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Chamber Symphony (1992)
| composer |
John Adams (b. 1947) |
| performers |
Fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center:
Whitney Hanes, flute
Lamija Talam, oboe
Charisse Graves, clarinet
Louis DeMartino, bass clarinet
Laurel Sharp, bassoon
Ben Hoadley, contrabassoon
Gabrielle Finck, horn
Andrew Sorg, trumpet
James Campbell, trombone
Daniel Bauch, percussion
Aaron Wunsch, piano
Shin-Young Kwon, violin
Glenda Goodman, viola
Jie Jin, cello
David Campbell, bass
Michael Morgan, conductor |
| publisher |
Boosey & Hawkes (BMI)http://www.boosey.com/pages/cr
|
| recording |
Live concert performance at Tanglewood Music Center, Lenox, Massachusetts, July 21, 2002 |
| duration |
23:10 |
John Adams:
"The Chamber Symphony, written between September and December of 1992, was commissioned by the Gerbode Foundation of San Francisco for the San Francisco Contemporary Chamber Players. [...] Written for 15 instruments and lasting 22 minutes, the Chamber Symphony bears a suspicious resemblance to its eponymous predecessor, the opus 9 of Arnold Schoenberg. The choice of instruments is roughly the same as Schoenberg's, although mine includes parts for synthesizer, percussion (a trap set), trumpet, and trombone. However, whereas the Schoenberg symphony is in one uninterrupted structure, mine is broken into three discrete movements, 'Mongrel Airs', 'Aria with Walking Bass', and 'Roadrunner'. The titles give a hint of the general ambience of the music.
"I originally set out to write a children's piece, and my intentions were to sample the voices of children and work them into a fabric of acoustic and electronic instruments. But before I began that project I had another one of those strange interludes that often lead to a new piece. This one involved a brief moment of what Melville called 'the shock of recognition': I was sitting in my studio, studying the score to Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony (1906), and as I was doing so I became aware that my seven-year-old son Sam was in the adjacent room watching cartoons (good cartoons, old ones from the '50's). The hyperactive, insistently aggressive and acrobatic scores for the cartoons mixed in my head with the Schoenberg music, itself hyperactive, acrobatic and not a little aggressive, and I realized suddenly how much these two traditions had in common.
"For a long time my music has been conceived for large forces and has involved broad brushstrokes on big canvasses. These works have been either symphonic or operatic, and even the ones for smaller forces like Phrygian Gates (1977), Shaker Loops (1978), or Grand Pianola Music (1982) have essentially been studies in the acoustical power of massed sonorities. Chamber music, with its inherently polyphonic and democratic sharing of roles, was always difficult for me to compose. But the Schoenberg symphony provided a key to unlock that door, and it did so by suggesting a format in which the weight and mass of a symphonic work could be married to the transparency and mobility of a chamber work. The tradition of American cartoon music -- and I freely acknowledge that I am only one of a host of people scrambling to jump on that particular bandwagon -- also suggested a further model for a music that was at once flamboyantly virtuosic and polyphonic. There were several other models from earlier in the century, most of which I come to know as a performer, which also served as suggestive: Milhaud's La Creation du Monde (1923), Stravinsky's Octet (1922-1923) and L'Histoire du Soldat (1918), and Hindemith's marvelous Kleine Kammermusik (1923), a little known masterpiece for woodwind quintet that predates [the cartoon] Ren and Stimpy by nearly sixty years.
"Despite all the good humor, my Chamber Symphony turned out to be shockingly difficult to play. Unlike Phrygian Gates or Pianola, with their fundamentally diatonic palettes, this new piece, in what I suppose could be termed my post-Klinghoffer [Adams' opera from 1991] language, is linear and chromatic. Instruments are asked to negotiate unreasonably difficult passages and alarmingly fast tempi, often to the inexorable click of the trap set. But therein, I suppose, lies the perverse charm of the piece. ('Discipliner et Punire' was the original title of the first movement, before I decided on 'Mongrel Airs' to honor a British critic who complained that my music lacked breeding.)
"The Chamber Symphony is dedicated to Sam."
Composer and conductor John Adams (b. 1947) is one of the most frequently performed and recorded composers living today. Although commonly placed in the compositional style known as minimalism, his music embraces a wide stylistic and thematic range, finding inspiration in American and European music and culture. Notable threads in his work include the modal techniques found in the recent works Violin Concerto (1993) and Slonimsky's Earbox (1996), well-known operatic settings of recent events Nixon in China (1985-1987) and The Death of Klinghoffer (1989-1991), and, taking a cue from Ives, Copland, and Nancarrow, explorations of the American vernacular in Grand Pianola Music (1982) and Century Rolls (1996). Adams has said, "Whenever serious art loses track of its roots in the vernacular, then it begins to atrophy."
Adams studied the clarinet as a child growing up in Worcester, Massachusetts. He began composing early on, taking theory and composition lessons from the age of ten. His father's involvement in a community orchestra allowed the young Adams to gain performing and conducting experience, as well as to hear his work performed for the first time. Adams went on to study composition at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts with Leon Kirchner, Earl Kim, Roger Sessions, Harold Shapero, and David Del Tredici. After graduating in 1971, he moved to California, where he taught and conducted at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music for ten years and was active in the San Francisco music scene. He became new music advisor to the San Francisco Symphony in 1978, the beginning of long-standing relationship with the orchestra which has included a number of significant commissions as well as his appointment as composer-in-residence from 1982 to 1985.
Since the mid-1980's, Adams has collaborated with a number of artists including the poets Alice Goodman and June Jordan, director Peter Sellars, and choreographer Mark Morris. The resulting dramatic works have been performed extensively in the US and Europe. In addition, Adams' instrumental music has garnered him such honors as the Royal Philharmonic Award and Grawemeyer Award. One of his most recent compositions, On the Transmigration of Souls, was written in response to the events of September 11, 2001 and premiered by the New York Philharmonic in September 2002.
Adams remains active as a conductor, regularly leading orchestras in the US, Canada, and Europe. He will succeed Pierre Boulez as composer-in-residence of New York's Carnegie Hall in 2003. His music can be found on many labels, principally Nonesuch Records, which has released a ten-CD retrospective entitled The John Adams Earbox.
related websites
http://www.earbox.com
Fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center are students of the Boston Symphony's summer institute for young professional musicians based in Lenox, Massachusetts. Founded in 1940 as the Berkshire Music Center under the leadership of conductor Serge Koussevitzky, the center invites advanced musicians of at least 18 years of age to participate in an eight-week session of intensive work in orchestral and chamber music, coached by Tanglewood faculty, members of the Boston Symphony, and visiting artists. Students perform in chamber recitals throughout the summer as well as in the weeklong Festival of Contemporary Music. Michael Morgan was a member of the Tanglewood conducting faculty for the 2002 season, and currently serves as music director of Oakland East Bay Symphony.
related websites
http://www.tanglewood.org
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