John Adams: preference

Transcript context

…You’ve also done an oratorio, El Niño. What do you see as the overall role of Christianity in your body of work? I grew up going to church. My mother went to church, I think mostly because she loved to sing in the choir. She was brought up as a Catholic, and then we started going to the Episcopal Church and ended up in the Unitarian Church, which is a very New England thing, which is where I grew up, in New England. I’m not a practicing Christian. I don’t go to church, but I’m very drawn to some of these biblical stories because they’re archetypal. They reflect, in myth and symbolism, the deepest of our human experience. In the case of El Niño, an oratorio that I wrote for the millennium — it’s about birth. On the surface, it’s a story of the nativity, of Mary conceiving and giving birth to Jesus, and the flight into Egypt, but it’s also a larger story. It’s about birth, and particularly about the women’s experience of it. For that, my collaborator, Peter Sellars, and I found a lot of texts by women, particularly by Hispanic women from Mexico and Chile, that told first-hand the experience of birth. And I like doing that because Handel’s Messiah, which of course treats the same material, just comes from the Bible. And that’s all guys talking about it, and really, what do they know about labor and the pain of parturition and motherhood? I think that makes my oratorio quite different. Why can’t other people conduct Shaker Loops well?…

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