Doctor Atomic (2005), was the story of the scientists in Los Alamos, N.M., U.S., who during World War II devised the first atomic bomb. Sellars compiled the libretto from a variety of sources, including the favourite poetry of the Los Alamos physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer as well as declassified government documents of the period.

In a departure from his 2005 statement that “if opera is actually going to be a part of our lives…it has to deal with contemporary topics,” Adams based his fourth opera, A

Flowering Tree (2006), on South Indian folktales; again Sellars was his collaborator. The work was created in homage to Mozart, taking as its inspiration The Magic Flute (1791).

Adams’s operas have been regularly performed, and they have been recorded; Nixon in China won a 1988 Grammy Award. A number of critics have found them to be among the most significant of contemporary operas. Adams created orchestral and choral works from his opera scores, including The Nixon Tapes (1987), for voices and orchestra, and Doctor Atomic Symphony (2005). The Chairman Dances, subtitled “Foxtrot for Orchestra,” which was written for Nixon in China but dropped from the final score, became one of Adams’s most-often-played orchestral works.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City commissioned a work from Adams: On the Transmigration of Souls, for orchestra, chorus, children’s choir, and prerecorded sound track, first performed Sept. 19, 2002. The text of the work derived from three sources: fragments from notices posted at the World Trade Center site by friends and relatives of the missing, interviews published in the New York Times, and randomly chosen names of victims. For this composition Adams was awarded the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in music; the recording won three 2004 Grammy Awards.

Adams received numerous other honours and awards as well. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1997. Also in 1997 he was named Composer of the Year by the venerable magazine Musical America. A festival in his honour at Lincoln Center in April and May of 2003 was the most extensive single-composer festival that had ever been held there.