John Adams
The Dharma at Big Sur Concerto for electric violin & orchestra
John Adams was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1947. He composed this
work in 2003 and the work had its premiere with Tracy Silverman, violin,
the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting, the
same year. The score calls for solo violin, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet,
4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, 2 harps, piano,
and two samplers. Duration is approximately 27 minutes.
*****
Worcester, Massachusetts native John Adams graduated from Harvard in 1971,
then joined the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory for ten years.
He has had a long relationship with the San Francisco Symphony, where he
was composer-in-residence for six years. He is perhaps best known for his
operas Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, but he
has also contributed major works for orchestra such as his Chamber Symphony,
Violin Concerto, and On the Transmigration of Souls, for
which he received the Pulitzer Prize for composition in 2003. While he
was often lumped into the category of “minimalist” composers early in
his career, his music was never so narrowly construed; today he counts
as one of the most influential—and thoughtful—of American composers.
Mr. Adams writes the following about The Dharma at Big Sur:
“The Dharma at Big Sur was composed in 2003 for the opening of
Disney Hall in Los Angeles. This new building was designed by the great
Frank Gehry with whom I’d collaborated twenty years earlier on a piece
called Available Light for the choreographer Lucinda Childs. Even
in its earliest planning stages, Disney Hall promised to be more than just
another concert hall. With the sweeping, silver-toned clouds and sails
of its exterior and with its warm and inviting public spaces, the opening
of this building embodied a watershed moment in the history of West Coast
culture. When I was asked by Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s
Music Director, to compose a special piece for the opening, I immediately
began searching my mind for an image, either verbal or pictorial, that
could summon up the feelings of being an emigrant to the Pacific Coast—as
I am, and as are so many who’ve made the journey here, both physically
and spiritually.
“I wanted to express the moment, the so-called ‘shock of recognition,’
when one reaches the edge of the continental land mass. On the Atlantic
coast, the air seems to announce it with its salty taste and briny scents.
Coming upon the California coast is a different experience altogether.
Rather than gently yielding ground to the water the Western shelf drops
off violently, often from dizzying heights, as it does at Big Sur, the
stretch of coastal precipice midway between Santa Cruz and Santa Barbara.
Here the current pounds and smashes the littoral in a slow, lazy rhythm
of terrifying power. For a newcomer the first exposure produces a visceral
effect of great emotional complexity. Many writers have tried to describe
it directly, but Jack Kerouac did it best. In both his poetry and his novels
he comes the closest to evoking my own sense of liberation and excitement,
an ecstasy that is nevertheless tinged with that melancholy expressed in
the first of Buddha’s Four Noble Truths: ‘All life is sorrowful.’
“My first plan was to compose an orchestral work that would feature an
actor—I had Willem Dafoe in mind—reading some of these essential Kerouac
visions from the poems, from the early ‘road’ books and from that later
alcoholic dark night of the soul he describes in Big Sur. The Beat poets
were the first American artists to take Buddhism seriously and introduce
its philosophical tenets into their literature. Anyone who doubts Kerouac’s
seriousness about Buddhism need only open the writer’s posthumously published
Some of the Dharma, an immense collection of personal notes, studies,
revelations, communications, and confessions, all having to do with his
study of Buddhism and all written in the mid-1950s during the period of
his greatest inspiration.
“But my plan took a sudden sharp turn when I heard Tracy Silverman play
the electric violin at an Oakland, California jazz club in 2002. A classically
trained, Juilliard-educated violinist, Tracy had left off playing the classical
repertory soon after his graduation. Restless with the tedium of repeating
the classical repertory and trying to fit into the narrow job description
of violin virtuoso, Tracy had developed his own unique style of violin
playing that was a marvel of aggressiveness, the product of his having
digested everything from Stefan Grapelli to the Indian saranghi to bluegrass,
Robert Johnson and Terry Riley.
“When I listened to Tracy play I was reminded that in almost all cultures
other than the European classical one, the real meaning of the music is
in between the notes. The slide, the portamento, the ‘blue note’—all
are essential to the emotional expression, whether it’s a great Indian
master improvising on a raga or whether it’s Jimi Hendrix or Johnny Hodges
bending a blue note right down to the floor. Classical Western music, from
Bach to the present, is dominated by the discrete twelve notes of the equal-tempered
scale, those seven white keys and five black keys so ironically imprinted
on our consciousness. From the time of Bach, the piano became the principal
vehicle for musical conceptualizing, and since then Western art music has
confined itself to these discrete pitches. Sliding or portamento, so common
in jazz, rock, blues, and in the music of non-Western cultures, was downgraded
in Western art music to the status of expressive eccentricities, something
you might hear in the fiddling of a Mischa Elman or in the old recordings
conducted by Wilhelm Mengelberg or Stokowski but not in normal ‘classical’
playing. Whether it was Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, a Chopin nocturne
or Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, emotive power in the European art
music tradition was the product of only the twelve discrete tones. Try
to imagine an expressive ‘slide’ in the middle of a Bach motet and you
could only think of it as an indecency, whereas in African or Middle Eastern
religious music, the ‘keening’ or ululation of the singer is an expression
of the highest devotion.
“Hearing Tracy Silverman play his six-string electric violin immediately
reminded me not only of the great jazz and rock performers and Pakistani
qawwali singers like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (where the real music is in
the slide between the notes), but it also made me think of the prose style
of Jack Kerouac, so deeply influenced by his listening to the rhythms and
melodic arcs of improvised jazz. And this is how The Dharma at Big Sur
eventually took its final shape.
“My goal in composing was to make music for the soloist that sounded as
rhapsodic and spontaneous as possible, as if the melodies were being invented
on the spot. This was no small challenge, because I wanted to compose every
detail with minute attention to the phrasings and to the way that the soloist
fit into the orchestral tapestry. I listened to music from many sources,
both vocal and instrumental. The Persian kamancheh virtuoso, Kayan Kalhor,
taught me how important ‘dirt’ can be in the grainy attack of the bow
against the string.
“The Dharma at Big Sur is in two parts, each dedicated to a West
Coast composer who had been both a friend and an inspiration to me, Lou
Harrison and Terry Riley. The first part, ‘A New Day,’ is a long rhapsodic
reverie for the solo violin, an ‘endless melody’ that soars above the
stillness of an orchestral drone with its quietly pulsating gongs and harps
and distant brass chords.
“The first version of this ‘concerto after Kerouac’ called for the soloist
and the orchestra to play in ‘just’ intonation, that is, with intervals
between the notes of the scale differently tuned than in the conventional
manner. I spent more than a month in my home studio carefully tuning my
synthesizers and samplers to represent exactly the special tunings I wanted.
‘A New Day’ is an homage to Lou Harrison, who lived not far from Big
Sur and who was the first significant American to compose in other tuning
systems. But at the first rehearsal in Los Angeles I realized almost immediately
and to my intense distress that the seventy players in the orchestra could
not possibly agree on the minute distinctions between frequencies that
I’d required in their parts. Furthermore brass instruments, being coils
of long tubing, were unpredictable and capricious in their resonant characteristics.
In later performances I had to revert to a more standard tuning for most
of the orchestra, but I was still able to keep the strange ‘natural’
intervals of the brass partials and the otherworldly resonances of the
harps, samplers, and piano, who remain tuned to a special ‘just’ scale
based on B major.
“The long, moody, intensely lyrical first part, ‘A New Day,’ reaches
a climactic moment when the orchestra, so long in the background, surges
up and takes over the melody from the soloist. After a delicately cacophonous
shower of tintinnabulations from the harps, piano, samplers, and tuned
cowbells, the tempo takes on a defined pulse, not unlike the jod, or medium
tempo section of a classical raga. The solo violin juggles a jazz-infused
melody that gradually expands in scope and tessitura. This is ‘Sri Moonshine,’
a tip of the hat to Terry Riley, not only the composer of In C and
A Rainbow in Curved Air, but also a master of Indian raga singing.
The easygoing roll of the rhythm gives way to a more insistent throb, producing
a dance-like effect like a gigantic, pulsing gamelan. The solo violin flies
high and swoops down like a seagull moving in a wind storm. The brass instruments,
so quiet and reserved in the beginning of the piece, now fill the acoustic
space with great surging walls of resonance. Low-tuned gongs mark the inner
structure of the music as it vibrates over and over on one enormous, ecstatic
expression of ‘just B.’”
Reprinted with kind permission of www.earbox.com
—Mark Rohr
|
