John Adams was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1947. He composed this work in 1995 on a commission from the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester, England, and the Oregon Symphony in Portland, Oregon. The work was premiered by the Hallé Orchestra in 1996 under the direction of Kent Nagano. The score calls for 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, piano, keyboard sampler (alternatively, celeste and small electronic organ), harp, and strings. Duration is approximately 14 minutes.
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Worcester-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 the Minimalism of his earliest pieces has gradually expanded with more romantic colors and harmonies—as well as a good deal more counterpoint—Adams has remained one of the most influential of American composers.

Slonimsky’s Earbox brings together the techniques of Adams’ earlier Minimalism with the greatly expanded sound-world of his later works. The composer writes: “Slonimsky’s Earbox marked an important turning point in my orchestral music, coming as it did after a period of harmonic and contrapuntal experimentation that began with The Death of Klinghoffer and progressed through the Chamber Symphony and Violin Concerto. The new piece seems, in retrospect, to have pointed toward a successful integration of the older Minimalist techniques (repetitive motifs, steady background pulse, and stable harmonic areas) and the more complex, more actively contrapuntal language of the post-Klinghoffer pieces. The model for this piece was the exploding first few moments of Stravinsky’s symphonic poem Le Chant du Rossignol (The Song of the Nightingale): the way Stravinsky’s orchestra bursts out in a brilliant eruption of colors, shapes, and sounds. What also attracted me was Stravinsky’s use of modal scales, a practice doubtless influenced by his Russian roots but which he abandoned soon after. I have long thought that the Russians—not only Stravinsky, but composers such as Scriabin and Tcherepnin—had begun something very important in their use of modal scales and harmonies, a direction that unfortunately was overwhelmed by more prestigious practices such as neoclassicism and serialism.

“Another Russian, Nicholas Slonimsky, who was best known in this country as the witty author of several books on music, had in 1947 compiled an exhaustive compendium of scales and melodic patterns (i.e., modes) called The Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns. Slonimsky was a character of mind-boggling abilities. He had a completely eidetic memory and could recall with absolute precision the smallest detail of something he’d read forty years before. He lived to be over a hundred, and his century spanned Czarist St. Petersburg where he was educated as a child, to Santa Monica, California, where he lived into the 1990s and where I’d come to know him. His autobiography, Perfect Pitch, stands alongside Berlioz’ memoirs as one of the few genuinely original literary works about music.

“The ‘Slonimsky’ in my title not only memorializes his wit and hyper-energetic activity, but it also acknowledged my great debt to his thesaurus, whose scales and resulting harmonies have had a singular impact on my music since the Chamber Symphony of 1992. ‘Earbox’ might be a word worthy of Slonimsky himself, a coiner who never tired of minting his own.”

© Mark Rohr 2008