John Adams: evaluation

Transcript context

…When you were a young man, you wrote Leonard Bernstein a letter, and he wrote you back, of all things. If you received a highly intelligent letter from a young man today, would you write him back? [laughs] Well, it depends on what the letter was. If the letter was as snotty as the one that I wrote Leonard Bernstein, I don’t know if I’d write him back. But I was a freshman at college and just at the most obnoxious point in my life when I had very strong opinions, and Leonard Bernstein — he was who he was. He had written a piece that, even to this day, I find a little saccharine and certainly not a piece that I choose to listen to. I wrote to him, and I scolded him for not being more up-to-date and writing the proper kind of atonal or serial music that I thought one should do when I was 18 years old. He wrote me back. It was amazing. He said, “I have to do what I have to do. This is me.” That was a really important thing for me to hear. I may have not understood it at the time, but as I grew older, I realized, yes, he was absolutely right. You just have to do who you are and not pretend to be somebody else or be influenced by what the supposedly proper way to make art is. Last three questions. First, how ambitious are you?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.