He spent two years composing it, pairing the big-band music he remembered from his grandfather's dance hall (to suggest the idea of Richard Nixon's imagined Middle America) with music that sounded like bad imitations of scores of Russian and French ballets. Adams followed that piece with "Nixon in China," which premiered in Houston and at first drew mixed reviews with its verse libretto, minimalist score and postmodern choreography. Adams recently wrote that "the charming old stories of Mozart scribbling out the overture to 'Marriage of Figaro' an hour before the premiere and dropping ink-wet parts onto the players' stands may or may not be true, but they for sure are the worst possible model for any composer who hopes to get a decent performance of his or her own music." Even so, he went on to describe, in harrowing detail, how he chained himself to his desk nearly around the clock as the first rehearsal for "Harmonielehre" was just days away, as he was running out of time. On his blog, Hell Mouth (named after some graffiti on the wall of a building that his wife photographed), Mr. Timothy Archibald for The Wall Street Journal Score sketches of 'Absolute Jest,' commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony As he explained, "I don't like to work after dinner and would do so only under the most extreme emergency." each morning, breaking for lunch, working through the late afternoon. He climbs the stairs to his light-filled second-floor home office by 9 a.m. Adams lives in a pink stucco home in north Berkeley, Calif., with his wife, photographer Deborah O'Grady, and begins each morning by taking his German shorthaired pointer, Eloise, out for at least an hour-long walk in Tilden Park. ![]() He said that helps him experience the music viscerally in a way that reading it from the heavy 24-staff Judy Green manuscript paper he uses for his final drafts cannot.Ī puckish, Harvard-educated New Englander who moved to California in his 20s, Mr. He writes the final version of his scores by hand, using the Turquoise brand of 5B drafting pencils he's used for the past two decades, which he joked "makes me a dinosaur." But he'll also sometimes compose on his Mac G5 computer or even by plunking out melodies on the small Yamaha upright piano in his studio-which he said he doesn't play well.Īs well as composing he sometimes conducts his own music. Adams spends long stretches in relative solitude, declining public engagements, when he is composing.
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