BERKELEY — John Adams belongs to that elite handful of living composers whose names at least ring a bell with the hoi polloi. Operas such as "Nixon in China" and works like his early "Shaker Loops" and his Violin Concerto have made him one of the most important American composers today.
Even so, within that elite company, Adams occupies a distinct and paradoxical role--as a sort of dean, bad boy, visionary and everyman all rolled into one thoughtful, good-natured package. He often has clever schemes up his sleeve, as when he mixed the influences of serialist Arnold Schoenberg and cartoon composer Carl Stalling in his Chamber Symphony--bouncing the Road Runner through a severe 12-tone composition.
So when the news comes that Adams will be unleashing a new 45-minute orchestral work called "Naive and Sentimental Music"--the world premiere of which will be given Friday by the Los Angeles Philharmonic--irony detectors go up.
In fact, the title comes from an essay written in 1795 by Friedrich von Schiller called "Naive and Sentimental Poetry," in which Schiller compares the naive artist--true to nature, instinctive, unself-conscious--and the sentimental artist--longing after the purer condition of the former. It points to a central tension that Adams admits gives his own music its juice.
Aligned with Minimalism--the chugging riffs and atmospheric washes first created by LaMonte Young and Terry Riley in the '60s, then popularized by Philip Glass and Steve Reich in the '70s--Adams, who turns 52 on Monday, has never been an absolutist in that camp. In works like "Shaker Loops" (1978), "Harmonium" (1981), "Grand Pianola Music" (1982) and "Harmonielehre" (1985, his last large-scale orchestra piece), he manipulated a familiar but personalized language of hypnotically repeating phrases and modal harmonies. In "Nixon" and his second opera "Death of Klinghoffer," he took on social subjects within a mostly Minimalist language.
But a marked shift occurred in his music in the '90s. His vocabulary expanded, from the quasi-serialist leanings of the Chamber Symphony, to the dissonance and neo-Romanticism of his Violin Concerto and his piano concerto "'Century Rolls."
One recent morning, Adams greeted a reporter at the front door while clutching an essential modern tool--a cordless telephone.
"The contemporary composer at work," he said, grinning. He is emphatically plugged in, composing on computers in his upstairs study or on the family farm on the Mendocino coast. But the hefty pile of paper on the kitchen counter, the manuscript of "Naive and Sentimental" awaiting the copyist's final draft, is all done by hand.
He points to the piece with a combination of pride and slight dread. Is waiting for a premiere nerve-racking? "Very much so. I'd prefer to go into the first rehearsal the day I finish, but it doesn't work that way."
Adams, born a New Englander and trained at Harvard, has lived in the Bay Area more than 25 years now. He and his wife, photographer Deborah O'Grady, have two teenage children (string players) and a German shorthaired pointer named Calvin. Calvin's slobbering, deadpan charisma comes to bear as a photographer shoots Adams. The dog insists on getting in the picture.
"He's a naive and sentimental dog," the composer jokes. "He doesn't know how important I am."
Part of Adams' charm is a sense that he, too, doesn't know how important he is. Nonesuch is soon to release a 10-box set of Adams' music, "The John Adams Earbox," a retrospective milestone for a young veteran who continues to explore ideas both serious and light, naive and sentimental.
Question: In that few people will know about the Schiller reference, the title "Naive and Sentimental Music" is confrontational, isn't it?
Answer: Absolutely. [He laughs.] Especially in the era of really hardball, theory-generated music. We're passing that era now, but certainly it was the one I grew up in, the era of serialists and 12-tone, [the] European postwar, extremely rationalist forms of composition. To have a piece called "Naive and Sentimental Music" is throwing the gauntlet down.
Q: How did you find the title?
A: Maybe 10 years ago, I was reading about Goethe and all the very early [German] Romantic philosophers, [and] this essay by Schiller would be cited. I was attracted to [the phrase] primarily because of its provocative implications.
"Naive" and "sentimental" are terms that, in American 20th century usage, are not positive attributes. If someone's naive, it means they're clueless. And "sentimental" refers to someone who buys Hallmark cards. [But] the root of "sentimental" is sentiment, and isn't that what music should be about? And "naivete" could also mean something quite positive, being childlike or not jaded.
