“I am not a political composer; I choose wonderful stories for my operas.”

▲ In the image, the composer with violinist Augustin Hadelich. Photo by Jair Cabrera Torres

▲ John Adams after a rehearsal at UNAM's Nezahualcóyotl Hall. Photo by Jair Cabrera Torres

Juan Arturo Brennan

La Jornada Newspaper, Saturday, August 23, 2025, p. 2

There seems to be a broad consensus, which no one has denied, that John Adams (Worcester, Massachusetts, 1947) is the most important American composer working today. His extensive, varied, and important body of work, his work as a conductor, his outreach, promotion, and education, and his writings all form the profile of a multifaceted creator, a Renaissance man in the midst of the modern era. Adams is in Mexico as guest conductor of the Minería Symphony Orchestra, to conduct Augustin Hadelich in his Violin Concerto ; before that, a bit of Sibelius ( The Return of Lemminkäinen ) and then a lot of Stravinsky (the complete version of The Firebird ). After the rehearsal, in the lobby of the Nezahualcóyotl Hall at the UNAM, there was a brief but substantial discussion with the next tenor.

–Of the many labels that have been bestowed upon you, do you think that postmodern suits you?

–When I first heard that term, I had no idea what it was, so I looked it up, and I couldn't make any sense of it because every definition was different, and it still is, so I don't think it means anything. The only way I think it does have any meaning is if we consider it as something that comes after modernism. If we focus on the essence of modernism, I think it's an extreme preoccupation with the structural breakdown of the method of using the elements of music, whether it's John Cage organizing sounds through chance, or serialism; that's what I call modernism. And all of that was fashionable in the 1950s and 1960s, and I grew up with all of that, with the need to make a judgment about it. So, if you say "post," at least you know it's not that.

–A composer and director, first and foremost, but you're also an important figure in the theater. How did you get into that, and where did you come from?

–I'm sure I inherited it from my mother. She was a very talented amateur singer and actress. We lived in a relatively small town; she sang in all the amateur productions of Broadway musicals, and I sang with her; we sang together in South Pacific. I think I inherited that gene, and it's interesting because in college I directed several student opera productions, and then for twenty years I wasn't the least bit interested in it, until the day I met Peter Sellars, a great stage director. He had heard a piece of mine for strings and decided I was the ideal composer he wanted to work with. My first collaboration with him was my opera Nixon in China, and although I've written six or seven others, it's still my most popular opera.

Note: Another important figure in the modern scene closely associated with John Adams is the prominent Danish choreographer Peter Martins, who has turned a good number of the composer's scores into ballets.

–Continuing with the topic of opera… there's Puccini's The Girl of the Golden West , and Barber's Antony and Cleopatra . You've written The Girls of the Golden West and your own version of Antony and Cleopatra. Any thoughts on the possible connecting vessels?

A “bad boy”

–I’ve always been something of a bad boy, ever since I composed Great Music for Player Piano many years ago, and I have a bit of Mark Twain in me. In the case of Girls of the Golden West , Peter Sellars and I thought Puccini’s was an overly romanticized version of the Wild West, of the Gold Rush , and we wanted to offer a vision that was much more truthful. That meant talking a lot about racism, misogyny, greed—all the things that Donald Trump is trying to suppress from our history, to prevent any information about it from being available. In our opera, all the texts come from original sources, and at the same time, it’s a very enjoyable opera because I adapted all these Gold Rush songs to my own music, and they’re very funny. As for Antony and Cleopatra , the very important San Francisco Opera commissioned a new opera from me to celebrate their centennial. In Girls of the Golden West, I included a few scenes from Macbeth because it turns out that during the Gold Rush, people liked to recite Shakespeare. Antony and Cleopatra is a Shakespearean tragedy that I love because it's about adult lovers, not Romeo and Juliet, but older people who each have rather complicated pasts. They fight constantly, a bit like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It's also a play about the decline and fall of a great civilization, Egypt, and the rise of another, Rome, and I think this is very relevant today because our country is in decline, in severe decline, and at the same time China is emerging.

▲ John Adams explores themes of racism, misogyny, and greed in his operas. Photo by Jair Cabrera Torres

–And today, China is not Mao's China, nor are the United States Nixon's, so your opera will acquire a new relevance.

–I hope so, yes.

–To return to the themes of racism, misogyny, and greed in Girls of the Golden West … your operas deal with highly charged mythical, political, and social themes, volatile, even explosive, and all very topical: The Child, The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Nixon in China , The Death of Klinghoffer, and Doctor Atomic . Do you consider yourself a highly politicized composer?

Certainly not; I don't consider myself a political composer. I choose those themes because I think they're wonderful stories and because I think audiences can relate to them. Certainly, American audiences can empathize with the issue of Chairman Mao and Chairman Nixon, and also with The Death of Klinghoffer, which is about terrorism with a religious component, and it all relates to what's happening now in Gaza; the opera expresses all of this, and Doctor Atomic is about nuclear war. These are all stories, themes that I consider suitable for artistic expression.

Let's return for a moment to the very essence of musical language and style. For several decades now, large audiences around the world have been powerfully drawn to music with repetitive structures and elements. Any theories on this?

–Of course! Because what happened with contemporary music since Schoenberg is that it lost its pulse, it lost its harmonic center, it lost the sense of the phrase, and unless you're another composer writing in the same style, it's like listening to someone speaking in a foreign language you don't understand. I believe that the essence of the musical experience is pulse, because it's the heartbeat, it's breathing, it's walking, it's the rhythm of the sun, and as for tonality, it's a fundamental human experience. I think the minimalists, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, did something historic by taking all of that and at the same time making it sound fresh.

–The New and Unusual Music concert series you founded was both very successful and controversial. What was its essence?

–That was with the San Francisco Symphony, and it was unusual because it was a classical orchestra that mostly just played Beethoven and all that, and suddenly we were doing concerts in a bar, a furniture store, a revue theater, and there was a lot of experimental music being made. Some of the musicians loved it, and just as many hated it. I then continued doing the same thing with the Los Angeles Philharmonic on a series called Green Umbrella —don't ask me why—and it's the most successful contemporary music series in the world; suddenly we have a thousand attendees coming to hear random music.

–What is the Pacific Harmony Foundation?

–It's a foundation my wife and I established to provide funding primarily for music education, with an emphasis on Black youth and children. Orchestras would like to have more Black musicians, and the problem is that children don't receive adequate training, so we provide funding to places like Oakland and Richmond in California, which are predominantly Black communities, but we also contribute to some music festivals.

–Finally, I find the vast majority of your work titles very imaginative and evocative. Your memoir is titled Hallelujah Junction , which is also the title of a 1996 piece for two pianos, alluding to a small truck stop on Highway 49, on the Nevada-California border. Is there any symbolic association in the coincidence of titles?

–None. I just think it's a great title.

– Touché , goodbye and thank you.

▲ In the image, the composer with violinist Augustin Hadelich. Photo by Jair Cabrera Torres

▲ John Adams after a rehearsal at UNAM's Nezahualcóyotl Hall. Photo by Jair Cabrera Torres

Juan Arturo Brennan

La Jornada Newspaper, Saturday, August 23, 2025, p. 2

There seems to be a broad consensus, which no one has denied, that John Adams (Worcester, Massachusetts, 1947) is the most important American composer working today. His extensive, varied, and important body of work, his work as a conductor, his outreach, promotion, and education, and his writings all form the profile of a multifaceted creator, a Renaissance man in the midst of the modern era. Adams is in Mexico as guest conductor of the Minería Symphony Orchestra, to conduct Augustin Hadelich in his Violin Concerto ; before that, a bit of Sibelius ( The Return of Lemminkäinen ) and then a lot of Stravinsky (the complete version of The Firebird ). After the rehearsal, in the lobby of the Nezahualcóyotl Hall at the UNAM, there was a brief but substantial discussion with the next tenor.

–Of the many labels that have been bestowed upon you, do you think that postmodern suits you?

–When I first heard that term, I had no idea what it was, so I looked it up, and I couldn't make any sense of it because every definition was different, and it still is, so I don't think it means anything. The only way I think it does have any meaning is if we consider it as something that comes after modernism. If we focus on the essence of modernism, I think it's an extreme preoccupation with the structural breakdown of the method of using the elements of music, whether it's John Cage organizing sounds through chance, or serialism; that's what I call modernism. And all of that was fashionable in the 1950s and 1960s, and I grew up with all of that, with the need to make a judgment about it. So, if you say "post," at least you know it's not that.

–A composer and director, first and foremost, but you're also an important figure in the theater. How did you get into that, and where did you come from?

–I'm sure I inherited it from my mother. She was a very talented amateur singer and actress. We lived in a relatively small town; she sang in all the amateur productions of Broadway musicals, and I sang with her; we sang together in South Pacific. I think I inherited that gene, and it's interesting because in college I directed several student opera productions, and then for twenty years I wasn't the least bit interested in it, until the day I met Peter Sellars, a great stage director. He had heard a piece of mine for strings and decided I was the ideal composer he wanted to work with. My first collaboration with him was my opera Nixon in China, and although I've written six or seven others, it's still my most popular opera.

Note: Another important figure in the modern scene closely associated with John Adams is the prominent Danish choreographer Peter Martins, who has turned a good number of the composer's scores into ballets.

–Continuing with the topic of opera… there's Puccini's The Girl of the Golden West , and Barber's Antony and Cleopatra . You've written The Girls of the Golden West and your own version of Antony and Cleopatra. Any thoughts on the possible connecting vessels?

A “bad boy”

–I’ve always been something of a bad boy, ever since I composed Great Music for Player Piano many years ago, and I have a bit of Mark Twain in me. In the case of Girls of the Golden West , Peter Sellars and I thought Puccini’s was an overly romanticized version of the Wild West, of the Gold Rush , and we wanted to offer a vision that was much more truthful. That meant talking a lot about racism, misogyny, greed—all the things that Donald Trump is trying to suppress from our history, to prevent any information about it from being available. In our opera, all the texts come from original sources, and at the same time, it’s a very enjoyable opera because I adapted all these Gold Rush songs to my own music, and they’re very funny. As for Antony and Cleopatra , the very important San Francisco Opera commissioned a new opera from me to celebrate their centennial. In Girls of the Golden West, I included a few scenes from Macbeth because it turns out that during the Gold Rush, people liked to recite Shakespeare. Antony and Cleopatra is a Shakespearean tragedy that I love because it's about adult lovers, not Romeo and Juliet, but older people who each have rather complicated pasts. They fight constantly, a bit like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It's also a play about the decline and fall of a great civilization, Egypt, and the rise of another, Rome, and I think this is very relevant today because our country is in decline, in severe decline, and at the same time China is emerging.

▲ John Adams explores themes of racism, misogyny, and greed in his operas. Photo by Jair Cabrera Torres

–And today, China is not Mao's China, nor are the United States Nixon's, so your opera will acquire a new relevance.

–I hope so, yes.

–To return to the themes of racism, misogyny, and greed in Girls of the Golden West … your operas deal with highly charged mythical, political, and social themes, volatile, even explosive, and all very topical: The Child, The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Nixon in China , The Death of Klinghoffer, and Doctor Atomic . Do you consider yourself a highly politicized composer?

Certainly not; I don't consider myself a political composer. I choose those themes because I think they're wonderful stories and because I think audiences can relate to them. Certainly, American audiences can empathize with the issue of Chairman Mao and Chairman Nixon, and also with The Death of Klinghoffer, which is about terrorism with a religious component, and it all relates to what's happening now in Gaza; the opera expresses all of this, and Doctor Atomic is about nuclear war. These are all stories, themes that I consider suitable for artistic expression.

Let's return for a moment to the very essence of musical language and style. For several decades now, large audiences around the world have been powerfully drawn to music with repetitive structures and elements. Any theories on this?

–Of course! Because what happened with contemporary music since Schoenberg is that it lost its pulse, it lost its harmonic center, it lost the sense of the phrase, and unless you're another composer writing in the same style, it's like listening to someone speaking in a foreign language you don't understand. I believe that the essence of the musical experience is pulse, because it's the heartbeat, it's breathing, it's walking, it's the rhythm of the sun, and as for tonality, it's a fundamental human experience. I think the minimalists, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, did something historic by taking all of that and at the same time making it sound fresh.

–The New and Unusual Music concert series you founded was both very successful and controversial. What was its essence?

–That was with the San Francisco Symphony, and it was unusual because it was a classical orchestra that mostly just played Beethoven and all that, and suddenly we were doing concerts in a bar, a furniture store, a revue theater, and there was a lot of experimental music being made. Some of the musicians loved it, and just as many hated it. I then continued doing the same thing with the Los Angeles Philharmonic on a series called Green Umbrella —don't ask me why—and it's the most successful contemporary music series in the world; suddenly we have a thousand attendees coming to hear random music.

–What is the Pacific Harmony Foundation?

–It's a foundation my wife and I established to provide funding primarily for music education, with an emphasis on Black youth and children. Orchestras would like to have more Black musicians, and the problem is that children don't receive adequate training, so we provide funding to places like Oakland and Richmond in California, which are predominantly Black communities, but we also contribute to some music festivals.

–Finally, I find the vast majority of your work titles very imaginative and evocative. Your memoir is titled Hallelujah Junction , which is also the title of a 1996 piece for two pianos, alluding to a small truck stop on Highway 49, on the Nevada-California border. Is there any symbolic association in the coincidence of titles?

–None. I just think it's a great title.

– Touché , goodbye and thank you.