John Adams Mines Beethoven's Mind

Transcript

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

John Adams comes from a school of composers who broke decidedly with the past. In the '70s and early '80s, he helped develop and expand on the style of music known as minimalism.

(SOUNDBITE OF JOHN ADAMS SONG)

MONTAGNE: Now his new album connects with a much older sound by this composer...

(SOUNDBITE OF LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN SONG)

MONTAGNE: Beethoven. And John Adams says all composers have obsessions.

JOHN ADAMS: We have music that we love so much that we kind of want to get under the skin of that composer. For me, taking, you know, not so much melodies but just little harmonic fragments, like fractals, from Beethoven and putting them through the black box of my own musical personality was a real stimulation to my invention.

(SOUNDBITE OF JOHNS ADAMS SONG)

MONTAGNE: This album consists of two works, both distinctly contemporary, inspired by Adams' love of Beethoven. He sat down with us to talk through some of his ideas on the piece "Absolute Jest" and an earlier piece, "Grand Pianola Music."

ADAMS: The earlier one dates from 1983, when I was a young composer living in the Haight-Ashbury and really very influenced by this minimalist school of music, which really focuses on repetitive rhythm and very reduced musical materials. You know, Beethoven qualifies in that sense. He could make so much out of very little material. I'm sure most listeners are familiar with the "Fifth Symphony" and how much of that structure is based on just a ba-ba-ba-ba (ph).

(SOUNDBITE OF LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN SONG, "SYMPHONY NO. 5")

MONTAGNE: Would it have been - in the early '80s and in the late '70s - unfashionable to be evoking Beethoven, to be even loving Beethoven?

ADAMS: Back in 1983, new music, contemporary music, was a pretty dour affair. Composers were still arguing over tonality or dissonance. So to write a piece that referenced Beethoven and did it in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek manner was considered a bit of a provocation. And in fact, when the piece was played by the New York Philharmonic, there were boos coming from the audience, which was something that didn't happen very often in those days.

MONTAGNE: Well, let's hear from both of these pieces. First, though, let's hear from Beethoven's "Piano Concerto No. 5."

(SOUNDBITE OF LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN SONG, "PIANO CONCERTO NO. 5")

MONTAGNE: And let's listen to something similar from your "Grand Pianola."

(SOUNDBITE OF JOHN ADAMS SONG, "GRAND PIANOLA MUSIC")

MONTAGNE: I mean, I wouldn't call you a magpie, but it's there, right?

ADAMS: In listening to the two of them together, which I have to say I've never done in all this time, what the two pieces do share is just that joy in tonality. You know, these big, rippling arpeggios that just kind of vibrate on a single key.

(SOUNDBITE OF JOHN ADAMS SONG, "GRAND PIANOLA MUSIC")

ADAMS: I can talk about a passage that was really controversial where there's the actual tune (humming). That was really the moment that got the sort of hard-core new music composers upset because they really did think it was a provocation to their very serious endeavors.

(SOUNDBITE OF JOHN ADAMS SONG, "GRAND PIANOLA MUSIC")

MONTAGNE: The new music composers, rather than the archlovers of Beethoven.

ADAMS: Most of the objections came from my fellow composers who felt that anything that was tonal was retroactive and nostalgic, and it wasn't looking forward to the brave new world of dissonant music.

(SOUNDBITE OF JOHN ADAMS SONG, "GRAND PIANOLA MUSIC")

MONTAGNE: Let's talk, then, about the most recent piece, "Absolute Jest," that premiered about 30 years after "Grand Pianola." And here there's an echo, in a sense, of some of what you were doing. What inspired you to reach back?

ADAMS: Well, I heard a performance of the wonderful ballet by Stravinsky called "Pulcinella." And in "Pulcinella," Stravinsky's manager, Diaghilev, suggested that he take very old baroque music and put it through the machine of Stravinsky's musical personality. And I was inspired by that idea. So I took very, very small melodic fragments from some of my favorite Beethoven.

MONTAGNE: What we're going to hear right now is just a brief moment, but it's Beethoven's ninth.

(SOUNDBITE OF LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN SONG, "SYMPHONY NO. 9")

MONTAGNE: Let's hear now something very similar coming through in "Absolute Jest."

(SOUNDBITE OF JOHN ADAMS SONG, "ABSOLUTE JEST")

MONTAGNE: It's a little like sampling.

ADAMS: Yeah, I think that you could make a case that my use of Beethoven here is a form of sampling, although I do many different things with it. I transpose the music. I turn it upside down. I extended things. I telescope them. I mix them together.

(SOUNDBITE OF JOHN ADAMS SONG, "ABSOLUTE JEST")

ADAMS: I don't think you can appreciate my music without being fundamentally musically literate. I'm writing music for people who do know Beethoven and do know Mahler and do know Stravinsky in the same way that most contemporary novelists or poets assume some form of literacy from their reader. And you know, we live in a culture where popular culture is so prestigious and so pervasive that it's kind of hard to shout through the storm. But my goal, really, is to create something that is appreciable now, but 100 or 200 or three years from now will be even more appreciated as a document of what is was like to be alive during this time.

MONTAGNE: John Adams, it's been a pleasure.

ADAMS: Thanks, me too.

(SOUNDBITE OF JOHN ADAMS SONG, "ABSOLUTE JEST")

MONTAGNE: Composer John Adams discussing his works "Absolute Jest" and "Grand Pianola Music." Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.