How Does Your Music Grow?

Composer John Adams compares composing to gardening

by Debra Pillivant

Composer and conductor John Adams stepped smartly to the podium on the stage in Finney Chapel, acknowledging the audience's polite applause with a slight nod.

He placed his script squarely before him and surveyed the audience as he might the musicians of a symphony orchestra. The audience responded with baited breath and eyes forward, waiting for the maestro to cue them in.

One, two, three, four ...

"I'm supposed to share some thoughts with you about composing music, so I thought I'd like to share myself," said Adams, opening his Convocation Series lecture, "Composing in Time and Place: Some Thoughts on Music in Our Time." His Oberlin appearance coincided with a Cleveland Orchestra performance of his Naive and Sentimental Music.

Adams' creative output spans a wide range of media: works for orchestra, opera, video, film, and dance, as well as electronic and instrumental music. Harmonium, Harmonielehre, Shaker Loops, and The Chairman Dances are among the best known and frequently performed works of contemporary American music.

Andrew Porter of The New Yorker has called Adams the creator of a "flexible new language capable of producing large-scale works that are both attractive and strongly fashioned," and Le Monde says his music "gives the impression of a rediscovered liberty, of an open door which lets in the fresh air in great gusts."

"The creative process – making art, preparing a life of art – is self-education," said Adams, a tall, mild-mannered man with a silvery beard that frames a face that smiles easily. "I'm probably the least able to explain when a moment arises. Music is stubborn, flawed words, stubborn sounds."

"What comes first, music or text?" he asked rhetorically, raising his arms and gesturing in the air as if to tweak the notes that were the words of his lecture. "Idea, harmony, rhythm, image? I can't tell you. Each time it's a different musical motive. The form is personalized. It depends on how a piece feels to me."

Adams took time to arrive at his compositional style. After earning both the B.A. and the M.A. degrees at Harvard University during the late 1960s, he moved to San Francisco in 1971 and became involved in the city's active and varied new music life, teaching for ten years at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

"For most of my 20s I was casting around for a language. I bumped against it a few times in the dark, but it wasn't until I became involved in minimalism that I began to develop a truly personal language. I didn't write my first mature piece, Phrygian Gates, until I was 30," Adams said in an interview posted on his official web site.

In his Oberlin lecture, Adams compared the process of composing to gardening.

"A composer must do good gardening of his harmonies, motives, and rhythms, planting them in his composition, watering and weeding his pieces as they grow," he said.

"If you do it (compose) every day, things come without a hassle, going forward until you suddenly hit a wall. The hard part is the starting and the stopping, the psychological issues of identifying good music and dealing with the ego. You have to ask yourself: Is that the best I can do?"

Adams called himself a "minimalist," relating to the Greek "to mime."

"My music is very emotional music. It has the capability to mime human behavior. Music more than any other art form has this capacity," he said.

"As I end my remarks for the evening," he said, cueing the audience for the big finish, "I'd just like to quote Janis Joplin."

He gathered his notes and placed them precisely on top of each other, preparing to dash if the audience should be unappreciative.

"Just take a little piece of my heart!" he said, smiling a quirky smile.

Applause, applause!