FundamentallySound Blog

Doctor Atomic looks interesting. The times were heady ones. I heard Harmonielehre last weekend. It was excellent. I do not know much else about Adams. Are there particular reasons?

I guess my favorite of the big three American minimalist composers is Reich. Philip Glass has actually become his music and John Adams seems to draw a brute and uninteresting line between 'pop' and 'serious' music that I find to be intellectually lazy. But I should listen to more of his music before coming to a conclusion, I admittedly haven't heard enough. I'm curious about this opera though, how does an American mainstream composer deal with his country's having built a device that can destroy the world. I hope it is more than politically correct guilt-appeasement.

The 'pop' / 'serious' dichotomy that composers like John Adams make, and somehow get away with, is nearly scandalous. It is as if they have not read one postmodern text and have certainly never given consideration to contemporary writers like Peter Sloterdijk. My interest in this opera is more sociological than musical, I'm much more fascinated with the way the material is handled, I see it as a kind of barometer of current American self-awareness, or the lack thereof. For whatever reason I still have some glimmer of hope that America could become a country that is self-aware.

I was unaware that John Adams is known for making such distinctions of kind. I favor Ellington's assessment.

The treatment of such a weighty event in human history could be interesting. Maybe we are going through a phase of relative unawareness. The bomb was an overwhelming component of public thought not so long ago. I remember worrying as a child about nuclear war. Greater consideration would help the world, but the fear of nuclear armageddon on the wane when it used to permeate society.

The symphony here will play Reich's Triple Quartet in April. Maybe I will go. The snippets on iTunes are appealing. I requested a recording from the library to get a feeling for his whole compositions.

I don't know if Adams is particularly known for making those distinctions, but I place him in a category of composers that seemed to make simplistic distinctions between popular vs art. Even now university music classes are taught with subtitles like pop vs serious aesthetics. It just seems like such a boring and vertical power distinction to make, when there are so many more multifaceted ways of dividing up the musical landscape.