John Adams: evaluation

Transcript context

…I have some questions about your other works, my favorites. On the Transmigration of Souls — compositionally and orally, why does it sound so different from your other works? How would you explain that? Well, I like to think that every single one of my pieces is different. I have often said the one thing I never want to do is brand myself, produce the same predictable piece. A lot of artists fall into that, especially if they’re successful. Every piece of mine is very different from its predecessor or the one that follows it. In the case of the piece that you mentioned, On the Transmigration of Souls — this was a request from the New York Philharmonic to compose a memorial piece which was going to be performed exactly a year after the World Trade Center attacks on September 11th. It was not an assignment that I was terribly happy about because I had other plans, and it seemed like it was going to be a very difficult subject matter to deal with, this terrible tragedy and all those people who were killed. But I came up with the idea of what I called a memory space, where the various texts and words and phrases could float, so to speak, in musical space. The listener would enter into that space the way you might enter into, let’s say, a big cathedral in Europe and just be alone and experience your emotions and your thoughts as they unite with these musical objects. The musical objects came from all different things. The texts that I put together came from little handmade signs that family members left around Ground Zero, hoping that they would find their loved ones. I went to a site online where people would sign in and leave a little memory card, remembering someone who had died, and just a long list of the names of the people that had passed away as a result of those attacks. When something is commissioned from you, do you feel that more creativity is pulled from you, that there’s a certain constraint imposed on you and you’ve got to come up with something?…

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