“The resort to Beethoven, both in London and all over the world, made many of us painfully aware of a distressing reality,” he says. “Despite having created arguably the most vibrant musical culture of any country over the past half-century or so, there didn’t seem to be any American piece that could answer the country’s emotional needs at that time.”
The New York Philharmonic picked Adams as the man to plug the gap, and commissioned him to write a commemorative work for the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Adams remains unhappy with the resulting work — a meditative choral piece, On the Transmigration of Souls. He feels the Republican administration manipulated the memory of the attacks, to create what he calls an “orgy of narcissism and collective victimization.”
Nor is he happy about the state of contemporary music. “We’re in danger of an overflow of extremely mediocre music,” he says, “partly because composing has become dangerously easy. Everyone can carry around software programs on a laptop and compose a new piece in a single evening. But the trouble is, of course, that the software dictates the parameters of what you can do, how you can think.”
So will there be no more Beethoven’s Ninth Symphonies or Mozart C Minor Masses? “I’ll certainly never be able to reach that level,” he says. “The great works of the past come about as a perfect collision of good fortune. You get a technology that just happens to have peaked at that time and a creative intelligence of just the right kind to exploit it. I’m not sure the Symphony Orchestra is going to see another Mahler, another Beethoven.”
Adams pauses, as if to reflect on whether he has just talked himself out of a job, then resumes. “But anyway, who the hell am I to talk like that? When I think of literature, everyone’s always said there’ll never be another Shakespeare, another George Eliot. But literature never ground to a halt. People go on writing truly great plays and novels. Maybe that’s what I’m doing, without even realizing it.”
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