How do you divide your career between composing and conducting?
In the past, I really only conducted new music, and did so partly as an adjunct to my teaching. But since 1983, I have not taught at all, and I make my living strictly as a composer. I supplement my income by conducting, which, as anyone will tell you, pays much better than composing, even if you’re a very successful composer. In one weekend you can make what it would take a month to make as a composer. It’s just the way the economic set-up of the music industry is.
Is that right, or wrong, or just there?
Actually, I think it’s a little bit wrong. Conductors are highly overpaid. It’s just one of those professions which is given over to prestige and glamor, and one could almost say conductors get an unfair amount of remuneration for their efforts compared to, let’s say, the people who are playing in the orchestra and actually making the music. I also think that creative work is not properly funded or paid for in this country, although things are very, very slowly changing. Commissions for composers are improving, and now rentals and licensing, and things like that are improving.
Is composing concert music something that should make a living wage for a lot of people?
Ideally it should. The facts of life are that at any given time in history, there are only a handful of composers who are really able to capture the public’s imagination, and create works which do go into circulation. That’s just reality, and it would be rather foolish to think that thousands of composers should be able to make a living writing music. That would mean that there would be a plethora of new music around.
Have we got too many people trying to make it as composers?
Probably, but life is very cruel, and the winnowing process is quite harsh.
In your wildest dreams, when you were studying or even beginning your career, did you ever think that you would be this successful?
I’m only successful in terms of — or in comparison to — other composers of serious music. When I look at what a real success is — whether it’s a baseball player, or a venture capitalist, or a politician, or even a successful novelist like Saul Bellow, whose novels sell in the hundreds of thousands, or even millions — a successful composer, like myself, still only sells twenty or thirty thousand copies of an album. Nixon in China, which was a highly visible, high-profile musical event in the last few years, and was one of the best-selling opera recordings to come out in the last several decades, still only sold something between twenty and thirty thousand copies, which is not a huge amount of sales compared to popular music, or literature, or whatever.
Do you find the idea and technique of minimalism is a straight-jacket, or is it just something that you embrace gladly?
No, I don’t find that it’s a straight-jacket at all. I don’t think any composer would gladly put on a straight-jacket. We might call them ‘constraints’. A composer usually wants some kind of constraints, only because constraints actually make the decision-making easier, and allow you to progress without having to swim around in the sea of possibilities every time you have to put a note on the staff. I went through a period where I designed my pieces in advance quite carefully, and behaved almost like an architect, in that I had all my materials on the table. I almost drew graphs of what I was going to write. But as I progressed, and as my language matured, and my self-confidence improved, I found that I could trust my intuitive musical abilities without having to constantly consult back to a graph, or a chart, or series of numbers. I think I really knew how all of the great composers of the past — Brahms, Beethoven, Bach, Verdi — behaved when they were composing. The rules of the games, and the sensations of structure and balance, and whether something is long enough or short enough, is something that ultimately has to be an internal judgment, rather than something that can be projected on a graph on a page. One of the problems with twentieth-century music is that too many composers have trusted to the rational mathematical side of the decision-making, and have not trusted enough to their intuitive feeling side.
Was the move to minimalism and the minimalist style an inevitable outgrowth of the compression that music was going into, and the texture and the density that exploded like a supernova?
Minimalism is essentially a simple language, and for which we take a great deal of criticism from our colleagues as composers and from many other people. It is a gesture of simplicity in the same way that Mozart’s music was a gesture of simplicity when placed up against the highly complex polyphony of the High Baroque. This happens in the history of art, not just in music.
Do you feel, then, that you are part of a continuum?
Oh yes. All creators are parts of continua, no matter how avant-garde or individual we think we are. One of the points I try to make when I’m defending my style of composition is that it is extremely difficult to write something simple that is effective and original. It’s much easier to sit down with the twelve-tone row, and write something that sounds crabbed and complex and intellectual and intimidating, than it is to write something that is simple, effective, and moving, and that can directly cut across everything to the listener, and affect that person.
We’ve been dancing around this now for several minutes, so let me ask the real big question then. What is the purpose of music in society?
[Laughs] I didn’t know we were dancing around it, or I wouldn’t have waltzed! The purpose of music in society is the same as the purpose of any artistic endeavor. It’s to enrich our lives, and to maybe help us understand more about ourselves and our relationships to others. Perhaps it is to call attention to the richness of the world around us. John Cage, who for many years was ridiculed for his theories, has actually, in the long-run, seen to be right in pointing out that music should be something that refines our senses, our ears, and our bodies to the world around us. Some music can make us feel very joyful in a way that no other artform can. It can touch us on an emotional level that no other artform can, because, as Schopenhauer said [paraphrasing], music is the one art that is most intimately expressive of the human will. It goes directly from one person’s deepest self directly to another, without necessarily having to go through the intellectual rational filter.
Cage espouses the idea that all sounds are music. Do you subscribe to that theory?
I’m not exactly sure he would put it that way, that all sounds are music. I think he would say that all sounds are available for what he calls music.
Then at what point do the sounds become music?
Adams: I tend to agree with Stravinsky in what he said in his book The Poetics of Music, [again paraphrasing] that a bird song is beautiful, and an arpeggio is perhaps not as beautiful, but the bird song is a natural event, and an arpeggio, no matter how crude or simple it is, is artifice, and there is a difference between artifice and the outside world. I find that the moment Olivier Messiaen takes a bird song and writes it down, and incorporates it into a piece of his, it becomes Messiaen. It becomes artifice, and hence that is art, but I don’t think that you can really approach the entire world as a grid for art without some kind of filtering process.
Are you conscious of the audience as you are writing your music?
[Thinks a moment] That’s a very difficult question, because if I were to say yes, then I would give the impression of somebody who is pandering to the audience, and thinking, “Ah, they’ll love this one! I’ll put a fortissimo in here, and that’ll wow them!” On the other hand, if I said no, that I don’t care about the audience, and I’m only here to please myself, I would be dishonest because music is ultimately a communicative activity. All art is a communicative activity. Basically, I’m no different than any other serious composer in the sense that I’m writing to please myself, and to educate myself, and to discover myself, and one of the steps of this process — which happens to be the last step — is bringing it out in front of the public. I imagine if my pieces were booed aggressively, sure, I’d be very disturbed, and I would probably recall them, and wonder what was wrong, and perhaps change something, because nobody, unless he’s an absolute sadist, wants an audience to hate his work.
Is Nixon in China a political statement, or is it a purely musical dramatic piece?
Oh, it’s a political statement, and music theater can have a political impact. I don’t think that we can change the world, but I do think that art can help to illuminate people’s political awareness. The politics of this opera are very subtle, and this is principally Alice Goodman’s work. She’s a brilliant writer, and her psychological acuity is extraordinary. The political crux of the opera is the second scene, where Nixon and Kissinger actually meet Mao. Many Americans have lost track of the fact that Mao was very old when this event took place. He was hardly able to stand up, and Nixon took a tremendous risk when he went there, because the whole world was watching, and he didn’t know if he was actually going to get to see Mao. Mao might have been too ill to see him, or, more likely, Mao might decide that it was more politically advantageous to snub him. But, in fact he did get to see him, and from the descriptions of both Kissinger and Nixon, they were so excited about it that they could hardly contain their delight. So, we get that sense of excitement and euphoria at the beginning of the scene. There’s this persiflage [light and slightly contemptuous mockery or banter] that very often goes on with diplomats while there’s a photo opportunity. Then the doors are closed, and everyone is sent out of the room, and the real meat and potatoes of the summit happens. What I was trying to get over, and what Peter and Alice were trying to get over, was this sense of Americans, in a certain way, trying to dictate to the rest of the world, particularly to the Third World. They were trying to show them that we, since we’re wealthy, and fat, and sleek, and well fed, and have lots of cars and microwave ovens, that our way of life and our way of economics is right, and their ways are wrong, and if they were only a little smarter, and adopted our methods of economics, they too could become like us. I think that is a fatuous attitude. It’s a form of latter twentieth-century colonialism, and one of the delights of that particular scene is that Nixon trots out all these homely American platitudes, and Mao, who is not only a fierce competitor but also a brilliant philosopher, just basically makes mincemeat of Nixon, and Nixon isn’t even aware of it! He leaves the meeting thinking he’s just really told the Chairman a thing or two. So, it’s quite an ironic scene.
Has there been any reaction from Nixon about the piece?
We know that he knows everything about the opera. He’s followed it very carefully, but he’s kept mum on it. I’m just as happy that he didn’t come to any of the performances, because when you meet these people, these politicians, you discover that very often they’re very literal people, and often are upset because artistic license stretches the fact. I would imagine he’s probably upset because that it wasn’t the way it actually went at all.
Do you fear for the future of music?
I fear desperately for this country, because I’ve seen this happen in my own state of California. It’s also happening in states like Massachusetts, which formerly had very high standards, and where the voters are becoming apathetic, and selfish, and don’t want give money to the schools. So, the schools are becoming worse and worse. Music, which the Greeks understood was one of the basic disciplines of life, but which we tend to think of as simply a hobby or an adornment on our existence, is being given short shrift, and this is really where the danger lurks. We could easily, by the turn of the century, turn into a country of very poorly educated Philistines who hardly understand or appreciate serious art.
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