John Adams
John Coolidge Adams (born February 15, 1947) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer with strong roots in
minimalism. He learned the clarinet from his father and played in marching bands and community orchestras during his
formative years. He began composing at the age of ten and heard his first orchestral pieces performed while still a teenager.
The intellectual and artistic traditions of New England, especially the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Harvard University,
helped shape him as an artist and thinker. After earning two degrees from Harvard University, he moved to Northern ...read more
John Coolidge Adams (born February 15, 1947) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer with strong roots in
minimalism. He learned the clarinet from his father and played in marching bands and community orchestras during his
formative years. He began composing at the age of ten and heard his first orchestral pieces performed while still a teenager.
The intellectual and artistic traditions of New England, especially the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Harvard University,
helped shape him as an artist and thinker. After earning two degrees from Harvard University, he moved to Northern
California in 1971 and has ever since lived in the San Francisco Bay area.
Adams taught for ten years at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music before becoming Composer in Residence with the
San Francisco Symphony (1982-85) and the creator of the orchestra’s highly successful and controversial “New and Unusual
Music” series. Several of Adams’s landmark orchestral works were written for and premiered by the San Francisco
Symphony, including Harmonium (1981), Grand Pianola Music (1982), Harmonielehre (1985) and El Dorado (1992).
His well-known operas include ‘Nixon In China’ (1987), which recounts Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China 1972, and ‘Doctor
Atomic’ (2005), which covers Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project, and the building of the first atomic bomb.
John Adams’ music is published by Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishing, www.boosey.com/adams.
Adams’ official site is www.earbox.com. « hide |
