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Published: Monday, 20 January 2025 at 09:40 AM
American classical music: ten US composers reveal the American masterpiece that inspired them
We talk to ten of today’s leading US composers about the works from their homeland that have most inspired them.
Nico Muhly
What I find about great about John Adams’s music is that it is so large. He’s a symphonist and a composer of operas, and he dominates the orchestral idiom in America.
He also shows a way to have an eclectic set of influences without feeling like it’s so deliberate. Because we as Americans have had access to so many different traditions, you can end up with too much on your plate. What John Adams lets in and what he keeps out is fascinating.
Adams’s Harmonielehre is a distillation of all of his previous work. There are traces of Shaker Loops and The Phrygian Gate, but what makes it different is that it is fully weaponised emotionally. Coming out of that tradition of repetitive gestures and into the visceral power that the first minute of Harmonielehre feels like a sort of geological birth. Adams takes the tropes of traditional Minimalist repetition and drags them through Mahlerian and Wagnerian idioms.
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What you end up with is so synthesised. It’s very American, taking different things from within your tradition and motorising them. The third movement has this gridwork of piano, celesta, harp and pitched percussion, and then this glorious long swan melody appears on top of it. Suddenly the whole thing gets electrified – it’s an amazing connection between rubato lyricism and gridded motor.
George Crumb
Of all American composers, Charles Ives has had the biggest influence on me. He was the first really important US composer. He wasn’t basing his music on the German style. A couple of the Ives works are influenced by European music, but all the well-known pieces are different from any other music. There’s an American quality that comes out very strongly.
I’ve played some of his music myself – the violin sonatas – and I love his songs. Ives can juxtapose these wonderful passages from folk music or hymn tunes, and then surround them with his own quite modern harmonic style. I do a lot of that in my own music. There’s a mystical quality about it. You hear the sound of a hymn tune in the strings in The Unanswered Question, and then you have the trumpet phrases out of the style altogether, like some other world coming in.
Then you have something that sounds like a little jazz quotation worked in. I just love anything that breaks the sense of a unified style of one period. The Unanswered Question is so dramatic in this sense: it has layers of music with different meanings. It’s something he does in his symphonic works too, and certainly in his string quartets.
Julia Wolfe
With his Music for 18 Instruments, Steve Reich created sounds that weren’t there before: the reverberation that he creates by the doubling of the instruments and the constant pulsation that makes you feel like you are inside the music.
It’s a very American sound. And certainly there are wonderful and interesting counterparts that relate to that era of music in Europe, but this is one of the landmark moments in American music history that shook up my ears and made me think ‘Woah! What kind of music is that?’. I’d never heard that kind of sound before. That’s a great feeling, not knowing where the music is coming from or what it’s about.
I think that for the American sensibility, hearing the united force of players and the composite sound is what that piece is all about. You can’t really pinpoint individual moments. Certainly you hear different timbres jump out and change over the course of the piece, but its power is in the equalisation of the players and how each part makes the whole, so there’s a sense of musical community within the piece.
Michael Gordon
I grew up playing puzzles with my father. He would always come home from work with some kind of mind twister or puzzle or something. My mother was a member of a record club, which would send you a record every month. Once, when I was about 14 years old, a record arrived which she handed to me. She said, ‘I don’t know what this is but maybe you’ll like it’.
I put it on my record player, and the first piece on the record was the Sonata for flute, oboe, cello and harpsichord by Elliott Carter. I heard the most frightening, dense, weird, strange, ugly and incomprehensible sounds, not like any music I had ever heard. But it was a puzzle. I was used to figuring things out, so I started trying to figure it out, and that led me really to a whole love of contemporary music. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Carter uses a very dense and internal language that was very foreign. I had been playing the piano, been playing classical music and listening to rock music and there was nothing – I had never heard anything that was in any way atonal or dissonant on this level.
At first you hear this thing that doesn’t make any sense, but on repeated hearings you start to find the melodies that sounded disjointed. You start to hear bookmarks; you start to hear signposts that happen along the way. And after a while what happens is that the piece hasn’t changed, but you’ve changed.
David Lang
As a young composer I got an incredible chill when I realised I was standing on a bridge over the Housatonic at Stockbridge, which is of course an incredible piece by Charles Ives.
Growing up in LA, I thought all culture happened in Europe, but historic things happened in the US too. That was important to me, as were Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach and Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, but the piece that’s had the most effect on me in terms of what my music actually does is Steve Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain.
It’s the first work I heard that made me think that music wasn’t just about harmony, instruments and orchestration, but was an idea or concept. You originally think your job as a composer is to micromanage: what are the notes? Who plays what? But then you realise that what makes something powerful from start to finish is the big decision. It’s the structure, the form.
It’s Gonna Rain is completely uninterested in the detailed, momentary decisions. It’s about convincing people that the experience in front of them is music. That was a very powerful idea and still is revolutionary. I often think that a composer’s job is to say, ‘Here’s something amazing. Listen to it’.
John Corigliano
Aaron Copland was certainly a huge influence on me, especially as a young composer. Appalachian Spring is a work that defines American music to me, and I was influenced by that kind of American thought of simplicity, directness and tonality in a simple but unusual way.
Copland was greatly influenced by Stravinsky, particularly the way Stravinsky freed up the German School’s idea of the quaver and the bar line as immovable: he emancipated the quaver. The other thing Copland did was to simplify the idea of the complex doublings in orchestration that were so much a European idiom. Appalachian Spring has not a note too many, no doublings at all, not even in the big orchestral version. It’s simple, clean orchestration.
Copland’s influence gave American music a kind of pulse and vigour that I don’t see in European music as much. The kind of urgent free use of rhythm is not something that Europe took on. If you listen to my early music, you see how influenced it is by this Americana school of writing.
But one of the reasons my music is difficult is because it has lots of metre changes, and the metre changes are very American. You find European conductors don’t like that. But my language has changed over the years – I’m now 78 years old!
Augusta Read Thomas
It was virtually impossible for me to choose just one work that has influenced me. My own work is a conglomeration of thousands of influences. Being an American, I’ve been listening to jazz for my entire life, and it has become something so deep inside me and my culture. But on another tangent, composers like William Schuman, Elliott Carter and Edgard Varèse all have a completely different vocabulary, which has also been important.
Varèse is special because although Intégrales was written almost a century ago, to me it still sounds incredibly fresh. The piece is scored just for woodwinds, brass and percussion, and he uses very particular colours like the E flat clarinet, the high woodwinds and the low contrabass trombone, and so he has extreme registers.
His use of percussion instruments is very rich: they have their own line, their own meaning, their own ways of being, and their own material. They are no longer just dinging off the entrance of a flute note or something similar, they really bring a whole other layer to the piece. He also uses certain motifs that recur over and over again, and get passed around the ensemble. It’s so ritualistic and vivid. I write a lot for percussion, and there is definitely a percussion sensibility that I always look back to Varèse for.
When he wrote this piece he’d been in the United States for almost a decade (he was born in Paris), and I can only imagine how fresh it would have sounded. I know that it got terrible reviews at the time – people didn’t get it. But now, as far as I’m concerned, it’s a classic.
Steve Reich
I discovered the music of John Coltrane [one of the greatest saxophonists of all time] when I was still going to the Juilliard in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I then began studying at North College near the bay area in San Francisco in 1961 and in 1963 I was studying with Luciano Berio. At night I was going to the jazz workshop where I heard John Coltrane and his quartet play many, many times, once with [saxophonist] Eric Dolphy as well.
Coltrane wrote Africa [from the Africa/Brass album] in 1961, but I probably didn’t hear it until 1962. It is a unique piece of music in that it is on one chord for 16 or 17 minutes which was not something that had been done in jazz or in any other Western music that I’m aware of. How did it remain interesting?
Through the incredible melodic invention of John Coltrane, sometimes beautiful melodies, sometimes screaming through his instrument, through rhythmic complexity by the drummer Elvin Jones who was probably the most polyrhythmic drummer that ever played jazz, and through the timbral variety that Eric Dolphy scored for the brass.
You have glissandos in the French horns that sound like a herd of elephants going through the jungle… So if you can change a timbre and have melodic variety and rhythmic complexity, you can stay on E, the low note in the double bass, for 16 or 17 minutes and still make a really good piece of music. That is a real lesson.
Joan Tower
George Crumb’s Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale) is a work that changed my life. Before I first heard it I was very involved with serialism, 12-tone music, and I was active as a performer playing the music of Schoenberg, Webern and Berg… those types of composers.
One day I went downtown for a concert and I heard this work. It was so colourful, so unique in its timbres, in its unfolding, its simplicity. This was in the context of the kind of music that I was playing, and this was a very different kind of piece. It struck me as like a foreigner coming from another land to my planet. I’d heard nothing like it before.
The thing about George Crumb’s work is that it’s completely individual. There’s nothing like it anywhere. It’s all about colour and timbre and using instruments with extended techniques in ways that probably weren’t used before. And the structure is strong, it holds together very well from place to place.
I had been composing for about ten years already, but after I heard that piece I moved out of the 12-tone world. It was a big detour, I’ll tell you that! It’s easy to get caught up in that world that you’ve grown into. So I viewed the 12-tone world as my family at the time, but it’s like I was on one planet only, and I didn’t know there were other planets.
Actually at that time there were only two other planets, which were the downtown crowd run by John Cage and Morton Feldman and that group, and the mid-town crowd, which was run by Copland, Barber and their group. And we were in the other crowd, and that was it. Those are the three styles at that time, the late 1960s and early ’70s. We have millions of styles to choose from, but at that time there were three.
John Luther Adams
I first saw Morton Feldman’s Piece for Four Pianos in a record store when I was about 16. It had a hot pink cover with a stern-looking gentleman sitting cross-legged on the deck of the Staten Island ferry, and I’m sure there was a cigarette dangling out of his mouth. He had these thick black glasses and was looking right at the camera, scowling.
All I knew about Morton Feldman at that point was that he was a pal of John Cage, but I’d never heard his music before. So I snapped up this LP, took it home and put it on my little stereo. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I think it was right about then that I knew this is what I want to do with my life.
When I was a student back then, there were these raging wars in classical music between those who thought music was some sort of sealed intellectual pursuit, and those who just wanted to revel in the sheer sensuality of the sound itself. I never understood why you couldn’t have it both ways, why music couldn’t be intellectual and ravishingly beautiful at the same time. I found that model in Feldman.
Ultimately for me, music is all about sound itself and about space. These are the most fundamental compositional elements for me. Something that I’ve learnt from Feldman is that notion of frozen time, of time turning into space. Samuel Beckett says ‘time is turned into space and there will be no more time’. That’s really the ‘come true’ for me as a composer.
It doesn’t come from any apocalyptic, religious vision. It doesn’t come from the fire and brimstone of Revelation. It comes from my own lifelong experience of the sprawling landscapes of Alaska. Sometimes I think, at the tender age of 16, in hearing that piece of Feldman for the first time, I sensed all of this. I innately longed for all these things in my life and in music.
Mohammed Fairouz
We now have a much broader definition of what constitutes a ‘work’ than ever before, so identifying one is difficult… But if I had to choose, I’d say West Side Story. I’ve always been interested in it, as well as Leonard Bernstein’s approach to music. He moves from one real hit number to the next without a wasted moment. The libretto, by Stephen Sondheim, is beautiful.
Bernstein has gone for a truly synthesised style in West Side Story – it’s really compelling and probably established him as one of the great melodists and tunesmiths of the 20th century. Melodies are hard because they seem to be self-contained entities. That’s what makes old folk songs so memorable.
Synthesising them and dragging them out into a two-hour piece is a challenge. Bernstein grappled throughout his life with what a ‘work’ is. West Side Story answered that question very elegantly. He uses the cultural melting pot of New York and its tensions as a way of answering questions about ‘What is American music?’ and ‘What is the diversity of it?’.
West Side Story just hits you every time. ‘One Hand, One Heart’ is such a number, and there’s that fascinating G flat minor with the F double sharp – that resembles the poison sign in the score, where Bernstein sets the word ‘death’, in the line ‘only death will part us now’.
The relevance of West Side Story today is also in its multi-culturalism and inter-racial issues. It looks forward to the world today that is increasingly emblematic of those tensions.
Jennifer Higdon
When I first heard Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring I had no idea what it was. We lived at the base of some of the Appalachian Mountains and as I was looking out the window at them I thought ‘wow, that sounds like how I think the mountains look’. So when they announced what it was called I was struck by how appropriate it seemed.
The way Copland handles the individual instruments, the solo winds and the strings felt like the mountain air to me. He also makes such brilliant use of the folk melody towards the end, the Shaker song Simple Gifts. It was really fresh to me. It really caught my attention.
‘Wow, that sounds like how I think the mountains look’
Copland was looking for an American sound when he wrote this, trying to figure out what an American sound was. Jazz certainly had a big influence on him. There’s a lot of space between the notes in the way it’s orchestrated on a page. There’s also always a clear sense of pulse which is not completely predictable.
People often tell me my music sounds American, which is hard for me to figure out. What does that mean? But I do like clear rhythm and I do like for the listener and the performer to have a clear sense of pulse.
I don’t like to obscure things completely like the beat or the barline. I listen to all kinds of music, but one of the things that seems to stand out is a very clear sense of harmonic movement which is connected to clear rhythms and a clear pulse.