aworks :: "new" american classical music

Hallelujah Junction (1996). John Adams #entertainment #breathlessencomium

America's most popular living classical composer makes an interesting comment in a New York Times book review of Camille Paglia:

The achievement of [George] Lucas, like that of Disney, is indisputably a defining element of American culture. But no amount of apotheosis and breathless encomium will elevate it to be other than exactly what it is — entertainment. To see George Lucas as the “greatest living artist” is to repeat an error especially common among Americans, which is to measure an artwork’s importance by its reach rather than its depth. Paglia, who knows her Emily Dickinson and her Kafka (both artists with zero “fan base” in their lifetimes), has journeyed to the wrong continent, and what she has found glittering there is fool’s gold.

Ok, having quoted that, America's most popular living classical composer may instead be John Williams. 
The greatest works of John Adams are without argument better than those of John Williams (Nixon in China vs. Star Wars!). But in the second tier where reach and depth get murky, Williams' works will outlast Adams'. 

This is a long, roundabout way of saying Hallelujah Junction won't be part of the American canon and John Williams is better than George Lucas. H.J., the book is recommended, though.

I have no opinion to offer on Camille Paglia, which is probably her worst nightmare.

 

Hallelujah Junction (2008). John Adams /h.j. the book, not the work/

Cover via Amazon

I'm finally reading John Adams' autobiography, Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life.

In the chapter on the impact of electronics in classical music, he talks about a Harvard professor who had his students listen to various instruments all playing the same pitch, except without the initial "attack" i.e. as a sustained sound. And so it was hard to actually distinguish the clarinet from the trumpet from the violin from the piccolo:

The lesson was that most of the characteristic information in a musical sound is in the onset, or the "attack." Strange but true: the attack is largely characterized by noise rather than by pitch. Each instrument has highly complex attack characteristics, and it is from here, in this split second of the beginning of a sound, that we derive the lion's share of the information.

To be fair, the book is not at all pedantic like that paragraph might imply.

And just today, Musical Assumptions happens to post about this very idea:

The edge for me is the millisecond when sound begins.