BMOP/sound Releases John Adams Album

courtesy of AMT PR

A little over two months after its last release of early compositions by Elliott Carter, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) has released a new album on its BMOP/sound label surveying roughly three decades of compositions by John Adams. As of this writing, Amazon.com is only offering this new recording through MP3 download; and the fact that the download does not include a PDF of the accompanying booklet is downright reprehensible, since that booklet includes useful comments by the composer. Fortunately, BMOP/sound has created its own Web site for selling CDs; and the new Adams release has its own Web page.

The album is framed by the two compositions that Adams has called chamber symphonies, both of which are three-movement works. The earlier of these, entitled simply “Chamber Symphony,” was composed in 1992; and “Son of Chamber Symphony” was composed in 2007. Between these two pieces, the BMOP ensemble, conducted by Gil Rose, plays one of Adams’ earliest pieces, “Common Tones in Simple Time.” Composed in 1979, this was his first orchestral work.

The first sentence of Adams’ booklet essay is, “What is a ‘chamber symphony,’ anyway?” This serves as a point of departure for discussing the two pieces to which Arnold Schoenberg attached this title, his Opus 9, composed in 1906, and his Opus 38, begin in 1906 but not completed until 1939, over three decades later. During those intervening years, Schoenberg focused on rejecting the need for music having a tonal focus, leading ultimately to what is now called his “twelve-tone technique.” Nevertheless, Opus 38 is unabashedly tonal (in the key of E-flat minor), complementing Opus 9, which was composed in the key of E major.

I was glad to see Schoenberg acknowledged in Adams’ essay. I have been more than a little amused by how Schoenberg hovers over some of the titles of Adams’ compositions. That begins with the 1985 “Harmonielehre,” which seems to have been deliberately appropriated from the title of the music theory textbook that Schoenberg wrote in 1911 (right around the time that his own music was abandoning the need for tonality). Then, about five years after he had completed “Son of Chamber Symphony,” Adams composed “Absolute Jest,” which was scored for string quartet and orchestra, where much of the jesting involves playing fast and loose with the late string quartets of Ludwig van Beethoven.

I was at the press conference in Davies Symphony Hall that preceded the first performance of this piece. On the way out I found myself next to Adams. I said, “So you wrote ‘Harmonielehre,’ followed by your chamber symphony. Is this your ‘reply’ to Schoenberg’s concerto for string quartet and orchestra?” Adams replied with a dismissive grunt! In retrospect I can sympathize with him. To paraphrase James Joyce unabashedly, I find myself wondering whether Adams views Schoenberg as “a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” The fact is that the gulf between Adams and Schoenberg is refreshingly distant, and Adams finds just the right rhetoric to establish that distance in his booklet essay.

Indeed, I rather like now having the opportunity for (almost) side-by-side listening to Adams’ two chamber symphonies, both of which, in his words, “share a highly animated, in-your-face kind of cheeky buoyancy.” My only disappointment was that the second chamber symphony lacked the arch movement titles found in the first. Since Adams writes about the influence of “American cartoon music,” I am pretty sure that the “Roadrunner” title of the final movement of “Chamber Symphony” owes more to the Warner Brothers cartoon character than it does to the photograph on the cover of the BMOP/sound album!

Adams was teaching classes at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) when he wrote “Common Tones in Simple Time” in 1979. He was also directing the school’s New Music Ensemble and was keenly aware that “new music” was advancing beyond the “mathematical abstractions” of post-Schoenberg serial techniques. His own adventurous scope in composition was probably influenced, even if only partially, by the activities at the San Francisco Tape Music Center (which actually began in the attic of the SFCM building). In that context, I was somewhat bemused to learn that “Common Tones in Simple Time” was dedicated to Leon Kirchner; but I have to keep reminding myself that Kirchner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning third string quartet, which was first performed in January of 1967, was scored for string quartet and pre-recorded tape. Whether “Common Tones in Simple Time” reflects on technological influences is left as an exercise for the listener!