#JOHN ADAMS COMPOSER FREE#

#JOHN ADAMS COMPOSER FREE#

Rather than set up small engines of motivic materials and let them run free in a kind of random play of counterpoint, I used the fabric of continually repeating cells to forge large architectonic shapes, creating a web of activity that, even within the course of a single movement, was more detailed, more varied, and knew both light and dark, serenity and turbulence. Comparing Shaker Loops to minimalist composer Terry Riley’s piece In C, Adams says, Adams was born ten years after Steve Reich and Philip Glass, and his writing is more developmental and directionalized, containing climaxes and other elements of Romanticism. While Adams employs minimalist techniques, such as repeating patterns, he is not a strict follower of the movement. The music of John Adams is usually categorized as minimalist or post-minimalist although in interview he has categorised himself as a ‘post-style’ composer. The work’s creators and others have disputed these criticisms. The opera has drawn controversy, including allegations by some (including Klinghoffer’s two daughters) that the opera is antisemitic and glorifies terrorism. The Death of Klinghoffer is an opera for which he wrote the music, based on the hijacking of the passenger liner Achille Lauro by the Palestine Liberation Front in 1985, and the hijackers’ murder of wheelchair-bound 69-year-old Jewish-American passenger Leon Klinghoffer. His operas include Nixon in China (1987), which recounts Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China, and Doctor Atomic (2005), which covers Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project, and the building of the first atomic bomb. His works include Short Ride in a Fast Machine (1986), On the Transmigration of Souls (2002), a choral piece commemorating the victims of the Septemattacks (for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003), and Shaker Loops (1978), a minimalist four-movement work for strings.

John Coolidge Adams (born February 15, 1947) is an American composer with strong roots in minimalism.

John adams composer