John Adams - not the President

with Martin Luther.

From WQXR and Carnegie Hall, this is classical music happy hour hosted by me, pianist

many X. Each episode will speak with a special guest about their lives. Listen to some of their favorite musical gems. Play music inspired games and answer questions from you are listeners. My next guest shares a name with not one, but two US presidents. He also just happens to be one of the pre-eminent composers of the 20th and now 21st centuries. Nixon and

China, Dr. Atomic, short-ride in a fast machine, his catalog of works, reads like a top 10 list of contemporary classical music. He's a conductor, a writer, a champion of young composers, a frequent contributor to the New York Times book review, and he has millions of fans of whom I am one. John Adams, welcome to the show. Thank you. It's great to be here, man.

It's a great pleasure. I had the privilege of doing a piano concerto by you. I think maybe

your first piano concerto. That's right. Yes. Century Roll. Century Roll is very exciting

with fabulous titles, too. I have Mani's Jim in the second movement, and I still think

“the third movement of that concerto is one of the great stories. You should tell it because”

you overheard a couple of professors in Berkeley. Is that what it was? Yes. This was back in the mid '90s, and I did not know that there was a comment that was passing for once every 10 centuries. If I may say so, probably one of the few things that you didn't know because you seem to know everything else. I heard a couple of, I assume they were professors in the University of California in Berkeley where I live, talking about the term "HailBop"

and of course, I thought it was "H-A-I-L" like "Yes" and "Bop", kind of music, and then I learned later that it was the name of the comment. But anyway, that phrase stuck to me and since there was a sort of jazzy feel to the last movement of the concerto that I wrote for you. I named it "HailBop" in my spelling. Fabulous. So, it's wonderful title. You've now written "Three Piano Concertos". I have, which is quite remarkable, given that I can't play the piano.

I never took a piano as well. Actually, that's one of the questions I wanted to ask was

you play clarinet. That's right. That was your first real instrument, or your last time. How do you deal with doing a concerto for another instrument? You've written violin concertos? You've written a clarinet concerto. I have. So, that you probably know about.

“Yes. But I think you write wonderfully for the piano, and I just, I wondered how that came”

about. You know, it's kind of a miraculous thing that I can't play the piano and when I sit down, you can strange things come up. And here I have the greatest pianist alive, you, the King Earl of Simon. You do when playing my concertos. I think, you know, it's possible that because I don't, my, my hands dunk it down on the keyboard in the conventional way, perhaps I come up with ideas that somebody who is a pianist would dream of. Yes, I see what you

mean. I sometimes the best teachers actually are ones that don't play the instrument that they're teaching, because they don't worry about how to do it. They just talk about what they want to come out. That's a strange concept, but I've got my hair around there. I do think very true. I've had a lot of lessons with chamber music things from violinists and jealous, and they would say,

“you know, this is what I want to hear there. I don't know how you do it, but that's what I want.”

And I think that's actually helpful because you can then try and figure out your own stuff. If you're composing a piano concerto, violin concerto, is there a subject? In some cases, there are. I'm thinking of the concerto, well, I call it a dramatic symphony,

And that's called Cheruzod. Point two. And it does have a bit of a imaginary narrative.

A modern woman who is, you know, it's kind of a feminist concerto, if there is such a thing. A little bit of an imagine scenario. There's one movement called Cheruzod, and the men with beards, you know, I imagine her being scolded. I'm trying to think, well, I have a clarinet concerto called Narlie buttons.

“Narlie buttons. But I think that's not just you. I think, in our time,”

there seem to be very few people that say symphony number three or piano concerto number two.

It's always some kind of tight. Why do you think that is? Well, I have to hand it to my good friend Steve

Wright. His titles are as clean and as pure as his music. You know, music for 18 instrument, music for, yes, for mallops and breakfast. Yes, I love like yes. I don't know. I mean, I just love telling my pieces. But I have several, I suppose you could call them symphonies, but one of them I call, not even sentimental music, which is a term that comes from Schiller. I have promonelaire. Monilaire. Isn't harmonilaire a book by Arnold Schunberg?

Yes, it's about tunnel harmony, about tunnel harmony. And in a way, this piece of mine is an affirmation of my embrace of canality. And the piano concerto I wrote for Eugene Wanks, the title of that is why does the devil have no messing my titles up man? I'm really sorry. Why don't you tell me? Must the devil have all the good tools? Oh, that makes it so much better.

“Must the devil. I will remember that. You know, I thought that phrase came from Chuck Berry,”

but it turns out that it originated with Martin Luther. Really? Yes. Well, that's a way back. What, what year was that? Well, it was before the portion of the electric guitar. I'm hoping you can help me answer some questions about classical music from our listeners. We've invited them to submit their questions, and we're going to do our best to answer them. If we don't know the answer, especially me, I'll be happy to make something up.

Absolutely. So, here's a question from Mary in New Jersey. Hello, my name is Mary. I'm from Scotch Plains, New Jersey. My question is what types of music, like symphonies or Gregorian chance,

“have changed the most and revolved the most over about the last more hundred years?”

When I hear medieval pieces, you know, King's consort kind of things, and I hear contemporary concertos with horns, for example. I'm wondering what the connection is through history. If certain types of music have retained their construction the same way or others have evolved quite a bit. Thanks for taking this question. That's a really good question, because I long felt that music evolves in response to technological inventions. If you listen to the very famous

Goldberg variation by Bach, which originally we assume were put on the harpsichord. And then you hear the same piece on the piano. It's just a different universe all together. And, you know, the piano kind of reached its ideal evolutionary point sometime in the

19th century, but before the piano was invented Beethoven would never have written

the kind of music he did. Likewise, look at the electric guitar with that brought about the whole genre of rock. So that's one way of answering your question. But also music responds to societal changes. You know, Renaissance music, of course, that was all done within the court or within the church. And today we have recordings and radio and amplified music. You can have a concert with like audience of 30,000 people whereas in the time of Biden it might have been at the most 50 or 60.

So music evolves just like life does. And do you think that there have been times of more and more complexity and then the reaction to it that music becomes again simple because people are

I do. You know, we see this in literature where you get something like Henry James,

but there's very large sentences and then you follow that with Ernest Hemingway and likewise the Baroque period and things were very, very ornate and complex. And then Mozart. Yeah, you find you know, I just want to tune with a nice accompaniment. Yeah.

“And I think that happened in the 20th century classical music because you had Schrinberg and”

Bayburn's very complex music. And then turn the page and it's Steve Reich. Yeah. So there you are. Thank you so much for the question. I was asked once I was on a talk radio show and I said I was playing the John Adams century roles. It's like really the former president and a big crowd at a baseball

game and this woman came looking at me and finally she came up and she said, excuse me,

but are you John Cage? Well, your son's name Sam. But he's right. Yes. So he's got it worse than you did because he's got the beer issue. He does. Yeah. But he's managed to deal with that. And he's a wonderful composer as well. That's right. Yes. And your whole family is involved in music. Not your wife, I think. Well, actually my wife Debbie does have a master's degree in composition from UCSD. I take it all back. Yeah. Sorry. Right. But she's devoted her life to photography,

particularly landscape photography and our daughter Emily started out as a violinist. That I knew. Yeah.

“But she's now really quite a wonderful painter. So the only thing we're missing in our family is,”

you know, we're somebody in finance to pay for it. Yeah. What you really need actually is a dentist.

I think we need a really gifted stock broker. Okay. Well, there's nothing I can arrange for you. I'm sorry. I feel like the way your music works, at least from the point of view of the performer, it's a bit like a mosaic. The things fit together in small increments. I certainly found that with century roles that were constantly putting it together in little pieces and it makes a big picture. Do you do puzzles? I don't. I'm just not smart enough. My hate-year-old granddaughter. You know,

when I'm driving her to her lessons, she's in the backseat doing a world. Some people just have that. I know that Leonard Bernstein loved to do puzzles and see Steven Sahnheim. Yes. Intellectually, feeble. I was just curious because it strikes me that a lot of the time, at least for me, putting a piece together, involved puzzles. You know, this interesting, I try not to think too much in depths about how I compose for fear, but I might as John K. says this wonderful thing about

psychiatry. He stopped doing it because he might get rid of his devil's, but he might also offend his

“angels. But I think that I like in my creative process more to Magellan. Just leaving knowing that”

there's something out there, but not knowing exactly what it is or where it is. What did he write? He didn't write any piano controllers didn't know. I am using what's called an analogy. Oh, it's an analogy. I'm sorry. Excuse me. This was the composer, right? Or was this the explorer? I'm talking about the explorer. Yes. It's what's known as a figure of speech. I wonder. He wouldn't have known the original John Adams would he? He was long before that.

No, yeah. So you don't really analyze that aspect of things. No, I remember one of my teachers when I was in college was a very gifted composer, David Dill, tried to cheat. And this is back in the late '60s at the time when composers were like Milton Babitt and who was, everything was system system systems and you didn't make a decision of about it falling. Yes. And David said, you know, somebody like Brahms had all this gift. He had

intuition, he had technique and he could just let it flow. He didn't have to depend on systems or intellectually analyze everything and that kind of fits me. You know, each composer is different. Some composers are very, very methodical and others are jazz musicians. What do you read for fun?

to read when I was studying German. I was reading or just trying to read Thomas Mon. Wow. And lately, I've been reading almost through the Neapolitan quartet by Elena Frante. And that's been up in Italian in Italian. Oh, fabulous. Let's take a whole year to do that. I think I saw a German edition once of the Thomas Mon book, Dr. Faustus. You can't read that. Well, what impressed

me was that I think the first word of it is all the whole line. Yes, it's just one word.

Yes, one of those is they seem to put all their verbs and subject things all in one word.

“That's right. Which is fantastic. You have to unpack it. Our good friend Rhineberg, the”

Leo, wonderful Dutch conductor, had great command of German. He said, I picked up Dr. Faustus and I, no, I cannot read this in German. Well, I tried reading it in English. That's hard enough. This is classical music, happy hour. I'm Maniacs. We'll return in just a moment. On big lives, we take a single cultural icon. People like Jane Fonda, George Michael, little Richard.

And we pull apart the story behind the image. And we do this by digging through the BBC's

vast archives. Discovering forgotten interviews that changed exactly how we see these giants of our culture. We're here for the messy, the brilliant, the human version of our heroes. I'm a mental geochie and chai right. And this is Big Lives. Listen to Big Lives wherever you get your podcasts. And this is classical music, happy hour. Let's return to our conversation with John Adams. What's your favorite drink after a long day of composing or conducting? Well, I live in

“Northern California where I think the IPA rage began and I can't end the day without an IPA. So you”

green beer it. Indeed. And of course half of the fun of these beers is their names. Like, you know, dogs, breath and, you know, real regret this. This is all used to me. Wow. Yeah. You'll see one of my favorites is a beer called Nuclear Sandwich. Oh, yeah. So, John. What's the first album that you bought with your own money? I suspect it was the Mozart clarinet concerto because I did play the clarinet. But I also remember

buying Sebelius symphony. Those are back in the days when there was a label called Angel Records. And it covers all look the same. I do also remember buying the score to Copeland's Appalachian Spring. Oh, it's with the money that I earned from my paper. Which composers would you like to have

to dinner? From now or from way back? Well, needless to say Stravinsky was always interesting.

Although a lot of what we learned about it has been filtered through Robert Kraft. But, you know, it was a very intellectually curious guy. What about for fun? For fun. Not Debussy. I can go through all my favorite clothes and I wouldn't want to have dinner with any of them.

“I think not Mozart. I think if it were Mauler, the food would be very, very Spartan.”

Mozart would be a lot of fun. Probably Hayden, too. I think those guys would be good dinner guests. So, this is a question from a listener who wants to know about minor keys. Yes. This is Farberath. I'm not still. And my question is, what composers do you think use the minor keys most effectively? I love the music, the depth, the bit of mystery, and perhaps the darker emotions that come from those and wondering what your experience of it is. Thank you. We have in Western music major and minor keys.

You know, we think of the major keys, the happy one, and the minor key is the melancholy one. Every good song, every good piece of music has both. If you had nothing but major keys, it wouldn't be very interesting. But, I think that there is a great repertoire of music that is essentially on the dark side of human experience and those are the ones that are in the minor keys. One of the interesting questions that a friend of mine Leonard Slat can use to ask is just to go,

what pieces begin in major and end in minor? And there are not many. In fact, there are not so many pieces in minor keys that end in minor either. Well, this is true. A lot of them end in major.

first of all, Brahms. I love Brahms very deeply, but you couldn't call him a happy,

“go lucky composer. I agree, and when Moller really wanted to lay it on, like the fifth symphony.”

Yes, so that's basically it. Thanks for the question. When you pick a subject for an opera, does the subject come first the text, what was the first

thing or was the music the first thing? No, the music was never the first thing. Each opera is a

different story. In the case of Nixon and China was suggested by my longtime collaborator, Peter Sellers, who also suggested the death of Klinghafer, Dr. Tomick, which is about Robert Oppenheimer and the creation of the atomic bomb and predates the film by 20 years or so. That was suggested by Pamela Rosenberg,

“who was General Director of the San Francisco Opera, she had an idea of it being an American”

Faust story. There was some deal that devolved it off in Homer. In the case of Anthony and Cleopatra, that's an interesting story because the previous opera was about the California Gold Rush, girls of the Golden West, and one of the things we discovered in research was a popular form of entertainment in California during the 1850s was reciting Shakespeare. So in that little bread over there were a couple of passages from McBeth and I just loved setting Shakespeare. So when I

got a request from the San Francisco Opera to compose another opera, I suggested Anthony Cleopatra,

which was a play that has always been a great deal to me. You brought some music for us to listen to,

and I'd love to know what you think about at this handle area, which I have just heard and flipped over. Well, you know, if we've been doing this conversation a year ago, I never would have chosen a piece by Handle, but I wrote a article for the New York Times book review, which is a review of a new book called "Every Valley" by Charles King, which is a wonderful book not only about the creation of the Messiah, but also of Handle and of London during the first couple of decades of 18th century.

And part of the reason I chose the assignment was that I didn't know anything about Handle.

So I took a deep dive into his music, and I just was absolutely floored by how beautiful it was. And I'm not surprised that many times, if you ask a singer, who their favorite composer is, they'll say Handle, even before Druid or Mozart. Wow. The story was called, too, then, "Chail, and Minis Roy, let's don't." Yeah, I looked at it. I looked it out, and I couldn't believe the title of it. Right. And it comes from a very early tutorial. The Handle was like 22 years old.

He obviously was born in Germany, but he was living in Rome at the time. And he was in the company of Cardinals who adored him. And this tutorial, which has a Jalian title, is Triomphe for the tempo of the Dysingano, which means the triumph of time and disillusionment, it's an allegorical text

“written by the Cardinal who I think had a crush on Handle. And among the characters, I'd deceit”

and time and pleasure and beauty. So I chose this area because it's so sublime, beautiful, and it also speaks to me. Because I need to be reminded when I'm setting a text about the shape of a melody, that it rises, and then it has to come down.

There are just these moments of dissonance, which create a kind of tension and a conversation

“between the voice and the accompaniment.”

And this particular area is quite far-ranging. It is. There are lots of sort of leaps for the piano. And if you're a really good vocal composer, you save those leaps. You know where to put them. You just don't toss them anywhere. This particular area is incredible.

I always do think of you as an opera composer. Does any verbal stuff

transmit itself to the non-verbal music? No, I don't think so. I mean, when I've set texts, first of all, I need really great words to set. And one of the things that troubles me about a lot of contemporary American opera is that the composers are just not very discriminating about their texts and a lot of liberty. If they're very per se, they get to the message over, but there's such great music within a great text. You know, and I've set John Dunn and Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman,

and then my liberalist for Nixon and China and the death of Klinghofer Alice Goodman was a great poet.

“And I think those are among the best liberty of our time. So when I'm setting the text,”

I'm hearing in my head the rhythm, the rhythm of the words. And it's very much an American rhythm.

I mean, I always just feel slightly uncomfortable listening to Benjamin Britain's vocal

settings. You know, they work within the context of his culture, but I grew up listening to American popular music. Yeah, maybe it's the name Benjamin Britain. Maybe there were Benjamin. No, I don't know Benjamin New Jersey. Yes, well, just asking with my name. It's got to be American. I guess you obviously want people to respond to your music and to listen to it as much as possible and to enjoy it in one way or another. I would think the most difficult thing in the world for for any

art form is to do something that is at the same time immediately engaging and yet interesting enough to come back to. Do you think about that aspect of things? I do. And the thing is that I come from a generation when I was in school, those were really the hardcore bad old days when composers had

repetitions for being indifferent to their audience, even arrogant. And I'd always struck me

this kind of ridiculous because art and particularly music, above and beyond all music is really about communicating feeling. And I care deeply about communicating what I feel to my audiences.

“I think what's terribly difficult for an audience sometimes is to engage with a piece enough”

that you say this was interesting enough for me to get to know it better or even for a performer to practice something a lot and find it interesting to play over and over and over. Is that something that doesn't enter your mind or should it at all? Of course it enters my mind. It's funny I was having a conversation with a wonderful pianist or a little shock. And she used the term "living composer." I thought, well that's a really strange category. We don't talk about

"living basketball player" or "living mayor." But I think that what that term comes from is the fact that people just really associate great music but the past. Well, a lot of us, a lot of the people that play that music have especially in my youth. The idea of playing a piece by someone alive was a real rarity. You know, it's always interesting. You go to Mama here in New York.

You have to wait in line to get into the museum. People can't get enough of contemporary art.

you know, there's always a danger that people feel intimidated. But I think if they hear my music,

“hopefully they want to hear it a second time. Well, I do think you've managed to find that road”

where you hear a piece for the first time. And you say, either I love this or I'm intrigued by it. And then you come back to it. Well, and I said to the young composer and good friend of my team of wanderers, I said, you know, there aren't enough earworms being written today. Write some earworms. What are earworms? Tell me, earworm is just a melody you get stuck in your head. Oh, I see. I see. It's so good you can't stop. I see. Here in the sea.

And here's a question about tempo markings. My name is Lewis from pale EPA. My question is about composers' notations. So, for instance, a leg Roman on Troppo says who the composer isn't around. Is it the conductor? Is it a manual? Is it some machine metric? What determines what is a leg row and whether it's not on Troppo? What you're asking is the story of my life as a composer because I really have a very specific notions of tempo in my piece. And if somebody plays a piece of

mind to slow or too fast, I get really freaked out. And there were composers of care. You know, we all know that story of Beethoven, who was the first composer to use metronome markings because the metronome was invented during his lifetime. The metronome being the gadget that you said it to a certain beats per minute. And it clicks and it tells you how fast it should be. Right. Yeah. And you know, there were composers who just absolutely distained the idea of a metronome

WC never would use it. And Brahms, as you mentioned, whereas a commosal like Stravinsky or Bartok were

“like me very specific. Yeah. What they wanted. So I think it's really in part the composers”

wishes, but some music invites what we call interpretation. And you know, it makes life interesting. If you listen to Leonard Bernstein, especially towards the end of his life, he really like slow tempo. Yeah. And if you listen to Tuscany, he always went to the other end. Everything was brisk and type and fast. I once heard Daniel Baronboy talk about what is a tempo. And he said, you know, tempo is a little bit like a suitcase when you're packing for a trip. If you're someone that's

very involved with bringing out specific details and you want things heard a certain way, that's like packing a suitcase for a two week trip. And then other times, you know, when you want things to flow, that's like packing for a weekend. So the suitcase is what fits the particular

music that you want to make. I thought it was a nice image. And obviously one of the most important

differences between performances is how fast or slow it goes. Of course. I mean, that's the interesting thing. It changes according to the hall you're playing in, according to the instrument you're playing. If the piano has a very heavy action, maybe you can't play fast enough

“for what's demanded you have to slow down. It's a great, great question. And something we deal with”

all the time. We just heard a question about tempo. And we have a little game that we'd like to play. These are performance directions in a score and you're supposed to answer which ones are real and which ones are fake. So here's the first one. Eric Sati, French composer, is often known for his unusual humorous score markings. Out of these four options, which is the real Sati performance direction. A, arm yourself with clairvoyance. B, as if wild animals were knowing on your liver.

C, radiantly joyful, despite the itching. And D, as if in tune. I would say probably B, the wild animals knowing on your liver. Well, I'm sorry to tell you it's actually eight. Arm yourself with clairvoyance. And it's from a piece called Gnossien. Okay, by Sati. Question two. Mozart might not be known for wacky score markings, but he occasionally showed

handwritten scores? For you, Mr. As. Are you finished yet? A sheep could drill like that or all of

the above. Knowing Mozart is probably all of the above. It's all of the above. That's correct.

“That's the correct answer. It's all of the above. That's why we would like to have dinner with”

Mozart. Exactly.

Some score markings are more complicated than others. But which of these directions is actually

found in a score for Tim Vinnie and Orchestra? A, fill the Tim Vinnie with hot water and during the

“third movement, steep, strong builders T, drink during the fourth movement. Be, strike with the”

utmost force on the paper membrane of the Tim Vinnie in the process, disappearing down to the waste in the body of the instrument. Freeze. See, step onto the Tim Vinnie, proceed the tap dance

for the entirety of the second movement. D, ignore the marking tacit, which means quiet. Play

something that will horrify the conductor. You know, having gone through, I've done a lot of a long guard concerts. I probably did all of those pieces. However, the second one sounds to me like it's been translated from a German. So I'm going to go with that one. That's absolutely correct. That was, it was translated from the German and it's from Maurizio Cagos, a concertstook for Tim Vinnie,

“Orchestra. I got a strum. We have to put this complete conversation in the library of Congress, okay?”

I hope I didn't annoy you too much and it was wonderful to hear you pontificate on everything. John Adams, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. It's been terrific to be here. I'm Maniacs and this is Classical Music Happy Hour. Classical Music Happy Hour is supported in part by the Robert and Mercedes I. Colts Foundation and by Lyndon Elson. Our production team includes Lauren Percel-Joyner, Eileen Delahante, Laura Boyman, Elizabeth Nunnomaker, David Norville,

Christine Herskowitz, and Edier. Our engineering team includes George Wellington, Irene Trudell, and Chase Cool Park. Classical Music Happy Hour is produced by WQXR in partnership with Carnegie Hill.