Adams: innovator or renovator

Recently, the topic of renovation in music was brought up in class. Since I have done a little bit of exploration into the music of John Adams this semester, it seems to me that such a question would make for an excellent investigation into Adams output.

The twentieth century was a time of great upheaval, both politically and socially. This is mirrored musically in the crisis that composers underwent during much of the century. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the tonal vocabulary had been almost completely exhausted, and composers had begun to experiment outside tonal parameters. The result led to atonality in the music of the second Viennese school, and a growing alienation of composers with concert going audiences.

This led to fragmentation in music circles. Conservatives wished to write music that would appeal to audiences, but their compositions were old fashioned and dated, while atonal composers, followed by composers of chance music wrote music that was too challenging to be appreciated by the lay listener, leading to an ensuing rejection by the populace. The conservative composers, while writing music that appealed to audiences, just had that, audience appeal with minimal content. A crisis of identity in music arose. Those who wrote had creative ideas to share didn't know how to relate to their audience, while composers who knew how to relate to their audiences, didn't know how to introduce the concertgoer to the new ideas music had to offer. Audience attendance at concerts plummeted likewise.

As a result, composers realized that in order to regain an audience, they needed to write music that would appeal to the audience. This could be viewed as the renovation aspect of music, in which composers in the decades of the 1980s and 1990s definitely did take part in. They wrote music that attempted to patch relations with an audience that felt like it had been betrayed.

On the surface, it appears that Adams could be a renovator, but only on the surface. As I have pointed out in previous weeks, Adams very carefully adapted many modernistic techniques into a vocabulary that not only could be understood by the concert going populace, but would take on greater emotional and social significance. One only needs to look at the Transmigration of souls and all of the quarter tones, the prerecorded elements, and the other multimedia effects incorporated into the work to realize that Adams is not by any means looking back to the past for inspiration, but is attempting to write a work of emotional intensity with a modern vocabulary that is relevant to our day and age.

Granted, Adams did renovate the symphonic scene by reestablishing the possibility of living composers writing music for a vehicle dominated for centuries by composers of the stature of Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn. Yet again, he did it in a highly innovative way, he took the orchestra and fit it into the harmonic and melodic vocabulary of the modern era.

With this having been established, a distinction can be raised between these two concepts. A renovator is someone who takes something and attempts to restore it to its previous state, typically through reverting to models from the past and not looking forward towards the future. An innovator, on the other hand, takes something and attempts to create something that looks towards the future.

This again raises the question of Adams. Is he an innovator or renovator, since his music displays aspects of both. Simply put, he is an innovator who renovated an art that had neglected the audience for too long.