Harmonium, for chorus and orchestra
John Coolidge Adams was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on February 15, 1947, and lives in Berkeley, California. He wrote Harmonium on a commission from the San Francisco Symphony and Chorus at the request of then-music director Edo de Waart to celebrate the inaugural season of Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. The work is dedicated to Edo de Waart. He led the San Francisco in the world premiere performance on April 15, 1981.
The score of Harmonium calls for large mixed SATB chorus (soprano, alto, tenor, bass) with an orchestra of 4 flutes (2nd, 3rd, and 4th all doubling piccolo), 3 oboes, 3 clarinets (3rd doubling bass clarinet), 2 bassoons, contrabassoon (doubling 3rd bassoon), 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, 4 percussion (glockenspiel, metallophone, xylophone, 2 marimbas, cowbells, tubular bells, triangle, anvil, sizzle cymbal, suspended cymbal, crash cymbals, crotales, tambourine, medium and large tom-toms, bass drum) harp, celesta, piano (also plays synthesizer), strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).
In the summer of 1971, John Adams packed his belongings into a weather-beaten Volkswagen Beetle and, drawn westward by the pull of the counterculture, he began the long drive from Boston to California’s Bay Area. At the time, Adams was a 24-year-old aspiring composer seeking new horizons. He had grown up exclusively in New England — first in small towns in Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire, and later at Harvard, where he attended college and caught the attention of Boston musical insiders as an occasional BSO clarinet substitute. Although Adams stayed on at Harvard for a few more years to complete a master’s degree in composition, he quickly concluded that he lacked the temperament for Ivy League seminar rooms. Instead, he did what so many creative minds and free thinkers, from the Beats to the hippies, did in that era: he relocated to San Francisco, which had played host to the Summer of Love a few years earlier and was still coursing with anti-establishment energy. Adams has been a Bay Area resident ever since. Widely considered this country’s leading, even its most characteristic, symphonic and operatic composer, he has long held that his musical language would not be what it is had he not become a Californian. For the man with the archetypal Yankee name, it was a tale as old as the United States: westward migration as a means of self-discovery and reinvention.
Having found his new spiritual home, Adams spent most of the 1970s in search of a compositional language. Two creative tendencies proved formative. The first was the burgeoning field of electronic music. Already in Boston, Adams began spending time in the tape studio, but in California he embraced do-it-yourself electronics with maverick gusto. Jerry-building his own modular synthesizer, Adams used it to generate rippling, shimmering swells of sound. This may seem ironic for a man known today primarily as a composer of symphonic and operatic scores. In fact, one of the through-lines of the first half of Adams’s career was his gradual incorporation of concepts and effects he discovered by working with electronics into his writing for acoustic instruments.
No less decisive was the minimalism of Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. By the mid-1970s, Adams had become disenchanted with the rebellious stance of much musical experimentalism, and the minimalists’ renewed embrace of consonance, pulsation, and repetition gave him a sense of license to pursue similar directions. Adams was also fast to distance himself from some of the style’s more rigid, systematic aspects: desiring greater scope for surprise and dramatic contrast, he was already describing himself in 1980 as “a minimalist who is bored with minimalism.” Still, as Adams states in his program note for Harmonium (reprinted below), what he took away from minimalist procedures was the possibility of constructing large-scale forms out of seemingly humble musical building blocks — a principle very much in the symphonic mold of Bruckner and Sibelius. The principle continues to serve Adams well even today, when his music has long since transcended the “minimalist” and “postminimalist” labels.
Although it was not the first piece in which Adams honed a mature compositional voice, Harmonium was the score that began to establish his reputation outside specialist Bay Area new music circles. In turn, it opened the doors that would lead to later landmarks like Adams’s operas Nixon in China (1987) and Doctor Atomic (2005). The earliest of a remarkable nine works commissioned or co-commissioned over the past 45 years by Adams’s hometown orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony, Harmonium was written at the behest of its then-conductor, Edo de Waart. The 1980-81 season was the first in the SFS’s now-permanent home, Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall, and de Waart asked Adams for a choral symphony to celebrate the milestone. In his memoir, Hallelujah Junction, Adams confesses that he was unnerved by the request:
I suddenly found that I’d had dropped in my lap a major commission from an “establishment” arts organization to be premiered in a high-profile setting. This was not something I had experienced before, and in truth I was not certain what I would do. […] I puzzled over how I might put my newly discovered musical language to use for such grand forces and how to fill a hall of more than 3,000 seats with sound. Up to that point my music had been almost entirely chamber music or electronic pieces. I could make as imposing a sound as anyone with loudspeakers, but the idea of producing a full panoply of orchestral and choral texture without resorting to synthesizers and electronics was daunting.
Deciding how to use the chorus was particularly challenging. As Adams indicates, at the time he had limited experience composing for voices, and his initial impulse was to treat the chorus like an electronic sound generator — a gigantic human synthesizer. Dispensing with text, the vocalists would sing vowels and syllables, which Adams would sculpt into larger, abstract forms. This helps explain the idea for Harmonium’s first pages, which occurred to Adams at an early date:
Harmonium began with a simple, totally formed mental image: that of a single tone emerging out of a vast, empty space and, by means of a gentle unfolding, evolving into a rich, pulsating fabric of sound. This wordless “preverbal” creation scene describes the opening of the piece, and it was fixed in my mind’s eye long before I had even made the decision whether or not to use a text. Some time passed before I was able to get beyond this initial image. I had an intuition of what the work would feel like, but I could not locate the poetic voice to give it shape.
While Adams ultimately concluded that doing without text would be too much of an expressive constraint, Harmonium retains vestiges of the original “sound generator” concept. At times, the chorus sings syllables like “no,” “ne,” and “ya,” sometimes as a contribution to the ensemble texture, and at other moments, as a kind of ecstatic “decomposition” of the poetic texts.
Adams’s next idea was to set verse by Wallace Stevens. Finding Stevens’s playful abstraction and modernist compression foreign to his needs, Adams rejected this plan, too. Ever the magpie, he did take one thing from Stevens — the work’s title, which he borrowed from that of Stevens’s first published collection. Referring to a reed organ, but derived from the Latin term for harmony, the word “harmonium” neatly encapsulates one of Adams’s core artistic priorities in the early 1980s: the use of consonant harmony, produced collectively by musicians working in concord, as a delineator of long-range compositional form.
In the end, Adams set three poems — one by John Donne (1572-1631) and a pair by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). All are “metaphysical” texts that delight in paradox, elaborate metaphors, and big questions about human existence. Aptly, Adams describes them as writings of “transcendental vision.” In part, this can be understood as a nod at the New England transcendentalism of Emerson, Thoreau, and Charles Ives. Certainly, it is telling that Adams gravitated towards Dickinson, the quintessential poet of “New Englandly” thinking, when tackling the commission that introduced him to a wide audience. In moving to California, it turns out, Adams never really turned his back on his Yankee roots. A bit like the naturalist and Thoreau disciple John Muir, it seems, Adams had come to see California as the true inheritor of the self-reliant, non-conformist ethos of New England transcendentalism. This theme would become increasingly explicit later in such works as his September 11 memorial piece On the Transmigration of Souls (2002) and his orchestral triptych My Father Knew Charles Ives (2003). The latter concludes with a movement that draws a parallel between the New Hampshire mountains of his childhood and the far more rugged peaks of northern California.
Harmonium’s first movement sets Donne’s “Negative Love,” which has sometimes gone by the alternate title “The Nothing.” Likely written in the 1590s, Donne’s text probes the difficulties associated with defining love. The poem invokes Christian negative theology, which held that God could only be understood indirectly, in terms of what He is not. With a cutting skepticism that has resonated with contemporary readers, Donne concludes that this is for the best: because he is incapable of defining love positively, he can never be dissatisfied by it. Adams says he has been criticized for glossing over the niceties of Donne’s thought, but he also points out that his focus was on the formal possibilities suggested by “Negative Love” — in his words, “a soaring arrow, a vector pointing upward, its ascent impelled by ever-increasing rhythmic and sonic energy.” Characteristic of Harmonium, “Negative Love” shifts to new tonal centers whenever new text is introduced. Generating a sense of large-scale forward motion, the tonal shifts produce what Adams describes as “a kind of celestial gear shifting,” as if this was music drifting across vast, cathedral-like spaces.
“Negative Love” begins with Adams’s “preverbal” conceit: the music emerges out of nothing, with the altos quietly repeating the syllable “no.” Once most of the middle and high-pitched forces have entered, weaving a placid but radiant sonic tapestry, Donne’s first words are heard: “I never stoop’d so low.” In a propulsive, clockwork passage, the chorus-narrator sings of the superiority of its love. A brief instrumental interlude featuring Sibelius-style string tremolos demarcates Donne’s two stanzas. Now Adams divides the soprano and alto voices into a pair of mini-choruses in a section that shows the lingering influence of the sound generator concept. Playing games of canonic imitation, the mini-choruses repeat Donne’s phrases until they are dissolved of meaning: having become pure sound, they embody the poem’s theme of ineffability. Soon, the chorus reverts to the repeating syllables “no” and “dat,” here vigorously turbocharged. They initiate a headlong accelerando, which culminates in a brassy, percussive peroration: “If any who deciphers best / What we know not, our selves, can know.” A calm coda glints with keyboards and string harmonics. Women’s voices deliver Donne’s cutting kicker, sung “childlike” and without vibrato.
For Harmonium’s slow movement, Adams selected one of Dickinson’s most celebrated poems, “Because I Could Not Stop For Death.” Its flow of vivid imagery, centered upon a cortège driven by Death, appealed for autobiographical reasons. Of his early childhood in East Concord, New Hampshire, Adams recalls that “only a few minutes’ walk from our front door, there was a cemetery, and many of the graves dated from the same time that Emily Dickinson lived not far away in Amherst, Massachusetts.” (Adams slightly exaggerates the proximity between the two towns.)
The music begins in suspended animation, reflecting Death’s lack of haste. Gloomy strokes of percussion, harp, and piano mark the carriage horses’ tread. After hushed repetitions of “I put away my labor,” an innocent ascending flute melody registers the horses’ passage by a schoolyard “where children played.” Tuba and contrabass caresses create an impression of sepulchral depth, heralding the procession’s climactic arrival at the grave, which Dickinson figures as a dwelling: “a house that seemed / A swelling of the Ground.” Following a return to the muted ambiance of the start, the chorus conveys the recognition that the cortège’s destination is not everlasting life (“Immortality”), but something more terrifying: the nothingness of “eternity.” Here Adams uses the gentle peal of alpine bells to provide consolation. Borrowing a page from Mahler, the bells gesture toward a realm beyond worldly suffering.
As the final choral resonances expire, so begins a churning instrumental passage that Adams likens to the Buddhist bardo state, the bridge between death and reincarnation. It leads without pause into the roaring, pealing billows of “Wild Nights.” With its oceanic imagery, the text exults in Adams’s own “rebirth” on the Pacific. The frank eroticism of “Wild Nights” has always challenged the stereotyped picture of Dickinson as virginal spinster, and her lines elicited from Adams a music of ecstatic impetus and sonic superabundance that seems — but is not — electronically augmented. In full-throated octaves that fulfill Adams’s vision of voices “riding upon waves of rippling sound,” the chorus delivers the first stanza. Later, leaping high voices are “Done with the chart, / Done with the Compass”: having found safe harbor in their lover, the narrator is no longer obliged to embark on the tides of fortune.
When the roaring pealing returns, feral trombone glissandos ratchet the intensity further, until a climax is reached in which the words “wild nights” morph into yelps of pleasure. What follows is postlude. A whispered passage lingers over the phrase “Were I with thee,” as if to underline the suppositional, unrealized character of the narrator’s desires. In Adams’s rapt setting of Dickinson’s final stanza, melodic shapes float like so many sea vessels atop the continuous undulation of the word “rowing.” The final lines, “Might I but moor Tonight / In thee,” are suffused with a longing that leaves it unclear whether the narrator has reached their amorous “Eden” or simply imagined it. Concluding with a series of lyrical brass orations, Harmonium fades back into the silence from which it originated.
Matthew Mendez
Matthew Mendez is a San Francisco-based musicologist and critic who specializes in 20th- and 21st-century repertoire. He received a Ph.D. in music history from Yale University and is currently a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at Stanford University. Mr. Mendez was the recipient of a 2016 ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award for outstanding music journalism.
The first Boston Symphony Orchestra performances of Harmonium were led by Simon Rattle on February 28, March 1, and March 2, 1981, with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, John Oliver, conductor, at Symphony Hall.
John Adams on Harmonium
Harmonium (1980) and Shaker Loops (1978) represent my first mature statements in a language that was born out of my initial exposure to Minimalism. From the very start my own brand of Minimalism began to push the envelope. What was orderly and patiently evolving in the works of Reich or Glass was in my works already subject to violent changes in gesture and mood. In Shaker Loops, for example, I utilized the repetitive techniques that Terry Riley first proposed in his ensemble piece, In C. But rather than set up small engines of motivic materials and let them run free in a kind of random play of counterpoint, I used the fabric of continually repeating cells to forge large architectonic shapes, creating a web of activity that, even within the course of a single movement, was more detailed, more varied, and knew both light and dark, serenity and turbulence.
Harmonium was composed in 1980 in a small studio on the third floor of an old Victorian house in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Those of my friends who knew both the room and the piece of music were amused that a piece of such spaciousness should emerge from such cramped quarters. The title of the work was all that survived from my initial intention to set poems from Wallace Stevens’s collection of the same name. After I realized that Stevens’s language and rhythmic sense was not my own, I cast far and wide for a text to satisfy a musical image that I had in mind. That image was one of human voices–many of them–riding upon waves of rippling sound. Ultimately I settled on three poems of transcendental vision. “Negative Love” by John Donne examines the qualities of various forms of love, ascending in the manner of Plato’s Symposium, from the carnal to the divine. I viewed this “ascent” as a kind of vector, having both velocity and direction. Musically, this meant a formal shape that began with a single, pulsing note (a D above middle C) that, by the process of accretion, becomes a tone cluster, then a chord, and eventually a huge, calmly rippling current of sound that takes on energy and mass until it eventually crests on an immense cataract of sound some ten minutes later. To date, I still consider “Negative Love” one of the most satisfying architectural experiments in all my work.
The two Dickinson poems show the polar opposites of her poetic voice. “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” is the intimate, hushed Dickinson, whose beyond-the-grave monologue is a sequence of images from a short life, a kind of pastoral elegy expressed through the lens of a slow-motion camera. Like Aaron Copland before me, I unknowingly set the bowdlerized version of the original, being unaware at the time that the poet’s original version differed significantly in syntax from the more smoothed-out, conventional version made by Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
Following the last palpitations of the slow movement the music enters a transition section, a kind of bardo stage between the end of one life and the beginning of a new one. Again, as in “Negative Love,” the music gradually assumes weight, force and speed until it is hurled headlong into the bright, vibrant clangor of “Wild Nights.” Here is the other side of Emily Dickinson, saturated with an intoxicated, ecstatic, pressing urge to dissolve herself in some private and unknowable union of eros and death. The metaphors, at once violent and sexually hypercharged, play upon the image of a “heart in port”, secure and out of danger from the wild storm-tossed sea. So much has been written about Emily Dickinson, and her mysterious persona has been subjected to so much speculative analysis, that it is always a shock to encounter these texts alone and away from any kind of exegesis.