![]() ![]() As an undergraduate, he conducted Harvard's student ensemble, the Bach Society Orchestra, for a year and a half his ambitious programming drew criticism in the student newspaper, where one of his concerts was called "the major disappointment of last week's musical offerings". Īdams next enrolled in Harvard University, where he earned a bachelor of arts, magnum cum laude, in 1969 and a master of arts in 1971, studying composition under Leon Kirchner, Roger Sessions, Earl Kim, Harold Shapero, and David Del Tredici. He graduated from Concord High School in 1965. Adams began composing at the age of ten and first heard his music performed as a teenager. He also played in various local orchestras, concert bands, and marching bands while a student. In the third grade, Adams took up the clarinet, initially taking lessons from his father, Carl Adams, and later with Boston Symphony Orchestra bass clarinetist Felix Viscuglia. He grew up with jazz, Americana, and Broadway musicals, once meeting Duke Ellington at his grandfather's dance hall. However, both his parents were musicians his mother was a singer with big bands, and his father was a clarinetist. Adams' family did not own a television, and did not have a record player until he was ten. As an adolescent, he lived in Woodstock, Vermont for five years before moving to East Concord, New Hampshire, and his family spent summers on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee, where his grandfather ran a dance hall. John Coolidge Adams was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on February 15, 1947. In addition to the Pulitzer, Adams has received the Erasmus Prize, a Grawemeyer Award, five Grammy Awards, the Harvard Arts Medal, France's Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and six honorary doctorates. His style is to a considerable extent a reaction against the modernist serialism promoted by the Second Viennese and Darmstadt School. In many ways, Adams's music is developed from the minimalist tradition of Steve Reich and Philip Glass however, he tends to more readily engage in the immense orchestral textures and climaxes of late Romanticism in the vein of Wagner and Mahler. Later operas include A Flowering Tree (2006) and Girls of the Golden West (2017). Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project, and the building of the first atomic bomb. Continuing with historical subjects, Adams wrote the opera Doctor Atomic (2005), based on J. Adams won a Pulitzer Prize for Music for On the Transmigration of Souls (2002), a piece for orchestra and chorus commemorating the victims of the September 11, 2001, attacks. His next notable works include a Chamber Symphony (1992), a Violin Concerto (1993), the opera- oratorio El Niño (2000), the orchestral piece My Father Knew Charles Ives (2003) and the six-string electric violin concerto The Dharma at Big Sur. Begun soon after Nixon in China, the opera The Death of Klinghoffer (1991) was based on the Palestinian Liberation Front's 1985 hijacking and murder of Leon Klinghoffer and incited considerable controversy over its content and choice of subject matter. Though the work's reception was initially mixed, it has become increasingly favored since its premiere, receiving performances worldwide. Īdams's first opera was Nixon in China (1987), which recounts Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China and was the first of many collaborations with theatre director Peter Sellars. Other popular works from this time include the fanfare Short Ride in a Fast Machine (1986) and the orchestral work El Dorado (1991). ![]() ![]() Increasingly active in the contemporary music scene of San Francisco, his large-scale orchestral works Harmonium and Harmonielehre (1985) first gained him national attention. Teaching at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Adams developed his own minimalist aesthetic, which was first fully realized in Phrygian Gates (1977) and later in the string septet Shaker Loops. Though his earliest work was aligned with modernist music, he began to disagree with its tenets upon reading John Cage's Silence: Lectures and Writings. He attended Harvard University, studying with Kirchner, Sessions and Del Tredici among others. Apart from opera, his oeuvre includes orchestral, concertante, vocal, choral, chamber, electroacoustic and piano music.īorn in Worcester, Massachusetts, Adams grew up in a musical family, being regularly exposed to classical music, jazz, musical theatre and rock music. Among the most regularly performed composers of contemporary classical music, he is particularly noted for his operas, which are often centered around recent historical events. John Coolidge Adams (born February 15, 1947) is an American composer and conductor whose music is rooted in minimalism. Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition (1995). ![]()
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