Sidebars: Conversations with John Adams, composer and conductor, and Jessie Montgomery, composer

John Adams, composer and conductor, discusses his El Niño

by Hannah Edgar

The last time John Adams conducted the May Festival Chorus was on a CSO concert in 2008, for his own 2008 On the Transmigration of Souls, composed in memory of those who died on September 11. The work won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Music and immediately secured a vaunted place in the 21st-century canon. Even so, Adams found himself frustrated by live performances of Transmigration, feeling they rarely cohered the work’s acoustic and prerecorded elements.

That May Festival performance helped convince him otherwise. “The pure American quality of their enunciation and their perfectly balanced sonorities lifted the matter-of-fact plainness of the words to a transcendental level, and for once the piece did not seem as compromised and uneven as I had previously thought,” Adams later wrote in his memoir.

Adams returns to conduct his bilingual operaoratorio El Niño (2000)—“one of my favorite pieces,” he admits. Hard at work on Antony and Cleopatra, his latest opera debuting in San Francisco this fall, Adams answered questions via email.

You started conducting very young, while you were still a teenager. Did you formally study conducting with anyone?

The only “lessons” I had were during one summer at a music festival; my teacher had been a pupil of the great Nadia Boulanger. Other than that, I learned a lot about conducting from playing in orchestras. I was often called to substitute in the clarinet section of the Boston Symphony when I was in college, so early in my career I learned firsthand what orchestra players appreciate (a good upbeat, helpful cues, efficient rehearsing, don’t waste their time) and what they dislike (conductors who haven’t prepared, who talk too much, or who keep stopping).

John Adams. Credit: Musacchio Ianniello Pasqualini

Have you sung in a chorus yourself?

This will probably come as no surprise to singers who struggle with my choral writing, but I’ve never sung in a chorus or taken voice lessons. Nonetheless, I love the sound of massed voices. My first commission as a young composer was from the San Francisco Symphony, for a work for chorus and orchestra. If they’d known how little experience I’d had with chorus, I’m sure they wouldn’t have proposed that. But they did, and the piece that resulted was Harmonium, a work which after 30 years continues to get a lot of performances. So…what can I say? Beginner’s luck? All of my operas and oratorios have large choral forces involved. In fact, Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer and Doctor Atomic all start with choruses.

What works do you gravitate towards conducting?

I consider it a privilege to be able to make programs around my music. When I did my Absolute Jest in Vienna a few years ago, a piece for string quartet and orchestra based on fragments of Beethoven, they asked me to pair it with a Beethoven symphony. So, there I was, doing something I’d never in my life imagined: conducting my favorite Beethoven, the Fourth Symphony, in Vienna! Likewise, I do 20th-century music that speaks to me on a very deep level: Sibelius, Ravel, Debussy, Bartók, Stravinsky, Copland and, of course, the music of my colleagues Steve Reich and Philip Glass. And all through my 40-plus years of performing I have done many premieres by young composers, several of whom are now making real waves.

In Conversation with Jessie Montgomery, composer of I Have Something to Say

by Hannah Edgar

Greta Thunberg’s impassioned speech at the 2018 UN Climate Change Conference was still ringing in Jessie Montgomery’s ears when the May Festival and Cathedral Choral Society (Washington, D.C.) commissioned her to write a work commemorating the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed some women the vote. Montgomery decided to place Thunberg in conversation with another trailblazing orator who put her audience in the hot seat: Sojourner Truth, using words from her oft-quoted (and likely misquoted) appeal to attendees of the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio.

Montgomery’s I Have Something to Say imagines an encounter between the two women and culminates with a children’s choir protesting in an imagined courtroom or assembly hall. Montgomery spoke to us about the work—her fi rst for full orchestra and chorus—and about collaborating on the libretto with her mother, the late writer and performance artist Robbie McCauley.

Your mom wrote the text for “I Have Something to Say.” Had you worked together on projects before?

No, we hadn’t. She was getting older, and I wondered, “Wait, why haven’t we done this?”She was the perfect person for creating a fictional conversation between these two women. I came up with the idea, and she was totally on board; she wrote the poem in, like, a day. That’s how my family is—you do your thing over there, I’ll do my thing over here. And when we come together, it’s gonna be great. As a composer, I never considered making political music. Because my mom was so grounded in politics and her own personal history, I think I saw that as her “thing.” I was the classical violinist that does my classical music stuff that has nothing to do with anything except how well I play—you know, all the annoying, superficial things that we think about as musicians. But with this piece, I really got into the messaging and embraced it a bit more.

You mentioned the children’s chorus being a voice for justice in this piece. Something I didn’t know about you is that you sang in a youth choir yourself, in the Young People’s Chorus in New York.

One hundred percent! I started singing in Young People’s Chorus when Francisco Núñez started the organization. He taught choir at my music school and my after-school thing. When he started the organization offi cially, I jumped in as one of the fi rst chorus members.

I just loved chorus—I loved the resonance of everyone singing, I loved the warm-up games. Around the same time, I was getting really good at violin, and I had to decide if I was going to focus on violin instead. Ultimately, I didn’t have aspirations of being a singer, but I did have aspirations of being a violinist. But later, when I went to summer camps and stuff , I was always excited to revisit singing.

I actually did write a piece for Young People’s Chorus several years ago based on Langston Hughes’s Danse Africaine. That was huge for me, because I know how it feels to sing in those groups. When I hear children singing, I cry instantly—it’s just an involuntary response. It doesn’t matter whose piece it is, whether mine or someone else’s.

Robbie McCauley Composer Jessie Montgomery. Credit: Jiyang Chen

So was your staff paper smudged with tears by the end of it?

Well, I was crying for other reasons. [Laughs] When you’re in the thing working on it, it’s the grueling things that move you, like the deadline.

Ah, stress crying.

Yes, stress crying, exactly! But I’m pretty sure I’ll cry during the concert, and probably in the dress rehearsal.