John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom

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Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Hello everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. I'm very honored tonight to be chatting with John Coolidge Adams, arguably America's greatest living composer, and he recently has premiered a new opera, Antony and Cleopatra. I am also the proud owner of a new compact disc box set called Collected Works, which I believe is about 40 compact discs and a Blu-ray of Nixon in China. John, welcome.

Thank you.

Now, as you know, Antony and Cleopatra, it's one of Shakespeare's messiest plots, especially starting in Act 2. You've got, what, 40 characters in 42 scenes? How do you handle that operatically?

Well, the first thing to do with a behemoth like that is to, shall we say, wrestle it to the ground. You know, with Shakespeare, the plays are long. I don't think Antony and Cleopatra is as long as Hamlet, but It's a big, big sprawling epic that is both political and personal. And, you know, it being an opera, we're really mostly focused on the interpersonal relationships. I mean, the reason I chose this opera was because on the one hand, it's, you know, about world politics. You know, it's the rise of one civilization and the decline of another, but it's also very intimate because it's about people who are caught up in the maelstrom and, you know, have very, very powerful intimacy as well as their being political figures.

There's a lot of very rapid action and not many soliloquies. Does that make writing an opera based around the story harder or easier?

Oh, writing an opera is hard no matter what. I once said to the great architect Frank Gehry, you're lucky you can farm out the electrical and the plumbing and, you know, concrete to someone else, but We composers, we have to do everything. In this case, I did the libretto and the vocal writing, the sketching, the instrumentation, and I even, you know, did the computer setting of the full score. So I was at this for pretty much 4 years.

If I think about Verdi's Shakespeare operas, it feels to me they require near-perfect performances. So I love James Levine doing Othello. But a lot of other recordings don't quite work for me. Or I love Von Karajan doing Falstaff, but everything has to be perfect. Are you worried that with your opera, the combination of Shakespeare, the complex music, all the roles, that it will be nearly impossible for other people to do it as well as, in essence, you're doing it now?

You know, for lack of a better word, I write classical music and the term classical music, of course, it has an odor for younger people because they associate it with older music, older people. But it's actually a very thrilling thing to do because when you write a score, you're essentially making a recipe for something, and it changes with every performance. It's not like a recording by a pop group that's always going to be the same. And hence, every different iteration of a work of mine is different, and different singers and different conductors and different violinists, they, they give a completely new point of view on, on something. So the pieces are constantly being Reborn.

Was Elizabeth Taylor the perfect Cleopatra? So sensual, so luscious. Is she your mental Cleopatra?

You know, I looked at some of the classical actresses. You can go on YouTube and, and see different performances. The greatest one is Janice Sussman, who's actually a South African actress. I think she was active in the early 1960s or so, but Ultimately, I follow my own vision, and what drew me to these two characters, Antony and Cleopatra, was the fact that they were older people. You know, one could say they'd been there, done that. Each of them had a background. Each of them had actually had children by other people. So in a way, this is a story about older people. I'm reminded of the great Edward Albee play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? You know, there's just some really, really knock-down, drag-out fights between these two people. But in the end, they love each other. And I guess my model was just, you know, my own life, my parents, people that I've known, people who've had difficulties in their relationships and who've somehow managed to find love.

So how old are Antony and Cleopatra in your vision?

Well, this takes place in roughly around 30 BC. So if you were 40 years old, you were old back then. I mean, people didn't have very long lifespans. We don't know for sure, but it seems like Cleopatra was probably at that time in her early 30s, maybe mid-30s. And Antony was probably, we're guessing, maybe 10 years older. But people lived fast and intense in those days. If you didn't get along with your cousin, you hired an assassin. You know, life was very brutal. And to survive took great determination and ingenuity and craftiness.

What does the opera draw from Debussy?

Most of my earlier operas had a lot of set pieces, you know, choruses or big chunks of wonderful poetry by Alice Goodman, who wrote my first libretti for Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer. So we have in those operas real soliloquies and arias and choruses. But in this case, in the Anthony and Cleopatra, I really wanted to make what I call a musical drama. And the interaction between the characters is just— it's quicksilver. It's really fast. It's like one of those Preston Sturges 1930s fast-moving, fast-evolving dramas. And I didn't really have a model for that in the operatic repertoire. The closest I could think of was the way Claude Debussy Debussy treated the great play Pelléas et Mélisande, which is by a Belgian playwright, Maeterlinck. And what made Debussy's opera so radical and so revolutionary was that he treated this story and kept it whole and just musicalized the text.

What have you drawn from Janáček?

You know, I've been compared to Janáček, but I have to say I actually don't know his work very well, so I can't answer that question very clearly.

Is there any Benjamin Britten vocal music that you truly love?

I'm a fan of Benjamin Britten, but not particularly of his vocal music. I know for listeners in England that's, you know, just an outrage to say that, but, you know, I find most setting of the English language in the classical tradition a little bit pretentious and a little bit stiff. My inspirations have always been great popular music, whether it was, you know, Ella Fitzgerald or Stevie Wonder or Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan. Just the way a great pop artist treats the English language, that's been my model. Not Benjamin Britten or not even Handel, even though I love Handel, but it's just a form of musicalized speech that doesn't interest me.

Stephen Sondheim, how well does he set texts in English?

You know, I grew up in a musical family. My father played the clarinet and the saxophone, and my mother was a very talented singer and actress. She didn't have any formal training, but when I was a kid, I would go to performances of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Cole Porter, you know, those shows that the local theater groups had put on. In fact, I was even in one of them. I was the little Polynesian boy in South Pacific, and my mother sang Bloody Mary. So, you know, I absorbed that like, as they say, with my mother's milk. It was just such a part of my musical DNA. And even though I'm more of a quote-unquote classical composer, that really is the deepest part of my identity as a theatrical composer.

I have some questions about your other works, my favorites: On the Transmigration of Souls, compositionally and aurally? 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've often said the one thing I never want to do is brand myself, you know, produce the same sort of predictable piece. And a lot of artists fall into that, especially if they're successful. So every piece of mine is somewhat— not somewhat, but 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 is a request from the New York Philharmonic to compose a sort of a memorial piece which was going to be performed exactly a year after the World Trade Center attacks on September 11th. And it was not an assignment that I was terribly happy about because I had other plans and, you know, it seemed like it was going to be a a very difficult subject matter to deal with, this terrible tragedy and all these 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, and the listener would sort of 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. And 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?

I'm lucky enough in that I don't have to follow some prescribed request, or if there is a prescribed request, I simply don't accept it. If I want to do something You know, whether it's a concerto or an opera or a string quartet, or I even wrote a show once with 2 dozen pop songs. I do that and then I look around for somebody to commission it.

The violinist Lila Josefowicz, what makes her such a perfect performer of your works?

Lila is—

Lila, sorry.

Lila is a very special person. She has immense energy. And that energy is combined with a wonderful sensitivity, lyricism. You know, I could say this, it sounds a little indecent, but I mean, she's the perfect package for my kind of music. She can absolutely groove, get things going in a wonderful, powerful rhythm, but she also has a very deep emotional sensitivity. She's played 3 major works, actually 4 major works of mine, one of which I composed specifically for her. And not just the regular violin, but she plays a piece of mine called "The Dharma at Big Sur," which is for electric violin, an instrument with 6 strings that, you know, can sound like a regular violin, but also can sound like Jimi Hendrix rocking out.

In your mind, is there a perfect version of your violin concerto?

You know, as I said earlier, every performer brings something special. You know, if I said there was a perfect version of it, that would probably discourage anyone from taking it up. Certainly Leila's performances and her recordings thrill me, but you know, the other day I received a video link of a performance by another violinist, Clara Jang, a Korean-German violinist, playing a piece of mine that no one except Leila has to this point dared play, and that was a revelation itself.

Why would Jesus have been drawn to a withered hand? You've asked that question. What's the answer?

You're mentioning a very early piece of mine called Christian Zeal and Activity, which dates way back into the 1970s. That was a period of sort of avant-garde experimental music. And I found an old hymn book. I think it was a Salvation Army hymn book. And I found it in a, I guess, a used bookstore. And the hymns were— they were all classified, you know, Easter, Crisis in Prison, Advent, etc. And then there was a section called Christian Zeal and Activity, which I thought was a wonderful phrase. So I composed the piece, and basically what I did was to take the very popular old hymn Onward Christian Soldiers, and I slowed it up to almost unrecognizable slowness. You know, it was like an iceberg slowly melting. I made a recording off a Sunday morning, you know, revivalist preacher talking about Jesus and the man with the withered hand, and there was something very musical about the way he kept repeating the term "withered hand." Yeah, it was a very American-sounding little clip. I guess you could call it a found object, and I mixed that in with the slowed-down hymn.

You've also done an oratorio, El Niño, What do you see as the overall role of Christianity in your body of work?

You know, I grew up going to church. My mother went to church, I think mostly because she loved to sing in the choir. She was brought up as a Catholic, and then we started going to the Episcopal Church and ended up in the Unitarian Church, which is a very New England thing, which is where I grew up, in New England. I'm not a practicing Christian. I don't go to church, but I'm very drawn to some of these biblical stories because, you know, They're archetypal. They reflect in myth and symbolism the deepest of our human experience. In the case of El Niño, an oratorio that I wrote for the millennium, it's about birth. You know, it's on the surface, it's a story of the Nativity, of Mary conceiving and giving birth to Jesus and the flight into Egypt. But it's also a larger story. It's about birth and particularly about the women's experience of it. And for that, you know, my collaborator and I, Peter Sellers, we found a lot of texts by women, particularly by Hispanic women from Mexico and Chile, that told firsthand the experience of birth. And I like doing that because Handel's Messiah, which of course treats the same material, just comes from the Bible, and that's all guys talking about it. And, you know, really, what do they know about labor and the pain of parturition and motherhood. So I think that makes my oratorio quite different.

Why can't other people conduct Shaker Loops well?

Did I say that?

You said that once, yes. I think it's in your autobiography. Oh. Or have they learned how to conduct it since then?

Oh, yes. Well, Shaker Loops is a piece for strings, and the very first version of that I wrote in a kind of experimental way where where the conductor would indicate as we went along the changes just by holding up fingers. I could do it and I was able to do a satisfying performance of it, but when another conductor did it, the shape was strangely out of focus. So it's not that the other conductor was incompetent, it was just that I had a very specific way of wanting to do it. So in the later version of it, I froze everything into more traditional notation. That flexibility is no longer there, but on the other hand, the form of the piece is very satisfying.

What do you think of how your music is sometimes used in video games like Sid Meier's Civilization?

I don't do video games. I know that my music is used in some of them because I get requests for licensing, but I'm not a video game guy. I did authorize the use of Peace of Mind Harmonie-Lehre. They used opening, I don't know, 20 bars or something. But when I went online to look at it, I noticed that they electronically transposed it up a step and added a thrash drum set to it. Like my music wasn't even quite trashy enough, so they had to trash it up some more.

How do you avoid what Harold Bloom called the anxiety of influence?

Harold Bloom was a very great literary critic, sometimes a little bit of a windbag, but his writings on Coleridge and Shelley, and especially on Shakespeare. It was very important to me. He had a phrase that he coined, the anxiety of influence, which is interesting because he himself was not a creator. He was a critic. But he intuited that we creators, whether we're painters or novelists or filmmakers or composers, that we live, so to speak, under the shadow of the greats that preceded us. If you're a poet, you've got all this great literature behind you, whether it's Shakespeare or Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson. And likewise for me, I've got really heavyweight predecessors in Beethoven and Bach and Mahler and Stravinsky. So maybe that's what he meant, just the anxiety of, is what I do even comparable with great art. And another thing is, if I have an idea, has somebody already thought of it before? So those are sort of the neurotic aspects of my life, but I'm no different than anybody else. You know, we just have to deal with those concerns.

Are you more afraid of Mozart or of Charles Ives?

I'm not afraid of either of them. I love them. I obviously love Mozart. More than Charles Ives. Charles Ives is a very, very unusual figure. You know, he was almost completely unknown in most of the 20th century until Leonard Bernstein, who was very glamorous and very well known— Bernstein kind of brought him to the public notice, and he coined this idea that Charles Ives was the Abraham Lincoln of music. And of course Americans love something they can grasp onto like like, "Oh yeah, I can relate to that." He's the Abraham Lincoln of music. And Charles Ives was a kind of a hermit. He worked during the days in an insurance firm at which he was very successful, but spent his weekends and his summer vacations composing. And his work is very sentimental, is also very avant-garde for its time. And I've conducted quite a few of his pieces. They are not, I have to admit, 100% satisfying. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that I've never heard these pieces or hardly ever heard them. And, you know, when you're a composer, you have to hear something and then realize, oh, you know, that works and that doesn't. And I think the fact that Ives, maybe he was just born before his time. You know, he was born in Connecticut in the 1870s, and America at that time just, it was still a very raw country and not ready for a classical experimental composer.

You seem to understand everything in music, from Indian ragas to popular song, classical music, jazz. Do you ever worry that you have too many influences?

You know, when I was a kid, it was very hard to get a hold of a recording of something. In those days, there was something called the Schwan Catalog of recorded music, and, you know, I used to get it at the music store, and there might be one recording of the Mahler Sixth Symphony. That seems hard to believe these days, but, you know, in 1965, '63, a lot of that music was very rare and I had to send away for it and wait months. So when I got it, it was really, really special. Today everything is available at all times. All you have to do is have a subscription to Spotify or Amazon Music or something and you can access access anything. And the same goes for books. You know, I have a Kindle. I have too much stuff on the Kindle. You know, nothing is special anymore. So one has to actually make some kind of like a pact with oneself to go back to that very, very personal relationship with one work or with just a group of very valuable pieces. Because otherwise we're just flooded with so much information that, you know, we end up with very short concentration spans. And we end up with a problem of what do we really value?

Earlier in your career, you kind of fought an internal mental war against serialism and 12-tone music. So take Boulez. After all these years, now, today, what do you think of it as music? Approach it fresh. Is it wonderful? Is it boring?

You know, I came of age during what I call the bad old days of contemporary music, and I can't explain why that happened, but sometime in the early part of the 20th century, a lot of very brilliant composers started writing music that was, you know, essentially inaccessible to average listeners. Whether it was Schoenberg or Varese or— I could name many other composers who started writing very dissonant music. Later on, composers got interested in fracturing rhythms to the point where you had a composer like John Cage who essentially devoted his dedicated his life to sort of atomizing, deconstructing all of the aspects of the musical language, both acoustically and culturally. You know, and that ran its course. The bad part of it was that it made audiences very wary of anything that was new. Even to this day, I'm still suffering from that because, you know, an uninitiated listener will go to a concert and open the program and see there's a piece by John Adams. I don't know who this is. He's still living, so it's probably going to be an unpleasant experience. And, you know, that's just something that is the result of years of very difficult, inaccessible, and very often rationally conceived contemporary music. At the same time that that was happening, there was this fantastic explosion of wonderful music in the pop realm. And I I had this sort of crisis in my life where I said to myself, "Why should I surrender, you know, the influence that great music can have to a pop artist and have to go and write serial or 12-tone music because that's, you know, what's required of, you know, a contemporary composer?" So I basically walked away from that, walked away from all that, you know, surrounded me when I was in college. I had to put up a with a great deal of criticism, including a lot of critics who were writing for the major newspapers and magazines, and they had come around thinking that the only way you could write contemporary music was this same sort of very difficult, challenging, rigorous, whatever the adjectives that they love to use, bracing, all these things that—

Take Boulez's Second Piano Sonata. If you put it on as listener, Aren't you thrilled today in 2022?

You're asking me about Pierre Boulez's Second Piano Sonata. I think it's just utterly unpleasant experience to listen to it. For a while you can be dazzled by the fact that a human being can actually play that, and there are very few human beings can do that. But, you know, it's interesting, Boulez wrote another piece which I think very much typifies what his attitude was. The piece is called Let's see, so, "The Farthest Reach of the Fertile Territory," which is actually, it's the name of a painting by the artist Paul Klee. But, you know, it represents a period in contemporary music where artists were just pushing the envelope as far as they could in terms of complexity, of density, of fracturing the language. It became sort of like a laboratory rather than seeing music music as essentially an act of communication.

What's your favorite Bob Dylan album?

Well, you know, I still like the early ones. I'm very fond of John Wesley Harding. In most cases, it's just individual songs. I think I show my age when I talk about that period because I, I'm so fond of it. But, you know, it's an interesting thing with pop music that it's so much linked to periods in your life. So that somebody who's my age has a very, very strong sentimental attachment to music that you heard when you were 20. Now, I don't know, maybe this has a lot to do with your recollections of romances or revelations or the drugs you took or the lovers you had. And, you know, a lot of pop music evokes that. I don't relate to pop music from the '80s, for example, or from the '90s. And I think that's very much a general thing. My parents related to music that was big in the 1930s and '40s, so you sort of measure by when you were born and the music you listen to.

Sgt. Pepper or Abbey Road, which are you more likely to put on?

Well, let's see, I think Abbey Road was really the great period. I mean, Sgt. Pepper had a lot of sort of provocative stuff in it, you know, it had synthesizer for the first time, and, and it was very frankly discussing psychedelic drugs. So it was very popular with my generation. But I think just as for pure musical experiences, those albums, The White Album and Abbey Road, was really the peak of their artistic achievement.

What do you see as the peak of Miles Davis's career?

You know, Miles Davis had a career like Stravinsky or like Beethoven or like Picasso. You know, he went through so many periods. He started essentially in the bop era and then moved into sort of a modal period when he started working with Joe Zawinul and Herbie Hancock. And then his latest period was, you know, it's really hard to find a word for it. I mean, he was strongly influenced by African music, showed his identity with his own race in a very strong way that had never been done before. So, you know, I can't really cherry-pick anything specific. I do know that when I look at my collection of my pieces that I keep going back to, the albums he made with Gil Evans, the big band albums, Miles Ahead and Sketches of Spain, those really stand out for their incredible beauty and for the lushness of the scoring.

Why isn't Robert Ashley better known? To me, he's one of the greats, but no one ever tells me to listen to Robert Ashley.

You know, I knew Robert Ashley way back in the 1970s because when I first came to California, a friend of mine said, "Oh, you have to get in touch with Bob Ashley." And at the time, Bob was teaching at Mills College, a very small college in Oakland, California. And, you know, to answer your question, I think that one of the things about Ashley is that he's just off the grid when it comes to finding a conventional way to describe it. You know, some people would say that he wrote great operas, but, you know, opera isn't really the word. I think maybe Bob used the term opera, but he used it in a sort of wry way. His greatest gifts were really this combination of his texts that he wrote and, of course, this fantastic, droll manner of speaking them. They would be accompanied usually by his longtime collaborator Blue Jean Tyranny, who played in a sort of light bluesy, sometimes gospel style piano. But it was Ashley's, I don't know, this very special Americana that you associate with, you know, road movies and quiet anonymous people talking about their relationships or their experiences in a diner or a gas station. Or an automobile, and that's what makes him very special. For me, he's— I don't think of him in the musical realm. I think of him more in the literary realm.

Do you think Morton Feldman has gone down as the truly great eternal American composer of his time?

You know, Morton Feldman, the special thing about him was that he was absolutely unique. The Latin term sui generis, which means just born of himself. He didn't sound like anyone. Each piece was very similar in the sense that the music tended to be— move very slowly in terms of time. It was very delicate, very sensuous. And when you listen to a Feldman piece, a classic Feldman piece, it's like getting into a warm bath. The bath, though, is sound. It's very erotic in a very exquisite way. It's interesting because my friend Michael Tilson Thomas invited the great classical pianist Emmanuel Ax to play a Feldman piece, a work for piano and orchestra, and they put it on a special program. It was a program of just contemporary music, and it was wonderful to hear it, but I noticed that he never brought it back in the regular subscription series. You know, he never put it on a program with Debussy or Stravinsky. And that is still an issue with Feldman's music. It requires a certain kind of listener. It requires a certain, shall we say, suspension of expectation, and it requires a whole kind of acoustical setting. So it probably doesn't survive in the sort of more aggressive, busy format of a standard orchestral concert.

Jefferson Airplane, the album Surrealistic Pillow, Is it still good music?

You know, I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the time. I was a student at Harvard, and, you know, I didn't know what San Francisco was. I think I'd read maybe some Allen Ginsberg or Jack Kerouac, but my first musical impression of San Francisco was Jefferson Airplane. You know, and there were a couple of good songs, and they had a great photo on their surrealistic pillow album. I can't really list them as one of the great bands. Many of those bands in the 1960s and '70s became famous because of one or maybe two songs, and then they kind of hobbled along and, and disappeared. That really was the case with them.

Now, you mentioned San Francisco. You first became a major orchestra conductor there, and your music has been promoted in San Francisco quite a bit. Edo Duarte, is it an accident that this happened in San Francisco, which is a highly innovative city in other ways? Or is it something that to you organically made sense?

You know, what is it they say, you know, that success has to do with being prepared and then the moment will come. I'm sort of mangling whatever the familiar saw is, but I think that I had all the tools. You know, I had been well trained and I loved this music and I knew it. And the opportunity came. I was a young Dutch conductor who was named to succeed Seiji Ozawa as conductor of the San Francisco Symphony. I met him. He liked me. He heard some of my music. He offered me a commission. I took it. The piece was a success. And, you know, things started to happen from there. The fact that it was San Francisco, I think, really is, you know, not critical. It could have happened in St. Louis or Minnesota or wherever. I live here because, you know, I'm very strongly affected by the landscape, the California landscape. Of course, now it gets increasingly harder to live here because San Francisco itself has become taken over by tech. It just experiences this unpleasantly hectic urban development, which goes hand in hand with a very distressing situation of the unhoused. And then my state, part of it's burning every summer because of climate change. So there's a mixture of delight and extreme disappointment about being a resident of California.

What do you think it would take for American classical music to get a real true foothold in European concert halls? Now, you've had premieres in Europe. Maybe you're somewhat of an exception to this, but it seems that American classical music is not that significant in Europe?

Well, we do live in a country where popular culture has enormous reach and it also has enormous prestige. But with that said, I have to say that a lot of the greatest classical musicians alive are Americans. Either they're American-born, like Yo-Yo Ma, or they came here and have become Americans, like Gustavo Dudamel or Yuja Wang. You know, despite the fact that, you know, we're a country that's literally controlled by popular culture, we have some of the greatest orchestras in the world and we have very, very intelligent audiences. I keep hearing that classical music is dead or that it's dying, but then I go to concerts and I have these incredible experiences, whether I'm conducting or whether I'm just in the audience. It's always a challenge. And if you go to Europe, They have the same problems there. They have problems filling the halls. Musicians don't get paid as well as they do in this country. So I think this idea that classical music in America is a dying art, I don't buy that at all.

Why don't you write more for clarinet? It was an early instrument of yours.

I wanted to play the violin. I grew up in a very small town in New Hampshire, and there was a music teacher who came to our public elementary school every 2 weeks, and he could teach anything. He could teach the piccolo or the violin or the trumpet, and I wanted to learn the violin, but I was told I would have to wait until the 5th grade, and I was restless. So my dad played the clarinet, and I reluctantly agreed to have him be my teacher, and I started playing the clarinet, and I got very good very quickly. And the clarinet was, you know, sort of my key to getting into the music world. While I was in college, I was a substitute clarinet player with the Boston Symphony. But, you know, it has a very small amount of literature. It has a couple of great pieces by Mozart and a few by Brahms. And really most of the rest of the music is in the classical realm. It's just part of being part of an orchestra. I mean, the most exciting thing to do if you are a clarinet player now would probably be to play klezmer music.

Helmut Lachenmann, yes or no?

I left my clarinets in the cellar, in the wine cellar about 30 years ago, and they're still down there.

Now, as composer of Dr. Atomic, are you looking forward to Christopher Nolan's movie Oppenheimer, or you don't care?

I might watch it, but Oppenheimer has become kind of an obsession with me. I've read the two wonderful biographies of him that have come out in the last 10 or 15 years, and I've read them both numerous times. Oppenheimer actually lived and taught in this city where I live, Berkeley, California, and in many ways he was a very special and mysterious human being, you know, a great, great brilliant scientist, but also somebody who appreciated poetry and art and music. So I have my own impression of him, and I don't know if I'm going to go to a Hollywood movie and see somebody else's imitation of Oppenheimer. I might, but I kind of doubt it.

Are you much influenced by cinema when you think operatically, or not really?

Like most Americans, I watch a lot of movies, mostly these days at home. You know, there's some wonderful cable series, many of which come from Scandinavia, that I like. And I'm very often asked you know, why don't you write for films? And the reason I don't write for films is that in order to be an effective film composer, you have to be ready to drop everything you're doing and just focus without sleep for 3 or 4 days on a project. And I have a life that, you know, is already full of things to do. I have works that I'm commissioned and I am absolutely focused on. I have a life as a conductor. And the few films that I have written scores for, in the end, you know, I will spend a great deal of time working to make music that fits exactly the scene, and then it comes back and the directors change the scene and put the music in another place, and ultimately it just— it's very frustrating. So I'm not a film composer. However, there are some directors who have taken my music, pieces of mine, and put them in their film scores. Particularly the Italian director Luca Guadagnino, who used music of mine in several of his films, and that's very satisfying when a sensitive director can do that.

But if you hear say that Hans Zimmer did the soundtrack to Dune, are you excited? You'll go to see it and hear it, or it's a peripheral interest for you?

I'm always, almost always, very frustrated by the low level of inspiration and in film composing. I think that film composers market themselves and basically give directors what they want, and a lot of the taste that even the greatest directors, people like Steven Spielberg, have is just very sort of sentimental and to me rather tacky, which is why, you know, most of the film score music I like comes from France or Italy, not American. These days now A lot of films don't even have a composer. They have a music consultant. So you'll get a film, let's say a Coen Brothers film, which would be a great film, but the music comes from, you know, all different sources, maybe 3 or 4 different pop artists or whatever.

Is it intimidating to conduct Philip Glass in front of Philip Glass?

I've conducted quite a few of Philip's pieces. It's not very difficult music to perform. A lot of the thrill of it is just in the connection with the audience because Philip's music is very simple and very easy to access. So you get a nice buzz from usually a very large audience. You know, often when I do my own music, I won't have a full hall, but often when I do Philip's music, a lot of people will come, people who wouldn't normally go to a classical concert. I remember doing the world premiere of, I think it was his 12th or 13th Symphony, I can't remember, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Disney Hall was just absolutely packed each performance because Philip, you know, he's much more known, has a much wider audience, people recognize his name than any other classical composer.

When you were a young man, you wrote Leonard Bernstein a letter, and he wrote you back, of all things. If you received a highly intelligent letter from a young man, today, would you write him back?

It depends on what the letter was. I mean, if the letter was, was as snotty as the one that I wrote Leonard Bernstein, I don't know if I'd write him back. But I was a freshman at college and just at the most obnoxious point in my life when, you know, I had very strong opinions. And Leonard Bernstein, you know, he was who he was. He had written a piece that even to this day I find a little little kind of saccharine and certainly not a piece that I choose to listen to. I wrote to him and I scolded him for not being, you know, more up to date and writing the proper kind of atonal or serial music that I thought one should do when I was 18 years old. And he wrote me back. It's amazing. He said, you know, "I have to do what I have to do. This is me." And that was a really important thing for me to hear. I may have not understood it at the time, but as I grew older, I realized, yeah, he was absolutely right. You just have to do who you are and not pretend to be somebody else or be influenced by what the supposedly proper way to make art is.

Last 3 questions. First, how ambitious are you?

Ambition is— it's not a very helpful term. I know people who are ambitious and you can tell because when you're talking to them, you see in their eyes that they're not even listening to you, they're thinking about their next move or, you know, what the world thinks of them. I certainly do think about what other people think of me, whether they respond to my music. I care deeply about whether my music reaches people. I would say I work hard. I do it not compulsively, I do it just because that's, that's what I do. But I wouldn't call myself ambitious. I think, you know, maybe there was a time in my life when I was young and I was anxious to meet people and make sure they knew about me, but I guess I'm just a little more philosophical now. I think if I have an important body of work and pieces that I've written are good, they will continue on after I'm no longer a living, breathing specimen, and that's really all I can ask for.

Now, I suspect many of my podcast listeners and readers don't know your music. For an uninitiated listener, where would you recommend they start to learn John Coolidge Adams?

Well, first of all, I never use my middle name.

You have to send it somewhere.

Except on my tax returns. But I think the most easy entrance point into my music is a short orchestral piece called "Short Ride in a Fast Machine," which was inspired by a terrifying car ride I had in a sports car. And it's a high-energy, enjoyable piece. It's a very popular piece of mine, gets performance almost every day somewhere in the world. 4 minutes long, and I think that's probably an easy way to get into my music, and it has a lot of John Adams in it in terms of the sort of driving pulse and colorful orchestration, and it's fun.

Very last question: What will you do next?

I am writing a piano concerto for an amazing young Icelandic pianist named Vikingur Olafsson. I recently wrote a piano concerto with a funny title, Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes, and he and I have been performing it around the world, and I was so thrilled by his playing that I decided I was going to write a special piece for him.

There's also a great Yu-Ju Wang recording of that piece, as you know. But John Adams, thank you very much. To listeners, I'm also happy to recommend John's autobiography, the collected works box set, John on Spotify, of course the new opera, Antony and Cleopatra, which has been receiving very strong reviews. And John, great chatting with you. Take care.

Thank you.

Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm @TylerCowen and the show is @CowenConvoes. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.