The Dharma at Big Sur / My Father Knew Charles Ives
John Adams’ exuberant new album of orchestral works – conducted by him and performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra – name-checks the ghosts of two famous Americans, novelist Jack Kerouac and composer Charles Ives, while summoning the spirit of many others, dead and alive. The Dharma at Big Sur, commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic for the opening of the Frank Gehry-designed Disney Hall, was partly inspired by Kerouac’s book Big Sur (1962), which recounts the writer’s journey along the Pacific coast to live in a cabin at Big Sur. Intent on revisiting his past, he disintegrates into lonely alcoholism before returning home. Adams’ composition features Tracy Silverman on electric violin, a musician he first heard playing in a jazz club and whose virtuosity occasionally evokes the agitated spirit of Jimi Hendrix.
This is very visual music. The first movement opens tentatively, gradually building into a suggestion of distant thunder before dissolving into soft bass notes above which float a series of achingly melancholic phrases for the solo violin. Evocations of air, heat and big horizons, diving birds and the rustle of trees are shot through with an undercurrent of inebriated anxiety manifested in roller-coaster moods, discordant phrases and moments of jittery counterpoint. The piece resounds with Buddhist and Hindu meditative traditions, non-Western tuning systems, folk music and the Californian landscape that Adams is so immersed in. (In the tradition of composers such as Edvard Grieg and Gustav Mahler, who wrote their compositions alone in the countryside, Adams composes in a shed in Rushy Ridge in the hills north of San Francisco.)
The opening bars of the second and final movement, ‘Sri Moonshine’, are as chaotic and joyful as a tipsy party beneath big stars. The frenetic violin dances a wild jig that jitters, splits and soars until it disappears into the distance like a line of trucks on a desert highway. The final bars are intricate and explosive – so layered with sounds that it’s surprising the orchestra doesn’t collapse beneath the weight of them. The composer Terry Riley lives in a ranch called Sri Moonshine, and the reference to him in the title is no coincidence. In a recent interview Adams said ‘I first heard Terry’s music while I was still a student at Harvard in the ’60s, and it was in part because of him that I decided to come out here … just as Kerouac, Ginsberg, and the Beats in their prose and poems first made the Dharma known to a wider American consciousness, so Lou [Harrison] and Terry did a swimilar thing in music. My piece is a recognition of that shift in consciousness that my arrival in California brought about in me.’
The three movements of My Father Knew Charles Ives (written for the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra) summon the distant journeys of the composer’s childhood in the 1950s, his musical family and the music of Ives, a small-town insurance salesman and maverick composer of works that effortlessly combine the traditions of European classical music with the sounds of trains, Gospel hymns, popular tunes, jazz, street marches and Dixie bands. The first movement, ‘Concord’, begins like someone opening their eyes after a deep sleep and slowly becoming aware of the sounds of the street outside the window. Gradually the non sequiturs, clangs, clashes, traffic, harmony and discord of a small town intrude, intermeshed with a profound sense of introspection; listening to this music is like simultaneously reading a postcard and someone’s mind. The second and third movements, ‘The Lake’ and ‘The Mountain’, open with suggestions of wind chimes and water before launching into a journey that builds with the momentum of a high-speed train that occasionally has to slow down and stop. Images flash by, a moment is stilled, time shifts, weather changes, and memories – aural and atmospheric – crowd around until the notes of the final bar fade as gently as twilight at the end of a hot, action-packed day.
