Del Sol Featured Composer-
John Adams

photo by Deborah O'Grady


John Adams

One of America’s most admired and frequently performed composers, John Adams was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1947. After graduating from Harvard University in 1971, he moved to California, where he taught and conducted at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music for ten years. His innovative concerts led to his appointment firstly as contemporary music adviser to the San Francisco Symphony and then as the orchestra’s composer-in-residence between 1979 and 1985, the period in which his reputation became established with the success of such works as Harmonium and Harmonielehre. Recordings on the New Albion and ECM labels were followed in 1986 by an exclusive contract with Nonesuch Records, an association that continues today.

In 1985, Adams began a collaboration with the poet Alice Goodman and stage director Peter Sellars that resulted in two operas, Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, worldwide performances of which made them among the most performed operas in recent history. A third stage work, I Was Looking At The Ceiling And Then I Saw The Sky, a “song play” with libretto by the poet June Jordan, was also staged in more than fifty performances in both the US and Europe. El Ni–o, a further collaboration with Peter Sellars, was premiered in Paris in December 2000. In 2002 Adams composed On the Transmigation of Souls for the New York Philharmonic, a work written in commemoration of the first anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks. This work received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Music. My Father Knew Charles Ives, a musical self-portrait of the composer’s childhood in Concord, NH, where he played in marching bands with his father and first heard live jazz in the summer dance hall owned by his grandfather. Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony premiered the work in April of 2003.

Future projects include a new opera, working title: Doctor Atomic, based on the life of Robert Oppenheimer, commissioned by the San Francisco Opera for premiere in September of 2005, and a new orchestral work for Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic, due in early 2006.

In celebration of a fifteen-year partnership, in 1999 Nonesuch Records released The John Adams Earbox, a 10-CD compilation comprising almost all of the composer’s music over a twenty-year period.