Composer captures the thrill of creation

By David Rollow, Globe Correspondent  |  November 14, 2008

The English art historian Alan Bowness, writing about the conditions for artistic success, gave the number one criterion in one word: "Relocate." In 1972, John Adams, native New Englander and student of modernists at Harvard, wanted a change. He went west in a crumbling VW with his new wife to join the electronic-music avant-garde in San Francisco. He found a janitorial job ("Assistant Building Manager") and flung himself into the wide-open art and music scene he found in the Bay Area. Relocate - yes, and then, when you do, jump in with both feet. He seems to have had a sense of fun, but his timing was perfect too.

No book I know of better captures the thrill of a moment of artistic freedom and innovation. The times were exciting, and Adams is a very entertaining writer. He approached becoming a composer as an adventure. The young musicians Adams worked with in San Francisco were less skilled than their Juilliard and Curtis counterparts, but they were ready to try anything new. The openness the West Coast offered was nowhere to be found in any Ivy League school. After a romance with music as noise, Adams found minimalism, but he was never really a minimalist, for its slow, hypnotic repetitiveness left him dissatisfied. He took on board the densely repetitive ostinatos of minimalism, but because he'd had enough of boring electronic compositions that intentionally went nowhere, eventually he brought back some of the dynamism and sudden change that minimalists had rejected. Essentially Adams wanted music that had the expressive and emotional range of the past while remaining deeply modern. Above all he wanted a musical language, or voice, that was his alone.

The way he tells it, Adams never made a calculating move. His story is not all successes. He encounters creative blocks. Some compositions receive thunderous ovations, but others fail with audiences. Some collaborations go badly; the story of his work on a Broadway-type show with the poet June Jordan is a tragedy of mismatched temperaments. Even the commissioned symphonic piece he wrote as a 9/11 memorial, "On the Transmigration of Souls," left him with ambivalent feelings. But the successes outweigh the flops, and the arc of the story is upward. He was fortunate in forming an association with Edo de Waart soon after that conductor arrived in San Francisco to take over the symphony from Seiji Ozawa, for it led to his receiving his first major orchestral commission, which - in reality - he was qualified to undertake because of his solid academic training at Harvard. If all he had known about at that point was resistors and condensers, he wouldn't have been able to find his way around an orchestral score. But the transformative event in his artistic life was meeting Peter Sellars, the "boy genius" theater director with whom he created "Nixon in China" and other operas.

Adams writes repeatedly of trying to find his own voice: "My own personal narrative was about extricating myself from what I felt to be the cold, dead hand of the academic avant-garde, from the theory-bound orthodoxy that held sway in the sixties, and from the fealty paid to European serialism and its offshoots." To fully achieve it, he had to find and develop his own musical language and voice, which turned out to be tonal. He describes the conductor-composer Esa-Pekka Salonen at one point as a "recovering Modernist," and the description applies as well to himself.

Although it is entirely about music, this is a book that any aspiring artist, in any medium, should read as a kind of how-to guide to achieving artistic success without losing integrity, something that seems to many young artists today nearly impossible. In fact, it is a book for anyone who wants to create something - including a self.

David Rollow is a writer and a painter who lives in Boston. He often writes about visual art.