A New Year In New Music
With annual retrospectives tapering off and best-of lists becoming so-last-year, it's time to ratchet our sights 180 degrees and look ahead to a new year in new music. This week on Hammered! we'll...
View ArticleThe Third Law of Classical Mechanics
Music is historically a very reactive material: Renaissance motets paraphrased liturgical chants; sonata structures were modeled on Mozartean tonal schemes; "Choral" symphonies were (at least) a...
View ArticleNixon in China: An Insider's Perspective
"Nixon asked Kissinger to go with him and Kissinger, in turn and to my eternal gratitude, asked me to accompany him."So began U.S. diplomat Winston Lord’s nearly four-decade long relationship with...
View ArticlePiano Casserole
A lot to digest last week, no? The Ecstatic Music Festival marathon gave us a taste of its "multi-genre" offerings, performer-composers flourished in unique collaborations, and Q2 was blarring John...
View ArticleAdams's Nixon in China
"News has a kind of mystery," sings James Maddalena in his landmark role as Richard Nixon in John Adams's first opera, Nixon in China.Maddalena returns to the role this month as the opera has its Met...
View ArticleTwo Adams Combine their Ribs for an Operatic Eve
Earlier this morning it was announced that composers John Adams and John Luther Adams will be collaborating on an opera—the former’s seventh and the latter’s first. While a clever pairing on name...
View ArticleJohn Adams's Rib
Our chat with Jessica Rivera and Eric Lamb begins Monday at 4 pm. Sign up for a reminder now!This week on The New Canon, soprano Jessica Rivera and flutist Eric Lamb enter the ring to talk about the...
View ArticlePrimal Counterpoint
Rhythm is often experienced in a very primal way, and perhaps it is because of its organic presence within our own existence. It may first go unnoticed, yet underneath the deafening chaos of life, one...
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Decade 9/11: Responses in Classical Music
ReadWriting a piece about a major disaster, war or other crisis is one of the bigger challenges a composer may face. In this guide to pieces about September 11, we explore how every composer faced a...
View ArticleComposer John Adams Reflects on Pulitzer Work, Public 'Overreaction' to Sept....
ReadComposer John Adams, looking back at On the Transmigration of Souls, his 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning piece remembering the victims of Sept. 11, expressed satisfaction with the work's success, but...
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Singing Terrorists: Death of Klinghoffer Gets London Premiere
No opera has been dogged by controversy over the last two decades as John Adams's 1990 work The Death of Klinghoffer. It provoked yet another boisterous media frenzy in the lead-up to its London stage...
View ArticleJohn Adams and Writing an American Opera
In this 1995 interview from the WNYC archives, John Adams talks with host John Schaefer about his new opera I Was looking at the Ceiling and then I Saw the Sky, finished just a week before the...
View ArticleThe Top Three Operas with Nerd Appeal
From astronomy and math to physics and comparative literature, operas with nerd appeal are becoming increasingly popular. "Science, technology and the capacity of the human intellect engage nerds all...
View ArticleAttacca Quartet Presents Music for Your Next Car Ride
2013 is already a busy year for The Attacca Quartet. The group is in the midst of a multi-year project to perform all of Haydn's 68 string quartets, and on Mar. 26, the ensemble will celebrate the...
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Review: John Adams Thinks Big in New Telling of the Gospel
Though every moment of The Gospel According to the Other Mary was the John Adams I’ve known for decades, the piece sounded like none other.That's usually the case with each succeeding Adams work, but...
View ArticleFive New and Unusual Crowdsourced Projects in Classical Music
From music libraries to actual compositions, anyone can contribute to a part of the classical music world these days. In recent years, crowdsourcing has been a means of creating ensembles, symphonies...
View ArticleSummertime Classics
Bramwell Tovey conducts his second “Summertime Classics” concert this season at the New York Philharmonic. The program opens with John Adams’ Short Ride in a Fast Machine, one of two pieces in his Two...
View ArticleMahler and Adams
Alan Gilbert leads the New York Philharmonic in Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, "Resurrection," featuring soprano Dorothea Röschmann, mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung, and the New York Choral Artists, directed...
View ArticleTop Five Works About American Presidents
It’s unfortunate to think that Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays were conflated into one Presidents’ Day, but on the other hand, it does give an excuse to celebrate all America’s leaders. Lately,...
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Album Spotlight: John Adams's Gospel a Pointed Social Critique
It’s passion season in classical music and while J.S. Bach has a pride of place with his St. Matthew and St. John Passions, contemporary composers have periodically expanded on (or departed from) the...
View ArticleMusical Transplants: Part II
This week, host Terrance McKnight continues with the theme of musical transplants. The program samples music by those taking on traditions from outside of their place of origin.We hear American...
View ArticleCincinnati Symphony Plays John Adams and a Dett Oratorio
The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra makes its first Carnegie Hall appearance since 2001, with a program featuring John Adams's iconic Harmonium and Robert Nathaniel Dett’s The Ordering of Moses, an...
View ArticleMetropolitan Opera Cancels Broadcasts of Klinghoffer After Protests
The Metropolitan Opera has called off its HD and radio broadcasts of TheDeath of Klinghoffer, John Adams and Alice Goodman's landmark 1991 opera, saying that Jewish organizations feared it could "fan...
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Protesters Disrupt Opening of The Death of Klinghoffer
The Death of Klinghoffer was greeted Monday night at the Metropolitan Opera by several disruptions from hecklers inside the opera house, hundreds of protesters outside, and a huge applause for the...
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Review: Depth, Not Controversy, Lingers After Met Opera's The Death of...
Revenge is the bullet that rarely hits its target but takes down anything that accidentally strays into its path. Such is the ultimate message of The Death of Klinghoffer, the John Adams opera that had...
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John Adams's El Niño From the Spoleto Festival USA
John Adams, Pulitzer Prize-winner and arguably America's best-known living composer, describes El Niño as, “my way of trying to understand what is meant by a miracle." This sweeping setting of the...
View Article30 Pieces: John Adams's El Niño
This month, WQXR is taking 30 popular pieces from our year-end Classical Countdown and asking music experts to give us their "next step" compositions. Countdown Piece: Handel's MessiahCountdown...
View ArticleLeila Josefowicz Plays John Adams's 'Scheherazade.2'
Alan Gilbert leads the New York Philharmonic in the world premiere of John Adams’s Scheherazade.2— a dramatic symphony for violin and orchestra — performed by violinist Leila Josefowicz, for whom it is...
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John Adams' 'El Niño' From the Spoleto Festival USA
John Adams, Pulitzer Prize-winner and arguably America's best-known living composer, describes "El Niño" as, "my way of trying to understand what is meant by a miracle." This sweeping setting of the...
View ArticleDances, Minimal and Otherwise
To shake off the sludge and snow from their boots, this week the Brothers Balliett hit the dance floor with two major figures of American music: Philip Glass and John Adams.Both composers are known for...
View ArticleWatch Live: WQXR Presents Pianists Christina and Michelle Naughton
Hailed by the San Francisco Examiner for their “stellar musicianship, technical mastery, and awe-inspiring artistry”, twin sisters Christina and Michelle Naughton have been dazzling audiences...
View ArticleOrpheus in the New World
This week, Exploring Music shifts its eyes toward music written during the 20th and 21st centuries. Taking its title from Philip Hart's study of orchestras during the 1970s, Orpheus in the New World,...
View ArticleAlan Gilbert Conducts John Adams
Tune in Thursday at 9 pm as Alan Gilbert leads the New York Philharmonic in a program of Anatoly Lyadov, Stravinsky and John Adams, with Leila Josefowicz as the soloist. Program:CONDUCTOR: Alan...
View ArticleThat Time Of Year Again ...
As the New Year looms and another 365 day cycle prepares to reset, we at Hammered! started thinking -- as any good contemporary music show should -- about John Adams. To what clock does music like his...
View ArticleMusical Recollections of 9/11
This article was originally published in September, 2021.9/11 was, irrefutably, “an experience that was beyond music” (Corigliano), yet we still turned to music for healing and solace, each in our own...
View ArticleWe Shall All Be Changed: Musical Reflections on 9/11
Saturday, September 11, 2021 at 7pm We Shall All Be Changed is a musical reflection on the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, showing that as tragedy and trauma reshape our lives and communities, people...
View ArticleThe New York Philharmonic with Conductor Susanna Mälkki
Listen to an encore presentation on Thursday, August 11th at 9pm.This episode of Carnegie Hall Live was originally aired on Thursday, January 6th, 2022 at 8pm. Carnegie Hall Live kicks off the new year...
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Adams's Nixon in China from the Paris Opera
Listen Saturday, July 1st, at 1pm.Program notes courtesy of WFMT.Click here for the upcoming Saturday Opera broadcast schedule.Conductor Gustavo Dudamel leads the ensemble in Adams's Nixon in China,...
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