John Adams

In his book "The Rest is Noise", Alex Ross tries to describe the music of John Adams. He writes: "It is a cut-up paradise, a stream of familar sounds arranged in unfamiliar ways. A glitzy Hollywood fanfare gives way to a translike sequence of shifting beats; billowing sounds of Wagnerian harmony are dispersed by a quartet of saxophones. It is present tense American romanticism, honouring the ghosts of Mahler and Sibelius, plugging into minimalist processes, swiping sounds from jazz and rock, browsing the files of postwar innovation. Sundry sounds are broken down and filtered through an intensely recognisable personal voice, sometime exhuberant and sometimes melancholy, sometimes hip and sometimes noble, winding its way through a fragmentary culture."
Get it? Can you hear it in your head?
No, you can't - unless you've heard some John Adams work before. If you have then that description is as good as it's possible to be, I think.
I have heard some quite short works of his and enjoyed them a lot; they're fun to hear. No tunes to speak of, mostly rythms, mostly fast ones that take you along, so to speak, on a helter skelter ride. But I had not heard any of his longer works until last night when the National Orchestra of Wales played his 1985 three movement work called "Harmonielehre". It was an astonishingly exciting experience: not so much a piece which entranced you with lovely tunes or development of themes but, rather, that thrilled you with its texture and rhythmic patterns.
"Forty triple chords set the piece in motion...." writes Alex Ross - and that describes it beautifully: "sets it in motiion" indeed. The final movement is colossal with an orchestra of about a hundred players seemingly all playing at the same time with five on timpani playing everything they have there.
I think it was Sir Thomas Beecham who said something like "musical works should be such that they can be whistled or hummed by a passengher on the Clapham omnibus". That finishes John Adams then; you couldn't whistle or hum anything of "Harmonielehre" but I wouldn't have missed it "for the world", as they say.