John Adams

Here his tape-loop experiments from the San Francisco Conservatory years met his memories of New England, and his own voice, lyricism laid over minimalist repetition, first came clearly into focus.

• Part one, 「Shaking and Trembling」, opens with tremolo, the strings shivering on the same note at great speed. The Shakers worshipping with trembling bodies and the 'shake' of the title are heard overlapping in sound.
• In part two, 「Hymning Slews」, the transparent high tones of lightly touched strings (harmonics) and sounds sliding between notes (glissando) spread slowly. It is worth sensing the stillness that contrasts with the fast first part.
• In part three, 「Loops and Verses」, the cello sings a long melody while repeating figures lay down the floor beneath it. Hearing a repeating background and a free melody at the same time is the heart of Adams's brand of minimalism.
• It was originally a string septet for seven players, and a string orchestra version appeared in 1983. A common comparison holds that in the chamber version each player's line is distinct, while in the orchestral version the sound is thicker and more brilliant.

Beginning from the tanker in a dream that ended a long creative block, it is his turning point, gathering the legacies of Schoenberg·Wagner·Mahler and minimalism into a single work.

• At the opening of the first movement, the full orchestra hammers down the same E minor chord dozens of times. The tanker Adams saw in his dream, rising from the water and shooting skyward like a rocket, was where this sound began.
• The second movement, 「The Anfortas Wound」, takes its title from the king in Wagner's 「Parsifal」 who bears a wound that will not heal. Often noted are the trumpet's long, lament-like melody and the dissonance that bursts out at the climax, recalling the screaming chord of Mahler's Tenth Symphony.
• The third movement, 「Meister Eckhardt and Quackie」, depicts, as the composer explained, a dreamlike scene of the medieval mystic Eckhart floating through the sky with the composer's infant daughter on his shoulder. Listen for the ending, where glittering repeated figures pile up gradually and close in a bright E-flat major.

Here the release of breaking through a creative block bursts out in a ride of just over four minutes, and it became the work that would spread his name more widely than any other.

• From beginning to end, a percussion instrument struck like a block of wood (the woodblock) carves out a steady beat without pause. This beat is both the engine of the racing car and its heartbeat.
• The other instruments divide the beat into groupings different from the woodblock's, so the accents cross. Keep your ear fixed on the woodblock and follow the moments when the other instruments cut in out of step, and you will feel the dizzying thrill of 'riding and then regretting it.'
• In the latter part, the trumpets and brass burst into a festive, brilliant fanfare that drives the piece to its end. Short and dazzling, it is often used to open a concert.

His first opera, which rewrote modern history as myth with Sellars·Goodman, and the work that established him as an opera composer.

• At the opening of Act I, the strings endlessly repeat a figure that climbs step by step from a low note, like a staircase (ascending). It sounds like the tense waiting of soldiers and citizens at Beijing airport for the presidential plane.
• In “News Has a Kind of Mystery,” the aria Nixon sings after stepping off the plane, the word ‘news’ repeats as if he were stammering. The excitement of a politician mindful of live television is layered onto the repeating figures.
• At the end of Act II, “I Am the Wife of Mao Tse-tung,” the aria of Jiang Qing (Mao Zedong’s wife), is written as coloratura, with the soprano rapidly spinning out very high notes. It is counted among the most difficult and dazzling passages in the whole opera.
• Act III is a quiet act set on the night after the festivities, as the characters, each in bed, look back on their pasts. Listen for the loneliness that contrasts with the earlier splendor, right through to Zhou Enlai’s final monologue asking how much of what we did was good.

A memorial premiered on the first anniversary of 9·11, it built a ‘space of memory’ from street sounds and victims’ names and won the Pulitzer Prize.

• The piece begins with prerecorded noise from New York’s streets, over which a single voice repeats the word ‘missing.’ This sense that the concert hall opens onto the city outside is the ‘space of memory’ the composer intended.
• Recorded voices call out the victims’ names one by one. Even as the chorus and orchestra swell, the reading of names keeps flowing underneath, so follow those voices without losing them.
• The children’s and adult choruses sing short, ordinary sentences taken from missing-person flyers and the words of the bereaved. Many have remarked that because these are everyday words rather than ornate lyrics, they sound all the more deeply sorrowful.
• After one immense climax passes, the music subsides again into street sounds and the reading of names. Notice the ending, which does not close but drifts back into everyday life.

Depicting the final hours before the first atomic bomb test, this opera carries most heavily his gaze that holds scientific achievement and destruction together.

• At the end of Act I, Oppenheimer, alone before the bomb tower, sings the aria “Batter My Heart,” a setting of a Holy Sonnet by John Donne. Oppenheimer is said to have named the test ‘Trinity’ with this Donne poem in mind, so this is where libretto and history interlock.
• Through the slow aria, low strings and brass bear down heavily beneath the baritone as he draws out a long, anguished melody. Often performed as a standalone song, this aria is the opera’s signature scene.
• Act II is filled with the tension of counting down the time left before the test, as electronic sound and orchestra layer the desert storm with mechanical noise. The ending, which renders the moment of the explosion not as a great blast but as stillness and long resonance, often becomes a talking point for interpretation.
• There is also a purely orchestral “Doctor Atomic Symphony” (2007). If the opera feels daunting, getting to know its sound world first through this symphony is one way in.

Recasting Rimsky-Korsakov’s storyteller as a woman of today, this piece shows that, even as an elder, he is still responding to the violence of the world.

• The solo violin is Scheherazade herself from beginning to end. Listen with the difference in mind: where the violin in Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade” was the voice telling the story, here it is the hunted, defiant heroine herself.
• In the first movement, “Tale of the Wise Young Woman — Pursuit by the True Believers,” the orchestra drives the violin’s melody roughly before it. The metallic sound of the cimbalom, a Hungarian folk instrument whose metal strings are struck with sticks, adds an exotic color.
• The second movement, “A Long Desire,” is a love scene in which the violin spins out a long, slow melody without end. It is a place to breathe between the sharp outer movements.
• In the third movement, “Scheherazade and the Men with Beards,” the composer said he portrayed the heroine standing before a tribunal of men. Follow the violin as it stands alone in defiance and flows into the final movement, “Escape, Flight, Sanctuary.” The performance by Leila Josefowicz, the work’s dedicatee and first performer, is regarded as something of a benchmark.