John Adams

American composer John Coolidge Adams (b. 1947, Worcester, MA) has created some of the most provocative artistic statements of our age. Adams’s controversial operas about real-life recent events contributed to a reinvigoration of contemporary opera in America. While the composer’s stage works have generated much scholarly and critical interest, the breadth of scholarship on Adams’s music expands beyond the operas. Early instrumental works have been the subject of scholarly discussion about the evolution of musical minimalism to postminimalism. Interviews and Adams’s autobiography offer insight into the many musical tributaries that have informed the composer’s life: big band jazz heard at the family’s dance hall in New Hampshire; musical theater sung by Adams’s mother in community productions; classical music as a clarinetist in youth symphonies; rock and roll; and the New England landscapes that would long inspire Adams. At Harvard University, Adams studied composition with Leon Kirchner, a former student of Arnold Schoenberg. Kirchner introduced Adams to the rigors of academic serialism and also to the problem, which would later plague Adams, of how to balance instinct with method. In 1971, after completing degrees (BA and MA) in music composition, Adams relocated to northern California. Adams joined the San Francisco experimental music scene and eventually established a voice as a distinctly American composer. Much scholarship has been devoted to the plurality of Adams’s stylistic impulses. Phrygian Gates (1977) and China Gates (1977) were the composer’s first works in the strict minimalist style. Soon thereafter, Adams began to integrate compositional techniques drawn from pre-Baroque to late-19th-century Romantic styles. Shaker Loops (1978), Harmonium (1981), and Harmonielehre (1984–1985) resulted. In 1985, Adams began composing the opera Nixon in China (1987) in collaboration with director Peter Sellars and librettist Alice Goodman, discovering a penchant for text setting. Their next opera, The Death of Klinghoffer (1991), proved to be a critical minefield, giving rise to a series of polemical debates about music, politics, and representation. After Klinghoffer, Adams composed primarily instrumental works using increasingly chromatic and modal idioms. In the early 2000s, Adams returned to grand opera with Doctor Atomic (2005) and continued to compose stage works, including A Flowering Tree (2006), The Gospel According to the Other Mary (2012), and Girls of the Golden West (2017), all in collaboration with Sellars. Adams’s focus on subjects of living memory in both the operas and instrumental works, such as On the Transmigration of Souls (2002), transformed the contemporary classical repertoire, making Adams a principal figure in late-20th and early-twenty-first-century American music.

History and Faust in Doctor Atomic

The libretto of John Adams’s Doctor Atomic (2005), by Peter Sellars, was “drawn from original sources”—one of a number of factors that endowed the opera with an aura of historical truthfulness. Yet from its inception, the composer also acknowledged a relationship between the opera and Faust mythology, even as he downplayed its impact on the work. In fact, analysis of the libretto and the musical setting reveals that they contain numerous references to earlier Faustian works, musical and literary. These references take the form of direct verbal quotation, the adaptation of musical material, and the incorporation of Faustian themes. The opera’s engagement with Faustian works by Baudelaire, Thomas Mann, Goethe, Stravinsky, and Liszt conflicts with attributions of historical authenticity that appeared at the time of its premiere.

Doctor Atomic or: How John Adams Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Sound Design

In his autobiography, John Adams mused that his 2005 opera, Doctor Atomic, challenges directors and conductors owing to its ‘abstracted treatment’ of time and space. This abstraction also challenges scholars. In this article, I bring the cross-disciplinary field of sound studies into the opera house to demonstrate that Adams's obfuscation of operatic space–time is achieved primarily through the use of a spatialised electroacoustic sound design. Drawing on archival materials and new interviews with director Peter Sellars and sound designer Mark Grey, I outline the dramaturgical, epistemological and hermeneutic ramifications of sound design for opera studies and advocate for disciplinary engagement with the spatial dimensions of electroacoustic music generally, and within opera specifically.

Doctor Atomic and the Black Hole

The existence of black holes was proposed by Oppenheimer and Snyder in 1939. Three years later Oppenheimer was appointed head of Los Alamos, the secret weapons laboratory of the Manhattan Project. Cygnus X-1 was the first black hole candidate to be studied. We now know it is a black hole with almost 15 times the mass of the Sun. Quasars are now thought to be generated by material falling into supermassive black holes in distant galaxies.

Opera as Film

The advent of high-definition broadcast of opera has transformed the ways in which we attend to opera as film. It establishes a narrative angle through filmic devices that shape the viewer’s multimodal experience in an entirely different way from viewing opera live in a theater. Building on recent studies on embodied cognition of film and multimedia, this chapter examines audio-visual congruence as a key to understanding the viewer’s experience of opera in its remediated form as film. To this end, it refers to the concept of multimodality, Anabel Cohen’s hierarchical model of narrative construction, and Mark Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory. Case studies include recent productions of Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre, John Adams’s Doctor Atomic, and Kaija Saariaho’s Adriana Mater. This study examines the distinctive types of audio-visual congruence established in these works and discusses further avenues for exploring opera and film through the lens of hermeneutical and cognitive research.

Anhalt’s Oppenheimer: The History of a Never-Finished Major Work

The “opera fantasy” Oppenheimer by Istvan Anhalt (1919–2012) survives as a draft libretto and 1,100 pages of musical sketches, on which the composer concentrated from mid-1988 to late 1991, partly with the collaboration of the playwright John Murrell. Prolonged negotiations with the Canadian Opera Company eventually collapsed and the work was abandoned. Using prior research by Peter Laki and archival documents (especially the composer’s previously inaccessible “diary” of the opera’s progress), this article traces Oppenheimer’s compositional development and the COC production talks, compares it to the 2005 opera Doctor Atomic by John Adams and Peter Sellars (both works deal with J. Robert Oppenheimer’s role in creating the first atomic bomb), and speculates on possible affinities between the existing sketches and other Anhalt compositions of the same period.