John Adams to lecture at Yale
Master American composer John Adams will deliver the 2009 Tanner Lectures on Human Values on October 28 and 29 at the Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall Street. His first talk, “Doctor Faustus and His Composition: Reflections on Thomas Mann’s Fictional Composer,” will be held on October 28, and his second, “Doctor Atomic and His Gadget: Composing the American Mythology,” on October 29. Both talks will take place at 4:30 pm.
Recognized worldwide for the expressive depth, technical range, and compelling themes of his work, Mr. Adams has broadened the aesthetics of contemporary American concert music, moving it away from academic modernism and toward a more expansive, profoundly humanist musical language.
I studied John Adams’ controversial opera The Death of Klinghoffer based on a terrorist hijacking of a cruiseliner in the mid 1980s. Despite the controversy that Adams romanticized terrorists or some crazy idea like that, the opera itself was quite good. If you’re familiar with the minimalism writing style made popular by Phillip Glass and Steve Reich, there’s much of that here.
