The venerated American composer John Adams may hold the dubious honor of being the world's only uncool minimalist. Philip Glass and Steve Reich are still considered mandatory in the education of aspiring hipsters, and will remain so as long as art students smoke pot and watch Koyaanisqatsi or minimal techno producers namedrop Reich's Music For 18 Musicians. But Adams has none of this cachet. He doesn't write film scores like Glass; he has no tenuous associations with the Velvet Underground like La Monte Young; he has never dabbled in disco à la Arthur Russell; and he has none of Lou Harrison's West Coast hippie mystique. Indeed, despite having written some of the most moving, resonant works of the past 25 years, Adams probably also bears the unfortunate distinction of being the most important American musician the majority of non-classical listeners have never heard of.
Part of the problem might be his un-Googleable name, which manages to confound even a simple Wikipedia search. But a larger problem is that Adams isn't really a minimalist. A Harvard-educated New Englander, he came to the movement the way Elvis Costello came to punk: late, after the bloodiest battles had already been fought. Indeed, alongside his black-clothed contemporaries, who were dabbling in shamanism, tripping on acid, and hanging out with Yoko Ono, Adams has always seemed a little tweedy-- but it often takes an interested outsider to bring an aesthetic movement to the next level. (Bad Brains, for example, were jazz-rock fusionists before bassist Daryl Jennifer brought some Damned albums over to vocalist's H.R.'s house and they decided to reinvent hardcore.) Adams rejected minimalism's trappings but eagerly soaked up its creative energy and the seemingly endless possibilities of its primordial pulse, which courses through even his most elaborate works.
A Flowering Tree, his latest opera, demonstrates how far you can stretch the basic language of minimalism-- former Village Voice critic and composer Kyle Gann once called minimalism's repeating melodic cells "sonic Silly Putty, capable of taking impressions of world music, reggae, birdsongs, whatever"-- without losing its basic shape. In A Flowering Tree, minimalism takes the impression of Mozart's final opera The Magic Flute. The work, which premiered in Vienna in 2006, was part of a festival celebrating Mozart's then-250th anniversary, and along with his longtime collaborator and producer Peter Sellars, Adams chose as text a South Indian folk tale in which a prince in a "far-off land" marries a woman named Kumudha who has the ability to transform into a tree. The fairy-tale mysticism of the story recalls Mozart's Flute-- transformation, and, eventually, betrayal and love conquering all-- but Adams also shows Mozart's gift for darkening a backdrop of fantasy with shades of pain, regret, and fear.
The opera's autumnal mood is established immediately, with a chilly gust of strings blowing in the orchestra. This perpetual-motion, chattering violin figure flows beneath the story like some ancient river, resurfacing repeatedly as if to remind us it will surely outlast all the players on this stage. The narrator, meanwhile, sets the stage for a romp in the style of the Shakespearean comedies, in which a lovers' paradise, abruptly overturned, is quickly and painlessly restored-- "Children, I want to tell you a story of love, and then pain, and then love again," he sings. But in this telling, the love and pain seem to all have bled into each other, making it impossible to separate when one ends and the other begins. Even when the music is joyful-- and there is plenty of joyful music here, with bells, chimes, gongs, piping recorders, and rough-and-tumble pizzicato passages-- persistent dissonances tug at the corners like nagging memories of past hurt.
Adams' score is almost narcotic in its gorgeousness. Like the lead character, the orchestra shape-shifts, transforming from full-blown clamor to eerie, hollow whines. Despite the aural splendor, the dread and unease behind the story never dissipates. When Kumudha undergoes her first transformation, the moment is less Cinderella than Frankenstein's monster; Adams turns it into some kind of terrible pagan rite, accompanied by fearsome, hair-raising tribal chanting ("Flores Chorus"). When Kumudha later finds herself trapped in a grotesque hybrid state, in "Kumudha Once More...", woodwinds and horns twist mournfully around each other like flower petals drifting to earth.
Adams has written far more pop-friendly works in his career, so if the sound of full-bore operatic singing causes you to shift uncomfortably in your seat, you might be better off initiating yourself with his stripped-down, hypnotic solo piano pieces like Hallelujah Junction, which are far closer in spirit and sound to Reich's Different Trains and Terry Riley's In C than his operas. A Flowering Tree, by comparison, has more in common with early 20th century works like Schoenberg's "Verklärte Nacht"-- and you know how kids today love them some Schoenberg. But just because buying opera tickets falls on most indie listeners' priority list somewhere between "check out that medieval renaissance fair" and "attend Promise Keeper's rally" doesn't mean that Adams should continue languishing in pop-culture obscurity. There are few living American composers writing works as universal and relevant as John Adams-- and that deserves everybody's attention.
