My earliest music memory was as about a five-year-old.
I lived in a very rural town, Vermont, Woodstock, Vermont, and my mother sang in the local theater
and my father played clarinet in the pit orchestra. It was a surreal play by Jean Cocteau called
La Tour Eiffel, The Eiffel Tower, and all I can remember was that I wore very few clothes
and I think I was supposed to be like a cupid or something and I was asked to throw paper
bullets from a very high chair in to the audience, and I apparently panicked and didn't do anything.
And I remember everybody shouting off stage, "Johnny, throw the bullets, throw the bullets,"
and I just froze. A few years later I also wore very few clothes. This time I was going
to appear as a young Polynesian boy in a Concord, New Hampshire, local production on South Pacific
and my mother was Bloody Mary. I think my stage appearance there was marginally more
successful.There is a lot of music in the family. My mother's stepfather owned a dance
hall on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee in central New Hampshire and it was there that
as a young boy I first heard big bands, particularly remember hearing the Duke Ellington Orchestra
twice on two different occasions in my grandfather's dance hall. And my parents were amateur musicians
but music, whether it was jazz or classical music, was in a sense sort of the Holy Grail
in the family, and I was inspired hearing my father play the clarinet and I learned
the instrument and we played in a marching band together and in a community orchestra.
Well, we didn't have a piano in the house. My mother was a singer and my dad had the
clarinet and they had no way of knowing how essential being able to play the piano was
to a young composer's education, but in retrospect I think sometimes composers become creative
people because of some - something that's missing. And in my case I couldn't play all
those wonderful Beethoven sonatas and Mozart concertos. I couldn't even play through a
piano vocal score of an opera so I think in a way that sort of motivated me to create
my own music. That doesn't mean I wasn't a skilled musician. I got a very, very rigorous
training both as a performer, as a conductor, and to this day my training has allowed me
to conduct not only my own music but lots of other music.I think my first impulse to
write music came probably when I was in the third grade. I don't know how old you are
then, maybe eight, nine years old. That was the 200th anniversary of Mozart's birth, 1956.
He was born in 1756. And I went to a very small school in rural New Hampshire and our
teacher read a child's biography of Mozart, which was an extraordinary thing in itself,
and I got this image of a young boy who could write symphonies and concertos, and so I went
home and tried to do it myself. Of course, then I came face to face with the brutal reality
that I needed to have a lot of knowledge about harmony and theory, but that was the beginning
and within three or four years I'd written my first orchestra piece and heard it played
by a local orchestra.Well, a discussion of operas is --Ê it's always a dicey one and
particularly when I'm being given an award and feel very honored. If I have to talk candidly
about opera it's a matter of a little bit of discomfort because I'm basically not much
of an opera fan. I rarely go and I remember my first experiences of hearing opera produced
incredible cognitive dissonance because I didn't like the sound of the operatic voice.
A very wealthy man had heard about me and he had grown up also in rural New Hampshire
so he invited me down. I think I was about 15 years old and I took the bus down to New
York City and was met by his wife and taken to the Metropolitan Opera when it was further
downtown. This was in the era before Lincoln Center and I heard Aida. All I remember was
a very, very large woman and a very, very short man on lifts and I later found out it
was Birgit Nilsson and Richard Tucker, but I didn't get it. Of course, I didn't know
what the story was and I didn't like the sound of it. Later as a college student I discovered
Mozart and I discovered a pure form of singing, and I think that helped to transform my feelings
but basically my inspiration for the singing voice has still been American popular music.
I still -- when I compose my own work I tend to think of my experiences of listening to
Stevie Wonder or Joni Mitchell more than a great opera singer.Well, I grew up in a period
when among other people Charles Ives was being discovered and of course Leonard Bernstein
because he was so glamorous and he was so charismatic. When Leonard Bernstein put his
finger on something people paid attention, and one of Bernstein's discoveries was Charles
Ives. Only specialists knew about Ives and I was a young boy and I bought my first Bernstein
recording of Ives and the idea of a New England composer, someone who loved Emerson and Thoreau
and incorporated his philosophical feelings about life into his music stimulated me and
provided a certain kind of model.My trip across the country has sort of now become a little
like a musical on the road. I wrote about it several times. I wrote about it in my book,
Hallelujah Junction, and I didn't mean to turn it into some myth but it was emphatically
a journey of discovery, what the Germans would call a wandern Jahr, except it turned out
to be a wandern Liebe because instead of coming back after six months I found that California
had a profound effect on me, not only the landscape but the culture. I'd grown up in
a small town in New England where everybody had a name like mine and looked like me, and
suddenly I found myself in San Francisco with this fabulous mix of all kinds of cultures
and people looked different and spoke different languages and their music was different. And
it -- I think it really opened the door to my own musical expressiveness.Well, I don't
think America ever has had a single identifiable style. Certainly, during the thirties the
sort of Copeland populist style became very well known and it continues to this day, but
if you had to put your finger on something that typified American music, that made it
essentially American and you would say that no one from Europe or elsewhere would write
like this I would say it is our sense of pulsation. And whether that's in jazz or rock or in minimalism
or in the kind of music that I write there's always this sense of pulsation and you always
feel it. It's a very visceral feeling and what I do in my music is try to mix a sense
of expressiveness and a sense of intellectual pleasure with what's fundamentally something
that's very much from the gut. Historically, things always seem to be bad. I'll talk to
people and they'll say, "Oh, it was so much better 20 years ago" or "It was so much better
a hundred years ago," but we look at the struggles that Mahler had. Nobody really took him seriously.
They just sort of indulged his obsession to compose these symphonies when really what
we wanted from him was his conducting, and likewise if you look at the early era of Duke
Ellington he was only appreciated by black listeners and everyone laughed at the minimalists
and called it needles stuck in the groove music. And it's very much an expected thing
that you have to just survive and endure and if there's quality to what you have to say
people will eventually understand it and appreciate it.A lot of people, particularly people who
are not terribly knowledgeable about music, don't understand why there aren't more Mozarts.
They don't understand why there aren't 20-year-old geniuses writing music. Why is it that composers
these days always look like me?Ê But I think that part of the reason is that Mozart wrote
in a time when style was accepted and it's just that he wrote in the common language
better than anyone else, but today what is expected of an artist is that he or she be
absolutely original, that he or she have a unique voice, and it takes time to develop
that. I don't think I really matured as an artist and found my own voice until I was
about 30 years old.Well, let's see. My name is John Adams so quite possibly. I enjoy my
ethnicity. Let's put it that way. I enjoy being an American. I enjoy the fact that I
am alive and composing at a time when this country for all its problems, its terrible
social problems and the constant chatter that's going on in the country ideologically and
also the fact that America has historically been very, very wary about artists, has always
distrusted them and thought there was something a little suspicious about them, the bottom
line is that we're a tremendously artistic country and we have a great tradition. We
are one of the great musical cultures on the globe and so to be part of that is a terrific
thing.Well, I'm amused when people call Nixon in China a classic now because I guess in
a sense it's like beginner's luck. It's somebody who's never played poker before and gets a
good hand and wins the first game. You should quit while you're ahead. I didn't know much
about opera. I got this commission. We were all very young, Peter Sellers, the stage director,
Alice Goodman, the marvelous librettist, and in a sense perhaps because we didn't know
much about opera and we were intimidated by an overwhelming responsibility we just sort
of went in and did it. We created something that was maybe quite fresh and shocking and
which -- people like to talk about how Nixon in China is this repertory piece now but if
you go back and you read the reviews after the premiere most of them were pretty savage.
They ridiculed it and called it a sophomoric exercise like a college play and a lot of
people were upset that we didn't -- weren't more critical of Nixon. I think the Village
Voice complained at how well I treated Pat Nixon so again you have to take the long view
and realize that a judgment today may prove to be wrong, and that goes for both sides.
If I get a glowing review I have to hold it at arm's distance and say, "Yeah, maybe, but
maybe not."Well, I've been very fortunate that my operas have- that people have continued
to want to produce them and hear them. Part of that may be the fact that I -- some of
the time, not always, but I deal with events and themes and psychological and historical
conditions that really touch us as Americans. It isn't just Richard Nixon who of course
is a delicious character for operatic treatment but it is -- it's the historical perplexity
of being a President, of being a person with immense power and what do you do with that
power. I'm fascinated to read every day about Obama and I wonder what that person's life
is like and how he can wake up and just assume those burdens of office and likewise with
the atomic bomb and Dr. Atomic. That single image of the exploding atomic bomb is so expressive
of our predicament as Americans in this time so that may be part of the reason why people
want to see my operas and want to produce them. People call me a political composer
but I think that's really wrong. I think that's a misnomer. I'm no more political than Shakespeare
or Sophocles. I'm basically taking themes that are at the absolute core of our existence
as living beings and bringing them to the level of art. Well, opera is this amazing
art form because it is a synthesis of words and music and if you have a great director
like Peter Sellers it's more than that. It's dance. It's the beautiful lighting. It's the
whole sensory experience. That's why when opera doesn't work it's such a horrible experience
and people leave the theater in such a bad mood, but in the rare occasions when everything
does come together and people have created a work with great love and care and enormous
effort it can be one of the overwhelming artistic experiences because it brings all those elements
together and you get synergy. Well, Peter Sellers found me. He was sort of an alarmingly
precocious person. He was already so fully mature as a 22-year-old. He was always wacky
and provocative but deep down inside he was a very, very serious artist, and I think he
was looking for somebody who was not only serious but had music with the power to move
people. And the bottom line is that music is an art form about feeling. I think we tend
to forget that, particularly in the era of modernism where music has become very much
a kind of intellectual activity, but ultimately it's about feeling and that's why people feel
they're swept away, they're deeply moved to tears or they're deeply offended if they hear
something that sounds ugly. And I think that it was my desire and capacity to use music
as an art of feeling that drew Peter to my work.I tend to work with a fairly limited
group of people. If you look at the great film directors you often see the same actors
coming back and forth. Antonioni used a very small group of people. Even Woody Allen today
tends to work with a very small group of people. The chronic problem with the opera world is
that it becomes a kind of a production machine and singers fly in and there's never really
time to get deep into the work of art, and part of this isÊ economic. You have to pay
this enormous bill to keep an opera company floating and the audiences generally want
to hear the same four or five operas so I'd say 80 to 90 percent of the opera that's produced
is done under bad conditions and it's not particularly done with love, and there's no
point for me in doing that sort of thing. What I want to do is work with singers who
-- and directors who -- for whom this is the only thing in their life at the moment
and so you have to pick and choose carefully. I'm always looking even if not actively. Sometimes
I'm passively looking for a theme. The thing is about an opera is that it's so much work
and it's so much money and it involves such zealous devotion on the part of everyone whether
it's the producers, the Peter Gelbs of the world, or the conductors or the stage directors,
and there's no point in making an opera if it isn't really important, if it doesn't need
to be written, if it isn't something that's going to absolutely command the public attention,
and I know that will come. It was a long time before I found the subject of -- for Dr. Atomic
and it may be five or ten years, if I last that long, but I suspect there is another
one down the road. I just haven't quite found the topic, and please don't send me any suggestions
because people keep doing that and it just is overwhelming. Well, because some people
wrongly think of me as a political composer or a composer who always has to have a social
issue. Of course, a lot of people asked me after 9/11 whether I was going to write a
piece and I thought it would be only in the worst taste to attempt to compose a work the
theme of which was 9/11, but then lo and behold I get a request from the New York Philharmonic
and in the end I was deeply moved and honored to be asked because I knew how much New Yorkers
had suffered and I also knew how much the Philharmonic had been involved in going down
and playing for the workers at ground zero. So I knew that I had to find a way to write
this piece, and fortunately I found an angel early on and that angel was Charles Ives,
a piece called The Unanswered Question, which is a very quiet and intimate and both spiritual
and philosophically questioning piece. And that sort of became the model for my piece,
On The Transmigration of Souls.Some creative people just write and others are sort of polymorphous
in their activities. I'm a funny person because when I'm home I'm very much a hermit. I don't
like to answer the phone and I tend to have a huge in-box of unanswered e-mails, but then
there's another side of me which is extrovert and when I leave home, I go to another city
to conduct or to curate a festival or something like that, I'm able to turn over a leaf and
become the opposite. Instead of the yang it's the yin, and I find that that extrovert attention,
even though the transition sometimes is very painful, it's good for me. It tends to feed
the other side of my personality so I think I've been able to create a good yin, yang
balance in my professional and creative life.It's a very mysterious thing. We need to have enormous
technical equipment. If you look at a composer like Brahms for example or Bach, their technical
chops were just overwhelming and yet what happens in the actual act of creation is kind
of unknowable, and in fact you don't want to know too much about it. You don't want
it to be too conscious because once things become too conscious you tend to repeat yourself,
and it's wonderful when you're actually in the creative act to sort of be almost half
asleep, to get in to that zone where you lose your ego and you lose your self-consciousness
and you just kind of follow this thread. It's sort of like Hansel and Gretel in the forest.
You don't know where it's going to lead, but if it's handled correctly it can be a voyage
of self-discovery not only for you but for the listener.I enjoy writing and I enjoy those
writers like Marcel Proust who wrote about their pasts, and I thought my past was colorful
and interesting. I also wanted to make a personal statement about my work just as a kind of
legacy but I also wanted to write a book for young musicians, particularly for young composers
who could see the struggles that I went through and the indecisions and wrong turns. I hope
it's fundamentally a humble book. It's not a book of self-promotion. It's one more of
this is what happened to me and the results were both good and at times bad but that's
what life is like.
