A pupil of Leon Kirchner, David Del Tredici and Roger Sessions at Harvard, John Adams moved to California, where he has made a name for himself in more original forms. In the 1970s he turned to minimalism, to which he gave an individual shape, as he developed his own distinctive musical language.
Stage Works
The opera 1982 Nixon in China, a collaboration with the theatre director Peter Sellars and the poet Alice Goodman, inspired by President Nixons visit toChina in 1972, has found a place in current repertoire. This was followed by a further collaboration, The Death of Klinghoffer, first staged in 1991, and based on the murder of an elderly American by terrorists who had seized a Mediterranean cruise-liner. Other stage works include I was looking at the Ceiling and then I saw the Sky, completed in 1996, and the nativity oratorio El Nio.
Orchestral Music
Shaker Loops, for string orchestra, dates from the mid-1970s and seeks inspiration from the religious ecstasy of Shaker ceremonies. The brief Short Ride on a Fast Machine, described as a fanfare for orchestra, forms a rapid contrast to Tromba Lontana and was first performed in 1986. Other works include a Violin Concerto in 1993 and in 2003 My Father Knew Charles Ives.
