This morning I immersed myself in early period John Adams, listen­ing to the two versions of Shaker Loops back-to-back and watching an old docu­men­tary about Harmo­nium.

It’s funny to look back to the early 80’s and see what an insti­tu­tion Adams had already become. The film­mak­ers tried desper­ately to roman­ti­cize him and his music, and he seemed to handle it well, posing for the camera in picturesque situ­a­tions, compos­ing in his impec­ca­ble mountain cabin or gazing thought­fully over the San Fran­cisco bay. Pretty banal stuff, though Adams did have some inter­est­ing things to say, includ­ing his own handy defi­n­i­tion of Mini­mal­ism: “A vast reit­er­a­tion of smaller units to create a larger archi­tec­ture”. He plays some licks from Nixon in China on his wonder­ful old clavi­nova to demon­strate this. It was also fun to see the 1980’s choris­ters struggle with Harmo­nium’s hemiola rhythms, which sound so staid now, precisely because Adams and others have reit­er­ated those gestures to the point of cliché. 

The piece itself, though, is still resound­ingly success­ful. The epic crescendo/accelerando into “Wild Nights” must have sounded incred­i­bly daring in 1982, and it still never fails to move me. Though it strikes me as a subver­sion of the poem, not to mention a manip­u­la­tion of the audience, to empha­size the line “were I with thee” as much as Adams does by repeat­ing it dal niente in the final section. It makes the ending sadder and more poignant, but is it true to the meaning of the text? I suppose that’s why so many composers set Emily Dick­in­son, because she can’t very well complain.

Though the original septet version used a quasi-aleatoric system of looped phrases and cues, Shaker Loops is always heard today in its later through-composed scoring. (I love looking at weird, unknown versions of familiar pieces, seeing how composers thought differ­ently about their own music as it contin­ued to evolve.) That said, in the way it sounds, the original version resem­bles the written-out version closely. The entire middle of the piece, includ­ing the entire second and most of the third move­ments, has no inde­ter­mi­nate notation what­so­ever. It’s as if Adams started compos­ing using the idea of loops, then as he became more involved with the music he was writing, aban­doned the idea in favor of increased control. I suppose this was a learning expe­ri­ence for him, because he was progress­ing closer toward the type of music he has become known for. There are a few details that are lost with a massed string texture, however; for example, the trills in the second movement become more of a textural effect, whereas the solo strings artic­u­late them as florid orna­men­tal lines. Contrary to Adams’s own state­ments, I think the main advan­tage of the written-out version is not increased compo­si­tional control, but increased confi­dence on the players’ part, simply because the notation is more tradi­tional. This results in tighter and more controlled perfor­mances, even without a conduc­tor (but with plenty of head-banging).