2013-03-01
4 分钟Howard Goodall and Suzy Klein discuss The Chairman Dances by John Adams
The story of music in 50 pieces with Howard Goodall and Susie Klein.
Howard, we're getting towards the close of our story of music in 50 pieces, and we've landed very firmly in America in the 1980s with John Adams, probably one of the most successful popular, cerebrally together and yet wildly successful composers of the last 50 years.
Why is that?
Well, I think that perhaps american composers were less shackled by the past than their european counterparts in the 20th century, which is why what I see in the cocktail that makes up a John Adams piece of music is the european musical tradition.
You hear bits of Debussy in his opera Nixon in China.
You hear bits of jazz, you hear bits of popular music, you hear his classical background coming through.
But you also hear the influence of Bernard Herrmann, the film composer, composer who wrote Psycho and vertigo.
In fact, vertigo and north by northwest are quite interesting templates for the music of John Adams.
Quite a big canvas of a sound, a big orchestra, but playing in a very rhythmic, pulsey way.
But interesting that Bernard Herrmann comes out of the european tradition and comes to America and comes to movies and that that kind of musical language starts becoming really rooted in what goes on in America.
It has a new sound.
It takes the sound of Europe and pushes it into the future.
Yes, I think in crude terms, you'd say rhythmic pulse is what's going on in american music in a way that's very different from what they inherited from the european composers.
We're not going into too much detail.
The early writers of film music in Hollywood, Franz Waxman, Eric Korngold, and there Miklos Rosher and other Europeans came to America, started writing film music, which was basically austrian.
Late 19th century classical music put into films quite soon into the 1940s, the influence of dance and popular music, a rigid pulse starts to work its way into orchestral music in America.
And that pulse, that sense of driving force which you hear in John Adams almost all the time.
And, of course, you hear it in minimalist composers as a whole, as a genre.
But in Adams, it's never far away.
Piano concerto is very rhythmic, influenced by all sorts of stripe piano traditions, etcetera.