Music for the souls

The US composer John Adams set out to commemorate September 11th. It didn't quite gel, but his work again highlighted the issue of accessibility, writes Aengus Collins.

John Adams is the sum of curious contradictions. He is the most prominent of living classical composers but readily admits that classical music is slowly dying. He is steeped in the culture of the US - can't squeeze enough of it into his music - but is out of step with much of its public and political life. He is undeniably cool - his concert audiences are younger and more left bank than the norm - but it's a nerdy kind of cool: he wouldn't look out of place teaching Open University physics.

Adams is thoroughly charming in person. Softly spoken, humble and immensely good-humoured, he lets me interrupt his only break in a day of rehearsals for the European premiere in London this summer of On The Transmigration Of Souls, a piece he wrote in response to September 11th. He's tired but still all smiles and enthusiasm as he sits forward on a sofa in the conductor's dressing room at the BBC's rehearsal studios in London.

On The Transmigration Of Souls is the most directly American of Adams's works. September 11th was an event that made itself instantly felt around the world, but the trauma it induced was particularly American, and it was to this American trauma that Adams was commissioned to respond. Written to be performed by a New York orchestra in a New York auditorium on the first anniversary of the twin towers falling, On The Transmigration Of Souls is part of a very American conversation.

The piece opens with recorded noises from late-night New York: footsteps, traffic, a siren. Then taped voices enter. First the word "missing" is repeated, like a heartbeat. Then a litany of names is read - the names of some of those who died. When the choir comes in it's with fragments gleaned from the missing-persons posters. "I'll miss you, my brother." "A gold chain around his neck." "Please call." "Come home."

The simplicity of Adams's starting point is deeply moving, even if somewhere between the theory and the practice things come unstuck. The piece's orchestral underpinnings are relatively static by Adams's usual standards. But this work was always going to stand or fall on the integration of the sung texts into the musical whole. On the page the banality of many of the textual fragments is imbued with emotional force. Sung, much of this immediacy is lost.

Adams seems not quite sure what to make of his composition. "It's a very mysterious piece, and I'm not even sure that it works. I've only heard it in one location, which was Avery Fisher Hall, in New York, and I think that the audience there was disposed to like it. But I don't know; I don't if it's going to be one of my successful pieces."

Adams has lived in San Francisco since the 1970s, when he finished a disillusioning musical education. The emphasis at Harvard had been on 12-tone serialism, a compositional methodology Adams found deadening. When he began composing in earnest it was minimalists such as Steve Reich and Terry Riley who fired his imagination. With its propulsive momentum and its solid tonality, Adams found in minimalism an aesthetic altogether more accessible and vibrant than that of the dominant avant-garde tradition in classical music at the time.

He is perplexed that critics continue to be hostile to or suspicious of the accessibility of his music. One reviewer memorably suggested his work has done for the arpeggio what McDonald's has done for the hamburger. "I'm always amused by the issue of accessibility," he says. "Who would have thought that the scandal of my life would be accessibility, when only a generation before the scandal was the opposite? It was Cage or Xenakis or Stockhausen, music so impenetrable or chaotic that even the most educated of listeners couldn't make any sense of it.

"Accessibility is a non-issue. You write what you feel. Certainly I've never thrown an idea away because I thought it was too complicated, and I have pieces that I think are very difficult to access.

"But I think your work has to have a certain appeal to it - you have to at least engage the listener, if on no other level then at least on the sensual one. Make it sound beautiful. Then you can start to do all sorts of psychological, structural or formal things. The problem with avant-garde music was that it painted itself into a corner. It became increasingly solipsistic and self-referential. If you weren't a part of the artist's private world then there was no way of accessing the work."

But minimalism had its drawbacks, too, notably the limitations of its palette. There is something mechanistic about much minimalist music. Part of its frequent beauty rests precisely in this mechanistic aspect, but minimalism's emotional range is restricted. There is much in life it is ill-equipped to deal with. In response to this emotional deficit Adams from early in his career supplemented minimalism with elements of a more traditional 19th-century musical aesthetic. His music lies somewhere between minimalism and romanticism. It's instantly recognisable as contemporary music, but there's a richness and a scope of orchestration borrowed from an another era.

Adams has also worked the fabric of US musical culture into his compositions, lifting threads and textures of US vernacular and weaving them into his scores. His Chamber Symphony is a response to Schoenberg's First Chamber Symphony, but it is also informed by the clamour of cartoon soundtracks.

"One of the things that I love in a work of art," he says, "is its ethnicity. Not that all art has to be like that - I love the Goldberg Variations. But I love what's Irish about Yeats and what's French about Debussy and what's Russian about Gogol. I take a great deal of pleasure from the Americanness of my own music."

So, it would seem, do many others. Adams has become a hugely popular composer. He has breathed new life into contemporary classical music. His recordings sell and concerts of his work are full. Yet he thinks orchestral music is coming to the end of its life. He is making waves in an art form he thinks is nearly dead.

"I think we're in a very puzzling period right now. Popular music, which didn't really exist before the 20th century, has become so pervasive a part of culture that it has largely crowded classical music out. My friends are an example: people that I know, who are not musicians, people who live on my street, people I might go on holiday with or go hiking with, genuinely close friends of mine. They're not followers of classical music. They listen to Bob Dylan or Radiohead or Laurie Andersen or The Rolling Stones.

"They don't listen to my music. And they for sure don't listen to Boulez or Berio or Birtwhistle. The relevance of classical contemporary music is being severely challenged. We have a very, very small audience now. In the US it's barely existent at all."

He seems to be an exception to this story of decline, to have grabbed and held the attention of a growing number of listeners. But he's not so sure. "I saw an interesting article in an Internet magazine recently," he says. "It had a picture of me and it said: 'Who knows this person?' And the point was that no one would recognise my face. The article went on to damn classical music and say that it's just not relevant any more. It's not a part of the culture any more. It's not like the movies. It's not like television. It's not even like contemporary art. It's just something that nobody cares about. It's a very neoconservative point of view - if something can't hold its place in the market it doesn't deserve to live. It's terribly anti-intellectual and anti-artistic, but it's a virulent state of mind in the US right now."

Whatever the fate or cultural status of classical music, Adams sees no choice but to continue ploughing his furrow. "It's a difficult time, but I'm committed to writing in this particular style for the orchestra," he says. It's too late to decideto become a rock star, he jokes. Not that he would want to be one. He likes the idea of artists such as William Faulkner and Emily Dickinson, who wrote for themselves with little or no concern for when, or even if, their efforts would be recognised.

"It may seem funny to you," he says as he starts to ready himself to go back to rehearsals, "but even though you see all these interviews with me I really don't solicit them. I'm not interested in being a star. I think life is very short, and I'm mostly just concerned with writing music and occasionally coming out into the public world and performing it. I know that if my work has value it will eventually be discovered."