John Adams: better a living composer than a dead statesman

[calimac]

John Adams spoke at Stanford last night. Even though I didn't expect him to say much about his new String Quartet, since I'm reviewing Sunday's performance I thought I should go and hear what he had to say.

What he had to say was a lot about the role of music - good music (he likes jazz as well as classical, but doesn't think much of most rock) - in society. He's annoyed that even top schools only ask the students in orchestra to rehearse one day a week, while students on sports teams practice five days a week. That suggests these schools consider sports five times as important as music.

Come on, he says. The arts aren't just an adornment; learning an appreciation and understanding of them in childhood seems to give a greater human sensitivity in adulthood. Music in particular is a way for people to share their deepest emotions. "Music is fundamentally about feelings," he says. "It can't convey ideas." After 9/11 in particular, classical music answered many people's deepest needs. (I immediately think of Michael Moore's brilliant use of Arvo Pärt's Cantus - perhaps the greatest work composed in my lifetime - to accompany the film of the disaster in Fahrenheit 9/11.) Beyond that, though, Adams is doubtful about the use of art as a social tool to achieve justice or the improvement of society.

But we can certainly use government money to support the arts, he says. It's our money, and arts are a worthy field. If we're using a stimulus to create jobs, musicians and actors and arts administrators need jobs just as much as construction workers do.

He's not worried about classical music losing audiences because of short attention spans. Long-breathed composers like Mahler and Wagner are still big hits. Listeners enjoy the opportunity to pay attention for long periods of time, because "the rest of life is one long attention-deficit disorder."

There is still a tendency, though, to consider classical music somehow sissy. That, Adams says, is undoubtably why Charles Ives - that "imperfect but wonderful godfather" of American music - adopted his pose of "overblown masculinity" to compensate. Some others have done similarly, and Adams says he abandoned the Cagean avant-garde as a dead end, so relentlessly abstract, experimental, and unconcerned with the vernacular.

In contemporary composition he sees a more insidious problem: composing software. Transcribing handwritten music into such software, or using it to try out complex sounds, is one thing, but composing directly on the computer is another. Adams finds he can identify software-written music at sight now. The problem is not what you can't do in software, it's what in practice, due to technical design, that you don't do. Music requiring complex notational practices, like George Crumb's, or that paints large still landscapes, like Toru Takemitsu's, tends not to get written in software. Instead, you get regular pulses, thanks to those click tracks, and simple tonal harmonies, and it's far too easy to turn out reams of mediocre scores.

David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet, who led the conversation with Adams, asked him what his favorite single note was. "Gee," said Adams, "that's a stumper. I tend to think in clusters. Maybe a big fat E-flat major chord, with tuba and timpani at the bottom." Harrington replied that his favorite note is the opening note of Fritz Kreisler's performance of Dvorak's Humoresque. "I could write a whole novel about that one note," Harrington declared. Adams stared back in bemusement. "You really are a minimalist," he said.

Comments

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

What a delight. Most interviewees don't open up like that, or if they do, don't have so many thoughtful things to say.

[scribblerworks.livejournal.com]

When I saw the Apple (?) composer program, that apparently won't even let you begin without a preset beat, I knew the results would end up being homogenized and mostly mediocre.

What about shifting keys and measures? What if someone wanted 5/4 time?

I like that last exchange there! Sounds like a lovely evening.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Any professional-level program will let you shift keys and rhythms, and allow for unusual times like 5/4 (not so unusual since Stravinsky). My cheap little DOS music-writing program, SongWright, will let you do that.

But there are more complex things it's harder to do this way on a computer (have you ever seen a score of George Crumb's? Yikes!), and most people just won't bother.

[(Anonymous)]

<< He's annoyed that even top schools only ask the students in orchestra to rehearse one day a week, while students on sports teams practice five days a week. That suggests these schools consider sports five times as important as music. >>

Well, I'm glad to report that at my suburban high school near Cleveland, in the 1980s when I attended and still today, band and choir rehearse daily, during the school day, and for class credit. I hadn't realized that was so unusual.

(And thanks for the clarification in the earlier post regarding Rebecca Clarke; I hadn't read closely enough.)

[nemosed.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a fascinating interview, especially the observation about the software - I think there are a lot of situations where making things supposedly easier in fact stifles certain kind of creative output. I use Sibelius and find it deeply frustrating in many ways, though I've never used it enough to get familiar with its quirks.

I'm not sure that the orchestra rehearsing once a week is a particularly big deal; after all, they're presumably expected to practise individually more often, and music is not a competition (at least, most of the time.)

(Um, hi. I friended you a while ago for your reviews in particular and am not sure I ever introduced myself. I hope you don't mind.)

[benjd.livejournal.com]

Apropos of your comment about Michael Moore's use of Arvo Part's Cantus in Fahrenheit 9/11--Part was born on September 11th, 1935. Thanks for introducing me to Part via your reference.