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conversations with Tyler is produced by the mercus center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at marcus.org for a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links visit conversations withth tyler.com hello everyone and welcome back to
conversations with Tyler I'm very honored tonight to be chatting with John cool Adams arguably America's greatest living composer and he recently has premiered a new Opera Anthony and Cleopatra I am also the proud owner of a new compact disc box set called collected works which I believe is about
40 compact discs and a Blu-ray of Nixon in China John welcome thank you now as you know Anthony in Cleopatra it's one of Shakespeare's messiest plots especially starting in act two you've got what 40 characters and 42 scenes how do you handle that operatically well the first thing to do with a behemoth like
that is to um shall we say wrestle It To The Ground you know with Shakespeare the plays are are long I don't think Anthony cleopatras is long as Hamlet but it's a big big sprawling epic that is both political and personal and you know it being an opera we're really mostly focused on the um inter personal
relationships I mean the reason I I chose this Opera was because on the one hand it's you know about world politics you know it's the rise of one civilization and the decline of another but it's also very intimate because it's about people who are caught up in the Maelstrom and you know have very very powerful intimacy as well as they being
political figures there's a lot of very rapid action and not many soliloquies does that make writing an opera based around the story harder or easier oh writing an opera is hard no matter what I've once said to the great architect Frank Gary you're lucky you you can Farm out the electrical and the plumbing and
you know concrete to someone else but we composers we have to do everything you know in this case I did the libretto and the vocal writing the sketching the instrumentation and I even you know did the computer setting of the full score so I was at this for pretty much four years if I think about Verity's
Shakespeare operas it feels to me they require near perfect performances so I love James LaVine doing otell but a lot of other recordings don't quite work for me or I love fanar and doing fall staff but everything has to be perfect are you worried that with your Opera the combination of Shakespeare the complex
music all the roles that it will be nearly impossible for other people to do it as well as in essence you're doing it now you know for lack of a better word I write classical music and and the term classical music of course it has an odor for younger people because they associate it with older music older
people but it's actually a very thrilling thing to do because when you write a score you're essentially making a recipe for something and it changes with every performance it's not like a recording by a pop group that's always going to be the same and hence every different iteration of a work of mine is
different and different singers and different conductors and different violinists they they give a a completely new point of view on on something so the pieces are constantly being reborn was Elizabeth Tor the perfect Cleopatra so sensual Solus is she your mental Cleopatra you know I looked at some of
the classical actresses you can go on YouTube and and see different performances the greatest one is Janice susman who's actually South African actress I think she was active in the early 1960s or so but ultimately I follow my own vision and what Drew me to these two characters Anthony and Cleopatra was the fact that they were
they were older people you know one could say they'd been there done that each of them had a background each of them had had actually had had children by other people so in a way this is a story about older people I'm reminded of the Great Edward Alby play who's Afraid of Virginia wolf you know there's just
some really really knockdown drag out fights between these two people but in the end they love each other and I guess my model was just you know my own life my parents people that I've known people who've had difficulties in their relationships and who've somehow managed to find love so how old are Anthony and
Cleopatra in Your Vision well this takes place in roughly around 30 BC so if you were 40 years old you were old back then I mean people didn't have very long lifespans we don't know for sure but seems like Cleopatra was probably at that time in her early 30s maybe mid-30s and Anthony was probably or guessing
maybe 10 years older but people lived fast and intense in those days if you didn't get along with your cousin you hired an assassin you know life was very brutal and to survive took great determination and Ingenuity and craftiness what does the Opera draw from deusi most of my earlier operas had a lot of set pieces you know choruses or
big chunks of wonderful poetry by Alice Goodman who wrote my first libretti for Nixon in China and the death of Kling offer so we have in those operas real soliloquies and Aras and choruses but in this case in the Anthony Cleopatra I really wanted to make what I call a a musical drama and the interaction
between the characters is just it's quick silver it's really fast it's like one of those Preston Sturgis 1930s fast moving fast evolving dramas and I didn't really have a model for that in in the operatic repertoire the the closest I could think of was the way Claude Dei treated the great play Pelos and melison
which is by a Belgian playwright metr link and what made dec's Opera so radical and so revolutionary was that he treated this story and kept it whole and just musicalized the text what have you drawn from yanich you know I've been compared to yanich but I have to say I actually don't know his work very well
so I I can't answer that question very clearly is there any Benjamin Brittain vocal music that you truly love I'm a fan of Benjamin Britain but not particularly of his vocal music I know for um listeners in England that's you know just an outrage to say that but you know I find most setting of the English
language in the classical tradition a little bit pretentious and a little bit stiff my Inspirations are always always been great popular music whether it was you know Ella Fitzgerald or Stevie Wonder or Joanie Mitchell Bob Dylan just the way a great pop artist treats the English language that's been my model
not Benjamin Britain or not even handle even though I love handle but it's just a a form of musicalized speech that doesn't interest me Stephen on time how well does c set texts in English you know I grew up in a musical family my father played the clarinet and the saxophone and my mother was a very talented singer and actress she didn't
have any formal training but when I was a kid I would go to performances of Rogers and Hammerstein Co Porter you know those shows that the local theater groups had put on in fact I was even in one of them I was the little Polynesian boy South pafic and my mother sang Bloody Mary so you know I absorbed that
like as they say with my mother's milk it was just such a part of my musical DNA and even though I'm more of a quote unquote classical composer that really is the the deepest part of my identity as a theatrical composer I have some questions about your other works my favorites on the transmigration of Souls
compositionally and orally why does it sound so different from your other works how would you explain that well I like to think that every single one of my pieces is different I've often said the one thing I never want to do is brand myself you know produce the same sort of predictable piece and a lot of artists
fall into that especially if they're successful so every piece of mind is somewhat not somewhat but very different from its predecessor or the one that follows it in the case of the piece that you mentioned on the trans migration of souls this is a a request from the New York philarmonic to compose a sort of a
Memorial piece which was going to be performed exactly a year after the World Trade Center attacks on September 11th and it was not an assignment that I was terribly happy about because I had other plans and you know it seemed like it was going to be a a very difficult subject matter to deal with this terrible
tragedy and all these people who were killed but I came up with the idea of what I called a memory space where the various text TT and words and phrases could float so to speak in musical space and The Listener would sort of enter into that space the way you might enter into let's say a big cathedral in in
Europe and just be alone and experience your emotions and your thoughts as they Unite with these musical objects and the musical objects came from all different things the text that I put together came from Little handmade signs that family members left around Ground Zero hoping that they would find their loved ones I
went to a site online where people would sign in and and leave a little memory card remembering someone who had died and just a long list of the names of the people that had passed away as a result of those attacks when something is commissioned from you do you feel that more creativity is pulled from you that
there's a certain constraint imposed on you and you've got to come up with something I'm lucky enough in that I don't have to follow some prescribed request or if there is a prescribed request I simply don't accept it if I want to do something you know whether it's a conero or an opera or a string
quartet or I even wrote a show Once with two dozen pop songs I do that and then I I look around for somebody to commission it the violinist lla josephovich what makes her such a perfect performer of your works Leela is Leela sorry Leela is a very special person she has immense energy and that energy is combined with a
wonderful sensitivity lyricism you know I could say this it sounds a little indecent but I mean she's the perfect package for my kind of music she can absolutely Groove get things going in a wonderful powerful Rhythm but she also has a a very deep emotional sensitivity she's played three major Works actually
four major works of mine one of which I composed specifically for her and not just the regular violin but she plays a piece of mine called the Dharma at Big Sir which is for electric violin an instrument with six strings that you know can sound like a regular violin but also can sound like Jimmy Hendrick
rocking out in your mind is there a perfect version of your violin conero you know as I said earlier every performer brings something special you know if I said there was a perfect version of it that would probably discourage anyone from taking it up certainly Leela's performances and her recordings thrill me but you know the
other day I received a video link of a performance by another violinist Clara Jang Korean German violinist playing a piece of mind that no one except Leela has to this point d sced play and that was a revelation itself why would Jesus have been drawn to a withered hand you've asked that question what's the
answer you're mentioning a a very early piece of mine called Christian Zeal and activity which dates way back into the 1970s that was a period of sort of a Vanguard experimental music and I found a an old hymn book I think it was a Salvation Army hym book and I found it in a I guess a Ed bookstore and the hymns were they were
all classified you know Easter crisis risen Advent Etc and then there was a section called Christian Zeal and activity which I thought was a wonderful phrase so I composed the piece and basically what I did was to take the very popular old hym Onward Christian Soldiers and I slowed it up to almost unrecognizable slowness you know it's
like a Iceberg slowly melting I made a recording off a Sunday morning you know revivalist preacher talking about Jesus and the man with a withered hand and there was something very musical about the way he kept repeating the term withered hand yeah it's a very American sounding little clip I guess you could
call it a found object and I mix that in with the slow down him you've also done an oratorio El Nino what do you see is the overall role of Christianity in your body of work you know I grew up going to church my mother went to church I think mostly because she loved to sing in the choir she was brought up as a as a
Catholic and then we started going to the Episcopal church and ended up in the Unitarian Church which is a very New England thing which is where I grew up in New England I'm not a practicing Christian I don't go to church but I'm very drawn to some of these biblical stories because you you know their
archetypal they reflect in myth and symbolism of the deepest of our human experience in the case of El Nino an oratorio that I wrote for the Millennium it's about birth you know it's on the surface it's a story of the Nativity of Mary conceiving and giving birth to Jesus and the flight into Egypt but it's
also a larger story it's about birth and particularly about the women's experience of it and for that you know my collaborator and I Peter sers we found a lot of texts by women particularly by Hispanic women from Mexico and Chile that told firsthand the experience of birth and I like doing that because handles Messiah which of
course treats the same material just comes from the Bible and that's all guys talking about it and you know really what do they know about Labor and the pain of paration and motherhood so I think that makes my oratorial quite different why can't other people conduct Shaker Loops well did I say that you
said that once yes I think it's in your autobiography oh or have they learned how to conduct it since then oh yes well Shaker Loops is a piece for Strings and the very first version of that I wrote in a kind of experimental way where you know the conductor would indicate as we went along the changes just by holding
up fingers I could do it and I was able to do a satisfying performance of it but when another conductor did it the shape was strangely out of focus so it's not that the other conductor was incompetent it was just that I had a very specific way of wanting to do it so in the later version of it I froze everything into
more traditional notation so that flexibility is no longer there but on the other hand the form of the piece is very satisfying what do you think of how your music is sometimes used in video games like sidm Civilization I don't do video games I know that my music is used and some of them because I get requests for
licensing but I'm not a video game guy I did authorize the use of Peace of Mind Harmony laa they used opening I don't know 20 bars or something but when I went online to look at it I noticed that they electronically transposed it up a step and added a thrash drum set to it like my music wasn't even quite trashy
enough so they had to trash it up some more how do you avoid what Harold Bloom called the anxiety of influence Harold Bloom was a very great literary critic sometimes a little bit of a windbag but his writings on CID and Shelly and especially on Shakespeare was very important to me he had a phrase that he
coined the anxiety of influence which is interesting because he himself was not a Creator he was a critic but he intuited that we creators whether we're painters or novelists or filmmakers or composers that we live so to speak under the shadow of the greats that preceded us if you're a poet you've got all this great
literature behind you whether it's Shakespeare or Walt Witman or Emily Dickinson and likewise for me I got really heavyweight predecessors in Beethoven and Bach and Mer and Stravinsky so maybe that's what he meant just the anxiety of is what I do even comparable with a great art and another
thing is if I have an idea has somebody already thought of it before so those are sort of the neurotic aspects of of my life but I'm no different than anybody else you know we just have to deal with those concerns are you you more afraid of Mozart or of Charles Ives I'm not afraid of either of them I love them I obviously love Mozart more
than Charles Ives Charles Ives is a a very very unusual figure you know he was almost completely unknown in most of the 20th century until uh Leonard Bernstein who was very glamorous and very well-known Bernstein kind of brought him to the public notice and he coined this idea that Charles eyes was a Abraham
Lincoln of music and of course Americans love something they can grasp on to like like oh yeah I can relate to that he's the Abraham Lincoln of music and Charles IES was a kind of a Hermit he worked during the days in an insurance firm at which he was very successful but spent his weekends and his summer vacations
composing and his work is very sentimental is also very of on guard for its time and I've conducted quite a few of his pieces they are not I have to to admit 100% satisfying and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that I've never heard these pieces or hardly ever heard them and you know when you're
a composer You have to hear something and then realize oh you know that works and that doesn't and I think the fact that Ives maybe he was just born before his time you know he was born in Connecticut in the 1870s and America at that time just was still a very raw country and not ready for a classical
experimental composer you seem to understand everything in music from Indian ragas to popular song classical music jazz do you ever worry that you have too many influences you know when I was a kid it was very hard to get a hold of a recording of something in those days there was something called the Schwan
catalog of recorded music and you know I used to get it at the music store and there might be one recording of the m six Symphony that seems hard to believe these days but you know in 1965 63 a lot of that music was very rare and I had to send away for it and wait months so when I got it it was really really special today everything
is available at all times all you have to do is have a subscription to Spotify or Amazon music or something and you can access anything and the same goes for books you know I have a Kindle I have too much stuff on the Kindle you know nothing is special anymore so one has to actually make some kind of like a pack
with oneself to go back to that very very personal relationship with one work or with just a group of very valuable pieces because otherwise we're just flooded with so much information that you know we end up with very short concentration spans and we end up with a problem of what do we really value
earlier in your career you kind of fought a an internal mental war against serialism and 12-tone music so take boues after all these years now today what do you think of it as music approach it fresh is it wonderful is it boring you know I came of age during what I call the bad old days of contemporary music and I can't explain
why that happened but sometime in the early part of the 20th century a lot of very brilliant composers started writing music that was you know essentially inaccessible to average listeners whether it was sherberg or VZ or I could name many other composers who started writing very dissonant music later on
composers got interested in fracturing rhythms to the point where you had a composer like John Cage who essentially devoted his life to sort of atomizing deconstructing all of the aspects of the musical language both acoustically and culturally you know and that ran its course the bad part of it was that it
made audiences very wary of anything that was new uh even to this day I'm still suffering from that because you know an uninitiated listener will go to a concert and open the program and see there's a piece by John Adams I don't know who this is he's still living so it's probably going to be an unpleasant
experience and you know that's just something that is the result of years of very difficult inaccessible and very often rationally conceived contemporary music at the same time that that was happening there was this fantastic explosion of wonderful music in the pop realm and I had this sort of crisis in my life where I said to myself why
should I Surrender you know the influence that great music can have to a pop artist and have to go and write serial or 12-tone music because that's you know what's required of you know a contemporary composer so I basically walked away from that walked away from all that you know surrounded me when I was in college I had to put up with a
great deal of criticism including a lot of critics who were writing for the major newspapers and magazines and they had come around thinking that the only way you could write contemporary music was this same sort of very difficult challenging rigorous whatever the you know adjectives that they love to use
bracing all these things that say take B's second Piano Sonata if you put it on as listener aren't you thrilled today in 2022 you're asking me about Pierre Bull's second Piano Sonata I think it's just utterly unpleasant experience to listen to for a while you can be dazzled by the fact that a human being can
actually play that and there are very few human beings can do that but you know it's interesting buz wrote another piece piece which I think very much typifies what his attitude was the piece is called let's see so the farthest reach of the Fertile territory which is actually it's the name of painting by
the artist Paul clay but you know it represents a period in contemporary music where artists were just pushing the envelope as far as they could in terms of complexity of density of fracturing the language it became sort of like a laboratory rather than seeing music as essentially an act of
communication what's your favorite Bob Dylan album well you know I still like the early ones very fond of John Wesley Harding most cases it's just individual songs I think I show my age when I talk about that period because I I'm so fond of it but you know it's an interesting thing with pop music that it's so much
linked to periods in your life so that somebody who's my age has a very very strong sentimental attachment to music that you heard when you were 20 now I don't know maybe this has a lot to do with your Recollections of romances or Revelations or the drugs you took or the lovers you had and you know a lot of pop
music evokes that I don't relate to pop music from the 80s for example or from the '90s and I think that's uh very much a general thing my parents related to music that was big in the 1930s and 40s so you sort of measure by when you were born and the music you listen to Sergeant Pepper or Abby RH which are you more likely to put
on well let's see I think Abby Road was really the great period I mean Sergeant Pepper had a lot of sort of provocative stuff in it you know it had synthesizer for the first time and and it was very frankly discussing psychedelic drug so was very popular with my generation but I think just as for Pure musical
experiences those albums The White Album and ABY rad was really the peak of their artistic achievement what do you see as the peak of Miles Davis's career you know Miles Davis had a career like stravinski or like Beethoven or like Picasso you know he went through so many periods he started essentially in the
Bop era and then moved into sort of a modal period when he started working with Joe zenel and Herby Hancock and then his latest period was you know it's really hard to find a word for it I mean he strongly influenced by African music showed his identity with his own race in a very strong way that had never been
done before so you know I can't really cherry-pick anything specific I do know that when I look at my collection of my pieces that I keep going back to the albums he made with with Gil Evans the big ban albums miles ahead and Sketches of Spain those really stand out for their incredible beauty and for the
lushness of the scoring why isn't Robert Ashley better known to me he's one of the greats but no one ever tells me to listen to Robert Ashley you know I knew Robert Ashley way back in the 1970s because when I first came to California a friend of mine said oh you have to get in touch with with Bob Ashley and at the time Bob was
teaching at the Mills College a very small College in Oakland California and you know to answer your question I think that one of the things about Ashley is that he's just off the grid when it comes to finding a conventional way to describe it you know some people would say that he wrote great operas but you
know Opera isn't really the word I think maybe Bob used the term Opera but he used it in a sort of ryeway his greatest gifts were really this combination of his texts that he wrote and of course this fantastic droll manner of speaking them they would be accompanied usually by his longtime collaborator blue jean
tyranny who played in a sort of light bluesy sometimes gospel style piano but it was Ashley's I don't know this very special Americana that you associate with you know Road movies and quiet Anonymous people talking about their relationships or their experiences in a diner or a gas station or an automobile
and that's what makes him very special for me he's I don't think of him in the musical realm I think of him more in the in the literary realm do you think Morton Feldman has gone down as the truly great Eternal American composer of his time you know Morton Feldman the special thing about him was that he was
absolutely unique the Latin term Su generis means just born of himself he didn't sound like anyone each piece was very similar in the sense that the music tended to be move very slowly in terms of time was very delicate very sensuous and when you listen to a Felman piece the classic Felman piece it's like
getting into a a warm bath the bath though is sound it's very erotic in a very Exquisite way it's interesting because my friend Michael Tilson Thomas invited the great classical pianist Emanuel ax to play a Felman piece work for piano and Orchestra and they put it on a special program it was a program of
just contemporary music and it was wonderful to hear it but I noticed that he never brought it back in the regular subscription series you know he never put it on a program with debc or stravinski and that is still an issue with felman's music it requires a c certain kind of listener it requires a certain shall we say suspension of
expectation and it requires a whole kind of acoustical setting so it probably doesn't survive in the sort of more aggressive busy format of a standard orchestral concert Jefferson Airplane the album surrealistic pillow is it still good music you know I was living in Cambridge Massachusetts at the time was was a
student in Harvard and you know I didn't know it's San Francisco was I I think I'd read maybe some Alan Ginsburg or Jack caroak but my first musical impression of San Francisco was Jefferson Airplane you know and there were a couple of good songs and they had a great photo on their surrealistic
pillow album I can't really list them as one of the great bands many of those bands in the 1960s and70s became famous because of one or maybe two songs and then they kind of hobbled along and and and disappeared that really was the case with them now you mentioned San Francisco you first became a major
Orchestra conductor there and your music has been promoted in San Francisco quite a bit Ado dwart is it an accident that this happened in San Francisco which is a highly Innovative City in other ways or is it something that to you organically made sense you know what is it they say you know that that the success has to do with being prepared
and then the moment will come I'm sort of mangling whatever the the familiar saw is but I think that I had all the tools you know I had been well trained and I loved this music and I knew it and the opportunity came there was a a young Dutch conductor who was named to succeed SE o zawa as conductor of the San
Francisco Symphony I met him he liked me he heard some of my music he offered me a commission I took it piece was a success and you know things started to happen from there the fact that it was San Francisco I think really is you know not critical it could have happened in St Louis or Minnesota or wherever I live
here because you know I'm very strongly affected by the landscape the California landscape of course now it gets increasingly harder to live here because San Francisco itself has become taken over by Tech that's just experiences this unpleasantly hectic Urban Development which goes handin hand with the very
distressing situation of the unhoused and then my state part of it's burning every summer because of climate change so there's a mixture of delight and extreme disappointment about being a resident of California what do you think it would take for American classical music to get a real true foothold in European concert
Halls now you've had premieres in Europe maybe you're somewhat of an exception to this but it seems that American classical music is not that significant in Europe well we do live in a country where popular culture has enormous reach and it also has enormous Prestige but with that said I have to say that a lot
of the greatest classical musicians alive are Americans either they're American born like yoyo ma or they came here and have become Americans like Gustavo dudl or yujian You know despite the fact that you know we're a country that's literally controlled by popular culture we have some of the greatest orchestras in the
world and we have very very intelligent audiences I keep hearing that classical music is dead or that it's dying but then I go to concerts and I have these incredible experiences whether I'm conducting or whether I'm just in the audience it's always a challenge and if you go to Europe they have the same
problems there they have problems filling the Halls music musicians don't get paid as well as they do in this country so I think this idea that classical music in America is a dying art I don't buy that at all why don't you write more for clarinet it was an early instrument of yours I wanted to play the violin I grew up in a very
small town in New Hampshire and there was a a music teacher who came to the public elementary school every two weeks and he could teach anything you could teach the piccolo or the violin or the trumpet and I wanted to learn the violin but I was told I would have to wait until the fifth grade and I was restless
so my dad played the clarinet and I reluctantly agreed to have him be my teacher and I started playing the clarinet and I got very good very quickly and the clarinet was you know sort of my key to getting into the music world while I was in college I I was a substitute clarinet player with the
Boston Symphony but you know it has a very small amount of literature it has a couple of great Pieces by Mozart and a few by brahs and really most of the rest of the music is in the classical realm is just part of being part of an orchestra I mean the most exciting thing to do if you were a clarinet player now
would probably to play kmer music helmet lockman yes or no I left my clarinets in the cellar in the wine seller about 30 years ago and they're still down there I was composer of Dr IC are you looking forward to Christopher Nolan's movie Oppenheimer or you don't care I might watch it but Oppenheimer has become kind
of a an obsession with me I've read the two wonderful biographies of him that have come out in the last 10 or 15 years and I've read them both numerous times Oppenheimer actually lived and taught in this city where I live Berkeley California and in many ways he was a very special and mysterious human being
you know a great great brilliant scientist but also somebody who appreciated uh poetry and art and music so I have my own impression of him and I don't know if I'm going to go to a Hollywood movie and see somebody else's imitation of Oppenheimer I might but I kind of doubt it are you much influenced by Cinema when you think operatically or
not really like most Americans I watch a lot of movies mostly these days at home you know there's some wonderful cable series many of which come from Scandinavia that I like and I'm very often asked you know why don't you write for films and the reason I don't write for films is that in order to Be an
Effective film composer you have to be ready to drop everything you're doing and just focus without sleep for three or 4 days on a project and I have a life that you know was already full of things to do I have works that I'm commissioned and I am absolutely focused on I have a life as a conductor and the few films
that I have written scores for in the end you know I will spend a great deal of time working to make music that fits exactly the scene and then it comes back and the directors changed the scene and put the music in another place and ultimately it just it's very frustrating so I'm not a film composer however there
are some directors who have taken my music pieces of mine and put them in their films scores particularly the Italian director Luca guino who used music of mine in several of his films and that's very satisfying when a sensitive director can do that but if you hear say that Hans simmer did the
soundtrack to Dune are you excited you'll go to see it and hear it or it's a peripheral interest for you I'm always almost always very frustrated by the low level of inspiration in in film composing I think that film composers Market themselves and basically give directors what they want and a lot of the taste that even the greatest
directors people like Steven Spielberg have is just very sort of sentimental and to me rather tacky which is why you know most of the film score of music I like comes from France or Italy not American these days now a lot of films don't even have a composer they have a music consultant so you'll get a film
let's say a Cohen Brothers film which would be a great film but the music comes from you know all different sources maybe three or four different pop artists or whatever is it intimidating to conduct Philip Glass in front of Philip Glass I've conducted quite a few of Philips pieces it's not very difficult music to perform a lot of
the thrill of it is just in the connection with the audience because Philip's music is very simple and very easy to access so you get a nice buzz from usually a very large audience you know often when I do my own music I won't have a full Hall but often when I do Philips music a lot of people will
come people who wouldn't normally go to a classical concert I remember doing the the world premiere of I think it was his 12th or 13th Symphony I can't remember with the Los Angeles philarmonic and Disney Hall was just absolutely packed each performance because Philip you know he's much more known as a much wider
audience people recognize his name than any other classical composer when you were a young man you wrote Leonard Bernstein a letter and he he wrote you back of all things if you received a highly intelligent letter from a young man today would you write him back it depends on what the letter was I mean if
the letter was was as snotty as the one that I wrote Leonard Bernstein I don't I I don't know if I'd write him back but I was a freshman at college and just at the most most obnoxious point in my life when you know I had very strong opinions and Leonard Bernstein you know he was who he was he had written a piece that
even to this day I find a little kind of sacaran and certainly not a piece that I choose to listen to I wrote to him and I I scolded him for not being you know more upto-date and writing the proper kind of atonal or serial music that I thought one should do when I was 18 years old and he wrote me back it's
amazing he said you know I have to do what I have to do this is me and that was a really important thing for me to hear I may have not understood it at the time but As I Grew Older I realized yeah he was absolutely right you just have to do who you are and not pretend to be somebody else or be influenced by what
the supposedly proper way to make art is last three questions first how ambitious are you ambition is it's not a very helpful term I I know people who are ambitious and you can tell because when you're talking to them you see in their eyes that they're not even listening to you they're thinking about their next
move or you know what the world thinks of them I certainly do think about what other people think of me whether they respond to my music I care deeply about whether my music reaches people I would say I work hard I do it not compulsively I do it just because that's that's what I do but I wouldn't call myself
ambitious I think you know maybe there was a time in my life when I was young and I was anxious to meet people and make sure they knew about me but I guess I'm just a little more uh philosophical now I think if I have a an important body of work and pieces that I've written are good they will continue on
after I'm no longer a a living breathing specimen and that's really all I can ask for now I suspect many of my podcast listeners and readers don't know your music for an uninitiated listener where would you recommend they start to learn John kulage Adams well first of all I never use somewhere except on my tax
returns but I think the most easy entrance Point into my music is is a short orchestral piece called short ride in a fast machine which was inspired by a terrifying car ride I had in a sports car and it's a high energy enjoyable piece very popular piece of mine gets performance almost every day somewhere in the world four minutes long and I
think that's probably an easy way to get into my music and it has a lot of John adoms in it in terms of the sort of driving pulse and colorful orchestration and it's fun very last question what will you do next I am writing a piano conero for an amazing young Icelandic pianist named vicking gor olafson I
recently wrote a piano cetto with a funny title must the devil have all the good tunes and he and I have been performing it around the world and I was so thrilled by his playing that I decided I was going to write a special piece for him there's also a great U jaang recording of that piece as as you know but John Adams thank you very much
to listeners I'm also happy to recommend John's autobiography the collected works box set John on Spotify of course the new Opera Anthony and Cleopatra which has been receiving very strong reviews and John great chatting with you take care thank you thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler you can
subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts Spotify or your favorite podcast app if you like this podcast please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review this helps other listeners find the show on Twitter I'm Tyler Cowan and the show is at cow and convos until next time please keep listening and learning