ADAMS: Slonimsky’s Earbox
John Coolidge Adams was born on February 15, 1947, in Worcester, Massachusetts, and now resides in Berkeley, California. He composed Slonimsky’s Earbox in 1995 on a joint commission from the Hallé Orchestra and the Oregon Symphony. Kent Nagano, to whom Adams dedicates the work, led the Hallé Orchestra in the work’s premiere on September 12, 1996, at Bridgewater Hall in Manchester, England. James DePriest conducted the American premiere the following month. These are the San Francisco Symphony’s first performances of Slonimsky’s Earbox. Adams scores the work for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, three clarinets (including E-flat clarinet), bass clarinet, three bassoons, four horns, four trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, crotales, marimba, glockenspiel, xylophone, two suspended cymbals, woodblock, claves, snare drum, hi-hat, temple blocks, cast, shaker, tambourine, tam-tam, triangle, vibraphone, piano, keyboard sampler (Kurzweil K2000 or Akai; alternatively, celesta or small electronic jazz organ), harp, and strings.
The success of John Adams’s 1987 operatic debut, Nixon in China, was a significant breakthrough for the composer, putting him firmly on the international map. Yet Adams had already begun laying the groundwork for his reputation with his pieces for the concert hall. Two of the most seminal of these were first heard here, in Davies Symphony Hall: Harmonium in 1981 and Harmonielehre in 1985. Indeed, Adams wrote The Chairman Dances as a kind of “warm-up” before plunging into the Nixon score. (The Chairman Dances—Foxtrot for Orchestra—is one of the composer’s most frequently programmed concert works.)
Intersections between Adams’s work for the opera house and those for the concert hall can be seen as part of an ongoing pattern in his creative life. For example, Doctor Atomic Symphony (released on CD this past summer) reflects from a purely instrumental perspective on idioms Adams explored in his opera Doctor Atomic, which premiered at the War Memorial Opera House in 2005. While such kinship can take the form of anticipation or recollection of a specific work for the stage (as is the case with Doctor Atomic Symphony), some of Adams’s compositions instead expand his technical arsenal and expressive dimensions in mediating more generally between the two realms.
Slonimsky’s Earbox belongs to this category. An orchestral tour de force, the work draws together aspects of the more densely textured language Adams had begun to deploy in his 1991 opera The Death of Klinghoffer—a language remarkable for its complex, colorful harmonies and polyphonic layering. It likewise anticipates something of the frenzied, nervous energy with which Adams would later employ in characterizing the momentous waiting of Robert Oppenheimer and his associates at the Trinity test site in his opera Doctor Atomic.
I recommend Adams’s recently published, highly engaging memoir, Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life, to anyone with an interest in the role of contemporary music in our culture. Adams remarks that several of his compositions from throughout his career appear to bear family resemblances. Slonimsky’s Earbox certainly shares some of its musical DNA with other achievements that followed Klinghoffer in the 1990s (an especially fruitful period for Adams’s instrumental catalogue): the Chamber Symphony (1992); the Violin Concerto (1993); the piano concerto Century Rolls (1996); and even the large-scale canvas of Naïve and Sentimental Music (1998). Yet Slonimsky’s Earbox has also inherited traits of the younger Adams voice in which minimalist techniques are more clearly in the foreground, going back to one of his most significant early works, Shaker Loops (1978).
Slonimsky’s Earbox presents a fascinating instance in which these varied stylistic tendencies can be heard to intertwine and further evolve the composer’s musical vocabulary. Adams himself believes that the work marks “an important turning point in my orchestral music,” one that led to “a successful integration of the older minimalist techniques (repetitive motifs, steady background pulse, and stable harmonic areas) with the more complex, more actively contrapuntal language of the post-Klinghoffer pieces.” This synthesis has far-reaching implications in Adams’s music, foreshadowing the diversity of languages that would become a feature of such later, large-scale works as El Niňo, The Dharma at Big Sur, Doctor Atomic, and A Flowering Tree.
A tall order, perhaps, for such a relatively brief piece of music—though the work’s pulsating energies and kaleidoscopic textures make for a readily enjoyable experience on first hearing. It is typical for an Adams composition to operate on multiple levels at once—even when the composer is clearly having as good a time with putting orchestral sounds together as Adams seems to have in Slonimsky’s Earbox. Aside from its compositional significance in Adams’s development as an artist, the work also serves as a kind of portrait of and homage to one of the most intriguing figures of twentieth-century musicology: Nicolas (born Nikolai Leonidovich) Slonimsky (1894-1995). The long, rich life of this Russian-American music historian stretched from the last decades of tsarist Russia (he was born in Saint Petersburg) to the waning of the millennium in Southern California. Irrepressibly curious, innovative, and funny, Slonimsky was a Renaissance man who channeled his formidable talents into both performance (as a conductor who championed new music) and scholarship.
Slonimsky was also a composer who tended toward the miniature (the song cycle Gravestones, for example, sets texts taken from tombstones in an old New England cemetery), but became especially known for his encyclopedic breadth of knowledge and his contributions to musical reference books and works of lexicography. He was a long-time editor of Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, and his beloved Lexicon of Musical Invective remains an uproarious compendium of cautionary tales for those too willing to dismiss new music with ill-tempered first judgments. (To cite a couple of notorious examples: The Harmonicon, a London monthly, snipes at Beethoven’s Ninth for its “want of intelligible design,” while a New York critic of 1897 wonders how anyone could take Rimsky-Korsakov seriously, since his name alone “suggests fierce whiskers stained with vodka.”)
One of Slonimsky’s encyclopedic projects, his Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns (1947), has proved to be a surprisingly far-reaching source of inspiration, regularly raided by composers and musicians across genres (in classical, jazz, and pop music). The Thesaurus offers a comprehensive inventory of alternative scales, modes, and chords to complement the traditional bedrock of Western tonality. Among its many colorful discoveries is a “grandmother chord” comprising twelve tones that are arranged in eleven different intervals. Such musicians as John Coltrane and Frank Zappa found the Thesaurus to be a stimulating guide. (Slonimsky in turn palled around with the Zappa crowd, naming his cat Grody-to-the-Max.)
Adams, too, discovered riches in Slonimsky’s Thesaurus, “whose scales and resulting harmonies have had a singular impact on my music since the Chamber Symphony of 1992.” Additionally, Adams enjoyed the pleasure of getting to know Slonimsky during his very last years, when the elder composer lived in Santa Monica. Adams enjoyed his friend’s amazingly detailed memory; he finds Slonimsky’s autobiography (Perfect Pitch) to rival Berlioz’s famous Memoirs as “one of the few genuinely original literary works about music.” Along with Slonimsky’s scales and modes, his deliciously quirky personality—characterized, Adams writes, by “wit and hyper-energetic activity”—is embedded in the music of Slonimsky’s Earbox.
The portmanteau word “earbox” (packing “ear” together with implied suggestions of “music box,” “sound box,” even “toolbox” and “toy box”) neatly encapsulates a contemporary idea of musical composition: In Slonimsky’s Earbox, Adams depicts composition as a process of selecting items from a box of available procedures, rather than as inspiration from above or as following a set of predetermined values. The source material is what the astute French critic Renaud Machart describes as “a reservoir of gestures, a conservatory of memory, and a place for experimentation.” Indeed, Adams chose this neologism not only as the title for the first important retrospective issued by his record label Nonesuch over a decade ago, but also as the name of his Web site (www.earbox.com).
Besides Adams’s own varying languages and his promptings from the Thesaurus, Slonimsky’s Earbox locates a key “tool” in the work of another Russian: Stravinsky’s symphonic poem of 1917, Le Chant du rossignol (The Song of the Nightingale), specifically, in its opening moments. Le Chant also straddles the worlds of opera and the concert hall. Stravinsky’s piece is an orchestral condensation of a short fairy-tale opera that was based on a Hans Christian Andersen story. Though Stravinsky temporarily dropped the opera—begun in 1908—in favor of a bird of another feather (The Firebird), he later returned to the opera and completed it in 1914. In 1917 he prepared a symphonic poem from the opera’s last two acts, which was then made into a ballet for Serge Diaghilev in 1920. (Fittingly, Slonimsky’s Earbox has likewise been choreographed, in a piece by Peter Martins for New York City Ballet, which premiered in 2000.)
Adams writes of his admiration for Stravinsky’s ability to manipulate the orchestra, as it “bursts out in a brilliant eruption of colors, shapes, and sounds.” But Adams also admires the deeper structure of archaic-sounding modal scales that underlie this eruption—precisely the sorts of scales that Slonimsky took pains to compile in his Thesaurus. According to Adams, traces of Stravinsky’s Russian roots can be heard in these modal patterns (they also inform the music of the famous Russian ballets of the pre-World War I years). Stravinsky would soon abandon this dizzyingly rich source of textures for a much leaner, low-calorie style. Still, Adams writes, “I have long thought that the Russians—not only Stravinsky but composers like Scriabin and Tcherepnin—had begun something very important in their use of modal scales and harmonies, a direction that unfortunately was overwhelmed by more prestigious practices such as Neoclassicism and Serialism.”
Adams’s Earbox erupts in colorfully energetic currents. Strange, mercurial scalar patterns rocket upward. (This is a composer with an uncanny knack for knowing exactly how to spin a piece into motion.) The explosive opening sets the tone for a brilliant toccata, demanding virtuosity from the entire orchestra. Adams intensifies the excitement of these bright, spiraling fragments by restlessly modulating them, shifting unpredictably among timbres. He generates further tension when the centrifugal energy of the opening gestures emerges against a field of motor-like, static patterns that eventually work their way into the foreground. Drawing from the minimalist compartment of the “toolbox,” these static elements slow the frenzy and introduce a quieter section in which Adams references another of his “tutelary deities”: Charles Ives (via a veiled appearance of the strings parts from Ives’s The Unanswered Question).
The music pools into a floating, introspective calm. Before long, new sparks are struck, and Earbox begins to gear up for a new and now certain trajectory. The final minutes constitute one of those masterful ingatherings so characteristic of Adams: He makes us simultaneously aware of the moment unfolding and of a destination further out that has just entered the horizon. (Aficionados of Adams’s Doctor Atomic will recognize a forerunner of the polyrhythmic layerings of that work’s countdown scene.) The haze-like calm is revealed as a mirage, a specter cast aside by the surging energy from the opening that returns, but that is now guided into an unstoppable, coruscating climax.
—Thomas May
Thomas May writes and lectures about music and theater, and is a Contributing Writer to the San Francisco Symphony program book. His books include Decoding Wagner and The John Adams Reader.
More About the Music
Recordings: Kent Nagano conducting the Hallé Orchestra (Nonesuch) and on the 10-CD Adams compendium Earbox (Nonesuch)
Reading: Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life, John Adams’s recent memoir (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) | The John Adams Reader: Essential Writings on an American Composer, edited by Thomas May (Amadeus Press) | Perfect Pitch: An Autobiography, by Nicolas Slonimsky (Schirmer) | Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers Since Beethoven’s Time, by Slonimsky (Norton) | Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns, by Slonimsky (Hal Leonard) | Hail Bop! Tony Palmer’s documentary on John Adams (DVD on Kultur) | earbox.com, Adams’s Web site