American composer and conductor; the leading representative of the style in which the so-called minimalism (characteristic features - laconic texture, repetition of elements), represented in American music by Steve Ryke and Philip Glass, is combined with more traditional features. Adams was born in Worcester, Massachusetts on February 15, 1947. His father taught him the clarinet, and he excelled so much that, as a student at Harvard University, he was able to occasionally replace the clarinetist
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American composer and conductor; the leading representative of the style in which the so-called minimalism (characteristic features - laconic texture, repetition of elements), represented in American music by Steve Ryke and Philip Glass, is combined with more traditional features. Adams was born in Worcester, Massachusetts on February 15, 1947. His father taught him the clarinet, and he excelled so much that, as a student at Harvard University, he was able to occasionally replace the clarinetist in the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In 1971, after completing his studies, he moved to California, began teaching at the San Francisco Conservatory (1972-1982) and headed the student Ensemble of New Music. In 1982-1985 he received a fellowship from the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. Adams first attracted attention with a string septet (Shaker Loops, 1978): this composition was praised by critics for the originality of the style in which the avant-garde of Glass and Rijk is combined with neo-romantic forms and musical narrative. It has even been claimed that during this time Adams helped his senior colleagues Glass and Rijk find a new creative direction, where the rigidity of the style is softened and the music is made available to a wider range of listeners. In 1987, the premiere of Adams’s Nixon in China, an opera based on Alice Goodman’s poems about Richard Nixon’s historic meeting with Mao Zedong in 1972, took place in Houston. Later, the opera was staged in New York and Washington, as well as in some European cities; its recording became a bestseller. The next product of Adams and Goodman’s collaboration was the opera The Death of Klinghoffer (1991) on a plot about the capture of a passenger steamer by Palestinian terrorists. Other notable works by Adams include Phrygian Gates (1977), a tense and virtuoso composition for piano; Harmonium (1980) for large orchestra and choir; Available Light (1982), an interesting electronic composition with choreography by Lucinda Childs; Grand Pianola Music (1982) for multiplicated pianos (Harmonium, 1980) for large orchestra and choreographs; and Armstration (1994) for electronic instruments.