Chamber Symphony (1993)

The Chamber Symphony, written between September and December 1992, was commissioned by the Gerbode Foundation of San Francisco for the San Francisco Contemporary Chamber Players, who gave the American premiere on 12 April 1993. The world premiere performances had been given in The Hague by the Schoenberg Ensemble in January that year.

Written for 15 instruments and lasting 22 minutes, the Chamber Symphony bears a suspicious resemblance to its eponymous predecessor, Arnold Schoenberg’s op.9. The choice of instruments is roughly the same as Schoenberg’s, though mine includes parts for synthesizer, percussion (a trap set), trumpet and trombone. However, whereas Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony is in one uninterrupted structure, mine is broken into three discrete movements: ‘Mongrel Airs’, ‘Aria with Walking Bass’ and ‘Roadrunner’.

The titles give a hint of the music’s general ambience. I originally set out to write a children’s piece, and my intentions were to sample the voices of children and work them into a fabric of acoustic and electronic instruments. But before I began that project I had another one of those strange interludes that often lead to a new piece. This one involved a brief moment of what Melville called ‘the shock of recognition’: I was sitting in my studio, studying the score of Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony, and as I was doing so I became aware that my seven-year-old son Sam was in the adjacent room watching cartoons (good cartoons — old ones from the 1950s). The hyperactive, insistently aggressive and acrobatic scores for the cartoons mixed in my head with Schoenberg’s music, itself hyperactive, acrobatic and not a little aggressive. I realised suddenly how much these two traditions had in common.

For a long time my music has been conceived for large forces and has involved broad brushstrokes on big canvases. These works have been either symphonic or operatic, and even the ones for smaller forces like Phrygian Gates, Shaker Loops and Grand Pianola Music have essentially been studies in the acoustical power of massed sonorities. Chamber music, with its inherently polyphonic and democratic sharing of roles, always posed difficulties for me as a composer. Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony, however, provided a key to unlock that door, and it did so by suggesting a format in which the weight and mass of a symphonic work could be married to the transparency and mobility of a chamber piece. The tradition of American cartoon music — and I freely acknowledge that I am only one of a host of people scrambling to jump on that particular bandwagon — also suggested a further model for a music that was at once flamboyantly virtuoso and polyphonic. There were several other suggestive models from earlier in the century, most of which I came to know as a performer: Milhaud’s La création du monde, Stravinsky’s Octet and The Soldier’s Tale and Hindemith’s marvellous Kleine Kammermusik, a little-known masterpiece of 1922 for woodwind quintet that predates John Kricfalusi’s Ren and Stimpy Show by nearly 60 years.

Despite all the good humour, my Chamber Symphony turned out to be shockingly difficult to play. Unlike Phrygian Gates or Pianola, with their fundamentally diatonic palettes, this new piece — in what I suppose could be termed my post-Klinghoffer language — is linear and chromatic. Instruments are asked to negotiate unreasonably difficult passages and alarmingly fast tempos, often to the inexorable click of the trap set. But therein, I suppose, lies the perverse charm of the piece. (‘Discipliner et Punire’ was the original title of the first movement, before I decided on ‘Mongrel Airs’ to honour a British critic who complained that my music lacked breeding.)

© John Adams
Reprinted with kind permission of www.earbox.com