Chamber Symphony · Grand Pianola Music

Schoenberg surprised some contemporaries by citing both Wagner and Brahms, two composers seen by many as overseeing opposing musical camps, as influences on his compositional style. How then would the leader of the Second Viennese School react upon learning that he was one of two even more contradictory inspirations for John Adams' Chamber Symphony -- his counterpart being the delightfully frenzied music that accompanied 1950s cartoons? As Adams tells the story, he was studying the score of Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony, Op. 9, while his seven-year-old son watched cartoons in the next room. This odd combination resulted in one of Adams' most adventurous works, one that helped set a new musical trajectory that would distance Adams farther than ever before from his minimalist counterparts Reich and Glass. In fact, by the time the Chamber Symphony was composed, Adams' musical language had evolved into one much too free in rhythm, harmony, and melody to still be called minimalist. This trend would continue a year later with his rhapsodic and exploratory Violin Concerto.

The Chamber Symphony's frantic beginning, with its absurdly insistent percussion and caricatural accompaniment, somehow recalls both Schoenberg and Looney Tunes. Perhaps these two aesthetics are not that far apart. Composed in 1907, Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony, Op. 9, emerged at the end of his initial thrust towards atonality, but before his codification of dissonance into the twelve-tone system. Thus the work retains some remnants of traditional harmony, almost ending some phrases with tonal cadences, while maintaining an overall melodic angularity. On the other hand, the cartoon music of mid-century American television used increased dissonance as a comic tool, with dizzying chromatic runs and deliberately odd harmonies exaggerating the slapstick action on the screen. In the final analysis, the two worlds are not so far apart.

Adams proves this, composing his Chamber Symphony for an ensemble identical to the one called for in Schoenberg's Op. 9, but adds a jazz combo of sorts, including drum set, synthesizer, trombone, and trumpet. Schoenberg's obtuse lines are blended with the musical pyrotechnics that could set a cartoon land chase scene, and is done in such a way that the two elements are indiscernible at any given moment. Adams also acknowledges other influences in this amalgam, namely Milhaud's La Creation du monde, Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat, and Hindemith's Kleine Kammermusik. Occasionally, the motoric patterns and static harmonies of Adams' earlier works re-emerge in the Chamber Symphony, but by and large this piece reflects and engenders a compositional style that becomes increasingly distanced from those of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Terry Riley, and increasingly difficult to describe as minimalist.

While his minimalist colleagues Steve Reich and Philip Glass came to prominence via electronic works and works for their own repertory ensembles, John Adams made his earliest impact on the contemporary music world primarily as an orchestral composer. Calling for an ensemble of winds, percussion, sopranos, and two pianos, Grand Pianola Music (1982) recalls the music of Charles Ives in its creative synthesis of various musical styles. The listener is greeted with a wide spectrum of sonic allusions, ranging from band marches to gospel tunes, from Beethoven's sonatas to melodramatic movie-hall stylings. The result is a work that walks the line between sincerity and irony.

Grand Pianola Music is divided into three movements. The first is intense and pulsing, blocks of harmonic stasis giving rise to angular yet lush melodies. The second maintains an underlying rhythmic drive from the first, its harmonies growing ever more intriguing as the movement progresses. It is here that Adams employs the 'pianola' effect: the two pianos are given identical figures slightly out of sync with one another, creating a glimmering echo. Gradually, the pulsing chords of the movement's opening are replaced by sustained harmonies in the voices and winds, bringing the work to its most reflective moment. The third movement unfolds as a driving, entertaining finale with a sweeping, late-Romantic grandeur and a gospel-music energy marshaled by Adams' characteristically brilliant orchestration.