John Adams: evaluation

Transcript context

…Now, you mentioned San Francisco. You first became a major orchestra conductor there, and your music has been promoted in San Francisco quite a bit — Edo de Waart. Is it an accident that this happened in San Francisco, which is a highly innovative city in other ways, or is it something that, to you, organically made sense? What is it they say? That success has to do with being prepared, and then the moment will come. I’m mangling whatever the familiar saw is, but I think that I had all the tools. I had been well trained and I loved this music, and I knew it. The opportunity came. It was a young Dutch conductor who was named to succeed Seiji Ozawa as conductor of the San Francisco Symphony. I met him; he liked me. He heard some of my music. He offered me a commission; I took it. The piece was a success, and things started to happen from there. The fact that it was San Francisco, I think, really is not critical. It could have happened in St. Louis or Minnesota or wherever. I live here because I’m very strongly affected by the landscape, the California landscape. Of course, now, it gets increasingly harder to live here because San Francisco itself has become taken over by tech. And it just experiences this unpleasantly hectic urban development, which goes hand in hand with the very distressing situation of the unhoused. Then my state — part of it is burning every summer because of climate change. There’s a mixture of delight and extreme disappointment about being a resident of California. What do you think it would take for American classical music to get a real, true foothold in European concert halls? Now, you’ve had premieres in Europe. Maybe you’re somewhat of an exception to this, but it seems that American classical music is not that significant in Europe.…

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