John Adams - Harmonium (1981)

0:00 1. Negative Love. A warm, pulsating cluster of sound slowly builds
2:31 The chorus takes up a sweet soft melody under luminous string harmonics, growing to an epic climax at 4:11
4:16 A more optimistic section, traveling through several "harmonic gates"
5:24, 6:08 Frantic tremolos and arpeggios behind a relentless driving chorus
8:01 An agitated crescendo into a huge climax at 8:54 before...
9:08 ...a suddenly calm ending with mellow horns and bright ostinatos

10:29 2. Because I Could Not Stop for Death. Bittersweet clusters underline a somber choral melody
12:58 The sound warms up as the chorus takes up a light, free-floating melody
14:28 A strong sense of nostalgia imbues the music (16:22, 17:28 glowingly beautiful timbre and harmony here)
18:04 The bitter sound of the beginning of the movement returns (19:39 the cowbells and chorus here create such a wonderful soundscape)
20:15 A grand accelerando and crescendo into...

22:41 3. Wild Nights. (self-explanatory)
24:49 Highly agitated
25:40, 26:21 An ecstasy of trombone glissandos pushes towards a very wild climax
26:59, 27:44 Gentle soothing waves of sound bring a comforting end

Composer: John Coolidge Adams (February 15, 1947 – )
Orchestra: San Francisco Symphony conducted by John Adams
Chorus: San Francisco Symphony Chorus directed by Vance George
Nonesuch

Score available from Associated Music Publishers: https://issuu.com/scoresondemand/docs/harmonium_23705

https://www.earbox.com/harmonium/
Harmonium (1980) and Shaker Loops (1978) represent my first mature statements in a language that was born out of my initial exposure to Minimalism. From the very start my own brand of Minimalism began to push the envelope. What was orderly and patiently evolving in the works of Reich or Glass was in my works already subject to violent changes in gesture and mood...

Harmonium was composed in 1980 in a small studio on the third floor of an old Victorian house in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Those of my friends who knew both the room and the piece of music were amused that a piece of such spaciousness should emerge from such cramped quarters. The title of the work was all that survived from my initial intention to set poems from Wallace Stevens’s collection of the same name. After I realized that Stevens’s language and rhythmic sense was not my own, I cast far and wide for a text to satisfy a musical image that I had in mind. That image was one of human voices–many of them–riding upon waves of rippling sound. Ultimately I settled on three poems of transcendental vision. “Negative Love” by John Donne examines the qualities of various forms of love, ascending in the manner of Plato’s Symposium, from the carnal to the divine. I viewed this “ascent” as a kind of vector, having both velocity and direction. Musically, this meant a formal shape that began with a single, pulsing note (a D above middle C) that, by the process of accretion, becomes a tone cluster, then a chord, and eventually a huge, calmly rippling current of sound that takes on energy and mass until it eventually crests on an immense cataract of sound some ten minutes later. To date, I still consider “Negative Love” one of the most satisfying architectural experiments in all my work.

The two Dickinson poems show the polar opposites of her poetic voice. “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” is the intimate, hushed Dickinson, whose beyond-the-grave monologue is a sequence of images from a short life, a kind of pastoral elegy expressed through the lens of a slow-motion camera. Like Aaron Copland before me, I unknowingly set the bowdlerized version of the original, being unaware at the time that the poet’s original version differed significantly in syntax from the more smoothed-out, conventional version made by Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

Following the last palpitations of the slow movement the music enters a transition section, a kind of bardo stage between the end of one life and the beginning of a new one. Again, as in “Negative Love,” the music gradually assumes weight, force and speed until it is hurled headlong into the bright, vibrant clangor of “Wild Nights.” Here is the other side of Emily Dickinson, saturated with an intoxicated, ecstatic, pressing urge to dissolve herself in some private and unknowable union of eros and death. The metaphors, at once violent and sexually hypercharged, play upon the image of a “heart in port”, secure and out of danger from the wild storm-tossed sea. So much has been written about Emily Dickinson, and her mysterious persona has been subjected to so much speculative analysis, that it is always a shock to encounter these texts alone and away from any kind of exegesis.

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