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John Adams
Person · male · United States · Worcester · born 1947 · recording since 1975
American composer (born 1947)
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Also known as John Coolidge Adams · John Coolidge Adams · 约翰·库利奇·亚当斯
Timeline
78 events▣ Album 67✦ Award 9◦ Birth 1★ Debut release 1
1940s
1970s
· Debut release
Debut release: Ensemble Pieces
First documented Album in the MusicBrainz discography.
source: musicbrainz
1980s
1990s
· Album
Album: Harmonielehre / The Chairman Dances / Tromba Lontana / Short Ride in a Fast Machine
Album
source: musicbrainz
· Album
Album: John Adams: Grand Pianola Music / Short Ride in a Fast Machine / David Lang: Are You Experienced? / Under Orpheus
Album
source: musicbrainz
2000s
· Album
Album: Fearful Symmetries / Chamber Symphony / Four Songs / Christian Zeal and Activity
Album
source: musicbrainz
· Album
Album: Shaker Loops / The Wound-Dresser / Short Ride in a Fast Machine
Album
source: musicbrainz
2010s
· Album
Album: Harmonielehre / Doctor Atomic Symphony / Short Ride in a Fast Machine
Album
source: musicbrainz
· Album
Album: BBC Music, Volume 25, Number 5: Philip Glass: Symphony no. 10 / John Adams: The Dharma at Big Sur
Album
source: musicbrainz
· Album
Album: Berlioz: Les nuits d’été / Ravel: Shéhérazade / Debussy/Adams: Le livre de Baudelaire
Album
source: musicbrainz
2020s
· Album
Album: Chamber Symphony / Common Tones in Simple Time / Son of Chamber Symphony
Album
source: musicbrainz
· Album
Album: City Noir / Fearful Symmetries / Lola Montez Does the Spider Dance
Album
source: musicbrainz
Biography
English biography4,754 words · 19 sectionssource: wikipedia-en · licence CC BY-SA 4.0 · revision 1370846563
Biography
John Coolidge Adams (born February 15, 1947) is an American composer and conductor. Among the most regularly performed composers of contemporary classical music, he is particularly noted for his operas, many of which center around historical events. Apart from opera, his oeuvre includes orchestral, concertante, vocal, choral, chamber, electroacoustic, and piano music.
Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Adams grew up in a musical family and was exposed to classical music, jazz, musical theatre, and rock music. He attended Harvard University, studying with Leon Kirchner, Roger Sessions, and David Del Tredici, among others. His earliest work was aligned with modernist music, but he began to disagree with its tenets upon reading John Cage's Silence: Lectures and Writings. Teaching at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Adams developed a minimalist aesthetic first fully realized in Phrygian Gates (1977) and later in the string septet Shaker Loops. Adams became increasingly active in San Francisco's contemporary music scene, and his orchestral works Harmonium (1980–1981) and Harmonielehre (1985) first gained him national attention. Other popular works from this time include the fanfare Short Ride in a Fast Machine (1986) and the orchestral work El Dorado (1991).
Adams's first opera was Nixon in China (1987), which recounts Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China and was the first of many collaborations with theatre director Peter Sellars. Though the work's reception was initially mixed, it has become increasingly respected since its premiere, receiving performances worldwide. Begun soon after Nixon in China, the opera The Death of Klinghoffer (1991) was based on the Palestinian Liberation Front's 1985 hijacking and murder of Leon Klinghoffer and incited considerable controversy for its subject matter. His next notable works include a Chamber Symphony (1992), a Violin Concerto (1993), the opera-oratorio El Niño (2000), the orchestral piece My Father Knew Charles Ives (2003), and the six-string electric violin concerto The Dharma at Big Sur (2003). Adams won a Pulitzer Prize for Music for On the Transmigration of Souls (2002), a piece for orchestra and chorus commemorating the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Continuing with historical subjects, Adams wrote the opera Doctor Atomic (2005), based on J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project, and the building of the first atomic bomb. Later operas include A Flowering Tree (2006), Girls of the Golden West (2017), and Antony and Cleopatra (2022).
In many ways, Adams's music is developed from the minimalist tradition of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, but he tends to more readily engage in the immense orchestral textures and climaxes of late Romanticism in the vein of Wagner and Mahler. His style is to a considerable extent a reaction against the modernism and serialism of the Second Viennese and Darmstadt Schools. In addition to the Pulitzer, Adams has received the Erasmus Prize, a Grawemeyer Award, five Grammy Awards, the Harvard Arts Medal, France's Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and six honorary doctorates.
Youth and early career
John Coolidge Adams was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on February 15, 1947. As an adolescent, he lived in Woodstock, Vermont, for five years before moving to East Concord, New Hampshire, and his family spent summers on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee, where his grandfather ran a dance hall. Adams's family did not own a television, and did not have a record player until he was ten. But both his parents were musicians, his mother a singer with big bands, and his father a clarinetist. He grew up with jazz, Americana, and Broadway musicals, once meeting Duke Ellington at his grandfather's dance hall. Adams also played baseball as a boy.
In the third grade, Adams took up the clarinet, initially taking lessons from his father, Carl Adams, and later with Boston Symphony Orchestra bass clarinetist Felix Viscuglia. He also played in various local orchestras, concert bands, and marching bands while a student. Adams began composing at age ten and first heard his music performed as a teenager. He graduated from Concord High School in 1965.
Adams next enrolled in Harvard University, where he earned a bachelor of arts, magna cum laude, in 1969 and a master of arts in 1971, studying composition with Leon Kirchner, Roger Sessions, Earl Kim, Harold Shapero, and David Del Tredici. As an undergraduate, he conducted Harvard's student ensemble, the Bach Society Orchestra, for a year and a half; his ambitious programming drew criticism in the student newspaper, where one of his concerts was called "the major disappointment of last week's musical offerings". Adams also became engrossed by the strict modernism of the 20th century (such as that of Boulez) while at Harvard, and believed that music had to continue progressing, to the extent that he once wrote a letter to Leonard Bernstein criticizing the supposed stylistic reactionism of Chichester Psalms. But by night, Adams enjoyed listening to The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and Bob Dylan, and has said he once stood in line at eight in the morning to purchase a copy of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Adams was the first Harvard student to be allowed to write a musical composition for his senior thesis. For his thesis, he wrote The Electric Wake for "electric" (i.e., amplified) soprano accompanied by an ensemble of "electric" strings, keyboards, harp, and percussion. A performance could not be put together at the time, and Adams has never heard the piece performed.
After graduating, Adams received a copy of John Cage's book Silence: Lectures and Writings from his mother. Largely shaken of his loyalty to modernism, he was inspired to move to San Francisco, where he worked at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music from 1972 until 1982, teaching classes and directing the school's New Music Ensemble. In the early 1970s, Adams wrote several pieces of electronic music for a homemade modular synthesizer he called the "Studebaker". He also wrote American Standard, comprising three movements, a march, a hymn, and a jazz ballad, which was recorded and released on Obscure Records in 1975.
1977 to Nixon in China
In 1977, Adams wrote the half-hour-long solo piano piece Phrygian Gates, which he later called "my first mature composition, my official 'opus one'", as well as its much shorter companion piece, China Gates. The next year, he finished Shaker Loops, a string septet based on an earlier, unsuccessful string quartet called Wavemaker. In 1979, he finished his first orchestral work, Common Tones in Simple Time, which the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Orchestra premiered with Adams conducting.
In 1979, Adams became the San Francisco Symphony's New Music Adviser and created the symphony's "New and Unusual Music" concerts. A commission from the symphony resulted in Adams's large, three-movement choral symphony Harmonium (1980–81), setting texts by John Donne and Emily Dickinson. He followed this with the three-movement orchestral piece (without strings) Grand Pianola Music (1982). That summer, he wrote the score for Matter of Heart, a documentary about psychoanalyst Carl Jung, a score he later derided as "of stunning mediocrity". In the winter of 1982–83, Adams worked on the electronic score for Available Light, a dance choreographed by Lucinda Childs with sets by architect Frank Gehry. Without dance, the electronic piece alone is called Light Over Water.
After an 18-month period of writer's block, Adams wrote his orchestral piece Harmonielehre (1984–85), which he called "a statement of belief in the power of tonality at a time when I was uncertain about its future". Like many of Adams's pieces, it was inspired by a dream, in this case, one in which he was driving across the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge and saw an oil tanker on the surface of the water abruptly turn upright and take off like a Saturn V rocket.
From 1985 to 1987, Adams composed his first opera, Nixon in China, with a libretto by Alice Goodman, based on Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China. The opera marked the first collaboration between Adams and theatre director Peter Sellars, who had proposed it to Adams in 1983. Adams worked with Sellars on all his operas until Antony and Cleopatra (2022).
During this time, Adams also wrote The Chairman Dances (1985), which he described as an "'out-take' of Act III of Nixon in China", to fulfill a long-delayed commission for the Milwaukee Symphony. He also wrote the short orchestral fanfare Short Ride in a Fast Machine (1986).
1988 to Doctor Atomic
Adams wrote two orchestral pieces in 1988: Fearful Symmetries, a 25-minute work in the same style as Nixon in China, and The Wound-Dresser, a setting of Walt Whitman's 1865 poem of that title, written when Whitman was volunteering at a military hospital during the American Civil War. The Wound-Dresser is scored for baritone voice, two flutes (or two piccolos), two oboes, clarinet, bass clarinet, two bassoons, two horns, trumpet (or piccolo trumpet), timpani, synthesizer, and strings.
During this time, Adams established an international career as a conductor. From 1988 to 1990, he served as conductor and music advisor for the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. He has also served as artistic director and conductor of the Ojai and Cabrillo Music Festivals in California. He has conducted orchestras around the world, including the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the London Symphony Orchestra, and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, performing pieces by Debussy, Copland, Stravinsky, Haydn, Reich, Zappa, Wagner, and himself.
Adams completed his second opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, in 1991, again working with Goodman and Sellars. It is based on the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro by Palestinian terrorists and details the murder of passenger Leon Klinghoffer, a retired, physically disabled Jewish American. The opera has generated controversy, including allegations that it is antisemitic and glorifies terrorism.
Adams's next piece, Chamber Symphony (1992), is for a 15-member chamber orchestra. In three movements, the work is inspired by an unlikely combination of sources: Arnold Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony No. 1, Op. 9 (which Adams was studying at the time) and the "hyperactive, insistently aggressive and acrobatic" music of the cartoons his young son was watching.
The next year, he wrote his Violin Concerto for American violinist Jorja Fleezanis. Lasting a little more than half an hour, it is also in three movements: a "long extended rhapsody for the violin" is followed by a slow chaconne (titled "Body through which the dream flows", a phrase from a poem by Robert Hass), and then an energetic toccare. Adams received the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition for the concerto.
In 1995, he completed I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, a stage piece with libretto by poet June Jordan and staging by Sellars. Inspired by musicals, Adams called the piece a "songplay in two acts". The main characters are seven young Americans from different social and ethnic backgrounds, all living in Los Angeles, with stories that take place around the 1994 Northridge earthquake.
Hallelujah Junction (1996) is a three-movement composition for two pianos that employs variations of a repeated two-note rhythm. The intervals between the notes remain the same for much of the piece. Adams used the same phrase for the title of his 2008 memoir.
Written to celebrate the millennium, El Niño (2000) is an "oratorio about birth in general and about the Nativity in specific". The piece incorporates a wide range of texts, including biblical texts as well as poems by Hispanic poets like Rosario Castellanos, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Gabriela Mistral, Vicente Huidobro, and Rubén Darío,
After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the New York Philharmonic commissioned Adams to write a memorial piece for the victims. The result, On the Transmigration of Souls, was premiered around the first anniversary of the attacks. On the Transmigration of Souls is for orchestra, chorus, and children's choir, accompanied by taped readings of the names of the victims mixed with the sounds of the city. It won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Music and the 2005 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Composition.
Commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony, Adams's orchestral piece My Father Knew Charles Ives (2003) has three movements: "Concord", "The Lake", and "The Mountain". Though his father did not actually know American composer Charles Ives, Adams saw many similarities between the two men's lives and between their lives and his own, including their love of small-town New England life and their unfulfilled musical dreams.
Written for the Los Angeles Philharmonic to celebrate the opening of Disney Hall in 2003, The Dharma at Big Sur (2003) is a two-movement work for solo electric six-string violin and orchestra. Adams wrote that with Dharma, he "wanted to compose a piece that embodied the feeling of being on the West Coast – literally standing on a precipice overlooking the geographic shelf with the ocean extending far out to the horizon". Inspired by the music of Lou Harrison, the piece calls for some instruments (harp, piano, samplers) to use just intonation, a tuning system in which intervals sound pure, rather than equal temperament, the common Western tuning system in which all intervals except the octave are impure.
Adams's third opera, Doctor Atomic (2005), is about physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project, and the creation and testing of the first atomic bomb. The work premiered at the San Francisco Opera in October 2005. Its libretto, by Sellars, draws on original source material, including personal memoirs, recorded interviews, technical manuals of nuclear physics, declassified government documents, and the poetry of the Bhagavad Gita, John Donne, Charles Baudelaire, and Muriel Rukeyser. It takes place in June and July 1945, mainly over the last few hours before the first atomic bomb explodes at the test site in New Mexico. Characters include Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty, Edward Teller, General Leslie Groves, and Robert Wilson. Two years later, Adams extracted music from the opera to create the Doctor Atomic Symphony.
In 2018, The Santa Fe Opera performed Doctor Atomic in its summer season. The production took place in Santa Fe, 33 miles away from the Los Alamos Laboratory, the Manhattan Project's research and development facility. This proximity forged a deeper connection between the production and the people of Los Alamos, fostering a new relationship with the pueblo communities. According to Andrew Martinez, this association "became an opportunity to confront the histories and present-day experiences of pain and suffering that New Mexico citizens have endured since that rainy summer night in July 1945 when the first atomic bomb was detonated". The production also featured a 2,400-pound silver orb hanging from the ceiling, representing the bomb. This single set piece stood on an otherwise empty stage, set against the backdrop of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
After Doctor Atomic
Adams's next opera, A Flowering Tree (2006), with a libretto by Adams and Sellars, is based on a folktale from the Kannada language of southern India translated by A. K. Ramanujan about a young girl who discovers she has the magic ability to transform into a flowering tree. The opera was commissioned as part of the Vienna New Crowned Hope Festival to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth, and has many parallels with Mozart's The Magic Flute, including its themes of "magic, transformation and the dawning of moral awareness".
Adams wrote three pieces for the St. Lawrence String Quartet: his First Quartet (2008), his concerto for string quartet and orchestra, Absolute Jest (2012), and his Second Quartet (2014). Both Absolute Jest and the Second Quartet are based on fragments from Beethoven, with Absolute Jest using music from his late quartets (specifically Opus 131, Opus 135 and the Große Fuge) and the Second Quartet drawing from Beethoven's Opus 110 and 111 piano sonatas.
From 2011 to 2013, Adams wrote his two-act Passion oratorio, The Gospel According to the Other Mary, a decade after his Nativity oratorio, El Niño. The work focuses on the final few weeks of the life of Jesus from the point of view of "the other Mary", Mary of Bethany (sometimes misidentified as Mary Magdalene), her sister Martha, and her brother, Lazarus. Sellars's libretto draws from the Bible and from Rosario Castellanos, Rubén Darío, Dorothy Day, Louise Erdrich, Hildegard von Bingen, June Jordan, and Primo Levi.
Scheherazade.2 (2014) is a four-movement "dramatic symphony" for violin and orchestra. Written for violinist Leila Josefowicz, who frequently performed Adams's Violin Concerto and The Dharma at Big Sur, the work was inspired by the character Scheherazade (from One Thousand and One Nights) who, after being forced into marriage, recounts tales to her husband in order to delay her death. Adams associated modern examples of suffering and injustice toward women, with acts in Tahrir Square during the Egyptian revolution of 2011, Kabul, and comments from The Rush Limbaugh Show.
Adams's seventh opera, Girls of the Golden West (2017), with a libretto by Sellars based on historical sources, is set in mining camps during the California Gold Rush of the 1850s. Sellars described the opera this way: "These true stories of the Forty-Niners are overwhelming in their heroism, passion and cruelty, telling tales of racial conflicts, colorful and humorous exploits, political strife and struggles to build a new life and to decide what it would mean to be American."
In 2022, Adams completed his eighth opera, Antony and Cleopatra, based on Shakespeare's play of the same name.
On June 14, 2023, the Library of Congress announced that it was acquiring Adams's manuscripts and papers for its Music Division, which also includes the papers of Bernstein, Copland, George and Ira Gershwin, Martha Graham, Charles Mingus, and Neil Simon, among others.
Personal life
Adams was married to Hawley Currens, a music teacher, from 1970 to 1974. He is married to photographer Deborah O'Grady, with whom he has a daughter, Emily, and a son, the composer Samuel Carl Adams.
Musical style
Adams's music is usually categorized as minimalist or post-minimalist, although in an interview he said that his music is part of the "post-style" era at the end of the 20th century. He employs minimalist techniques, such as repeating patterns, but is not a strict follower of the movement. Adams adopted much of the minimalist technique of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, but his work synthesizes this with the orchestral textures of Wagner, Mahler, and Sibelius. Comparing Shaker Loops to the minimalist composer Terry Riley's piece In C, Adams remarked:
rather than set up small engines of motivic materials and let them run free in a kind of random play of counterpoint, I used the fabric of continually repeating cells to forge large architectonic shapes, creating a web of activity that, even within the course of a single movement, was more detailed, more varied, and knew both light and dark, serenity and turbulence.
Many of Adams's ideas are a reaction to the philosophy of serialism and its depictions of "the composer as scientist". The Darmstadt School of twelve-tone composition was dominant while Adams was in college, and he compared class to a "mausoleum where we would sit and count tone-rows in Webern".
Adams experienced a musical epiphany after reading John Cage's 1961 book Silence, which he said "dropped into my psyche like a time bomb", causing him to drop out of academia, "pack his belongings into a VW Bug, and drive to California". Cage posed fundamental questions about what music was, and regarded all types of sounds as viable sources of music. This perspective offered Adams a liberating alternative to serialism's rule-based techniques. But Adams found Cage's music equally restricting. He began to experiment with electronic music, and his experiences are reflected in the writing of Phrygian Gates (1977–78), in which the constant shifting between modules in Lydian mode and Phrygian mode refers to activating electronic gates rather than architectural ones. Adams explained that working with synthesizers caused a "diatonic conversion", a reversion to the belief that tonality was a force of nature.
Some of Adams's compositions amalgamate different styles. Grand Pianola Music (1981–82) is a humorous piece that purposely draws its content from musical cliches. In The Dharma at Big Sur, Adams draws from literary texts such as Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and Henry Miller to illustrate the California landscape. He has professed his love of genres other than classical music; his parents were jazz musicians, and he has also listened to rock music, albeit only passively. Adams once claimed that originality was not an urgent concern for him the way it was for minimalists, and compared his position to that of Gustav Mahler, J. S. Bach, and Johannes Brahms, who "were standing at the end of an era and were embracing all of the evolutions that occurred over the previous thirty to fifty years".
Like other minimalists of his time, Adams used a steady pulse to define and control his music. The pulse was best known from Terry Riley's early composition In C, and more and more composers used it as a common practice. Jonathan Bernard highlighted this adoption by comparing Phrygian Gates, from 1977, and Fearful Symmetries, from 1988.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Adams started to add a new character to his music, which he called "the Trickster". The Trickster allowed Adams to use the repetitive style and rhythmic drive of minimalism while simultaneously poking fun at it. When Adams commented on his own characterization of particular minimalist music, he said that he went joyriding on "those Great Prairies of non-event".
Overview
Adams won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2003 for On the Transmigration of Souls. Response to his output as a whole has been more divided, and Adams's works have been called both brilliant and boring in reviews that stretch across both ends of the rating spectrum. Shaker Loops has been called "hauntingly ethereal", while 1999's Naïve and Sentimental Music has been called "an exploration of a marvelously extended spinning melody". The New York Times called 1996's Hallelujah Junction "a two-piano work played with appealingly sharp edges", and 2001's American Berserk "a short, volatile solo piano work".
The most critically divisive pieces in Adams's collection are his historical operas. At first release, Nixon in China received mostly negative press. In The New York Times, Donal Henahan called the Houston Grand Opera world premiere of the work "worth a few giggles but hardly a strong candidate for the standard repertory" and "visually striking but coy and insubstantial". In the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, James Wierzbicki called Adams's score the weak point in an otherwise well-staged performance, describing it as "inappropriately placid", "cliché-ridden in the abstract" and trafficking "heavily in Adams's worn-out Minimalist clichés". But with time, the opera has come to be revered. In Music and Vision, Robert Hugill called a production "astonishing ... nearly twenty years after its premier", while The Guardian's Fiona Maddocks praised the score's "diverse and subtle palette" and Adams's "rhythmic ingenuity".
More recently, New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini commended a 2007 American Composers Orchestra concert celebrating Adams's 60th birthday, calling Adams a "skilled and dynamic conductor" and the music "gravely beautiful yet restless".
Klinghoffer controversy
The opera The Death of Klinghoffer has been criticized as antisemitic by some, including the Klinghoffer family. Leon Klinghoffer's daughters, Lisa and Ilsa, after attending the opera, released a statement saying: "We are outraged at the exploitation of our parents and the coldblooded murder of our father as the centerpiece of a production that appears to us to be anti-Semitic." In response to these accusations of antisemitism, composer and Oberlin College professor Conrad Cummings wrote a letter to the editor defending Klinghoffer as "the closest analogue to the experience of Bach's audience attending his most demanding works", and noted that, as a person of Jewish descent, he "found nothing anti-Semitic about the work".
After the September 11 attacks in 2001, performances by the Boston Symphony Orchestra of excerpts from Klinghoffer were canceled. BSO managing director Mark Volpe said of the decision: "We originally programmed the choruses from John Adams' The Death of Klinghoffer because we believe in it as a work of art, and we still hold that conviction. ... [Tanglewood Festival Chorus members] explained that it was a purely human reason, and that it wasn't in the least bit a criticism of the work." Adams and Klinghoffer librettist Alice Goodman criticized the decision, and Adams rejected a request to substitute a performance of Harmonium, saying: "The reason that I asked them not to do Harmonium was that I felt that Klinghoffer is a serious and humane work, and it's also a work about which many people have made prejudicial judgments without even hearing it. I felt that if I said, 'OK, Klinghoffer is too hot to handle, do Harmonium, that in a sense I would be agreeing with the judgment about Klinghoffer.'" In response to an article by the San Francisco Chronicle's David Wiegand denouncing the BSO decision, musicologist and critic Richard Taruskin accused the work of catering to "anti-American, anti-Semitic and anti-bourgeois" prejudices.
A 2014 revival by the Metropolitan Opera reignited debate. Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, who marched in protest against the production, wrote: "This work is both a distortion of history and helped, in some ways, to foster a three decade long feckless policy of creating a moral equivalency between the Palestinian Authority, a corrupt terrorist organization, and the state of Israel, a democracy ruled by law." Mayor Bill de Blasio criticized Giuliani's participation in the protests, and Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of The Public Theater, said: "It is not only permissible for the Met to do this piece – it's required for the Met to do the piece. It is a powerful and important opera." A week after watching a Met performance of the opera, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said "there was nothing antisemitic about the opera" and characterized the portrayal of the Klinghoffers as "very strong, very brave" and the terrorists as "bullies and irrational".
Operas and stage works
Nixon in China (1987)
The Death of Klinghoffer (1991)
I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky (song play) (1995)
El Niño (opera-oratorio) (2000)
Doctor Atomic (2005)
A Flowering Tree (2006)
The Gospel According to the Other Mary (opera-oratorio) (2013)
Girls of the Golden West (2017)
Antony and Cleopatra (2022)
Orchestral works
Common Tones in Simple Time (1979)
Grand Pianola Music (1982)
Shaker Loops (adaptation of the 1978 string septet for string orchestra) (1983)
Harmonielehre (1985)
The Chairman Dances (1985)
Tromba Lontana (1986)
Short Ride in a Fast Machine (1986)
Fearful Symmetries (1988)
El Dorado (1991)
Lollapalooza (1995)
Slonimsky's Earbox (1996)
Naïve and Sentimental Music (1998)
Guide to Strange Places (2001)
My Father Knew Charles Ives (2003)
Doctor Atomic Symphony (2007)
City Noir (2009)
I Still Dance (2019)
Frenzy (2023)
The Rock You Stand On (2025)
Concertante
piano
Eros Piano (for piano and orchestra) (1989)
Century Rolls (concerto for piano and orchestra) (1997)
Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? (concerto for piano and orchestra) (2018)
After the Fall (concerto for piano and orchestra) (2024)
violin
Violin Concerto (1995 Grawemeyer Award for Music composition) (1993)
The Dharma at Big Sur (concerto for solo electric violin and orchestra) (2003)
Scheherazade.2 (dramatic symphony for violin and orchestra) (2014)
others
Absolute Jest (for string quartet and orchestra) (2012)
Saxophone Concerto (2013)
Vocal and choral works
Ktaadn (1974)
Harmonium (1980-1)
The Nixon Tapes (three suites from Nixon in China) (1987)
The Wound-Dresser (1989)
Choruses from The Death of Klinghoffer (1991)
On the Transmigration of Souls (2002)
Chamber music
Piano Quintet (1970)
Wavemaker (for string quartet, voices, tape, and live electronics, 1975)
Shaker Loops (for string septet, 1978, revised version of Wavemaker)
Chamber Symphony (1992)
John's Book of Alleged Dances (for string quartet, 1994)
Road Movies (for violin and piano, 1995)
Gnarly Buttons (for clarinet and chamber ensemble, 1996)
Son of Chamber Symphony (2007)
Fellow Traveler (for string quartet, 2007)
String Quartet No. 1 (2008)
String Quartet No. 2 (2014)
Iron Jig (for string quartet, 2026)
Other ensemble works
American Standard, including "Christian Zeal and Activity" (1973)
Grounding (1975)
Scratchband (1996)
Nancy's Fancy (2001)
Tape and electronic compositions
Heavy Metal (1970)
Hockey Seen: A Nightmare in Three Periods and Sudden Death (1972)
Studebaker Love Music (1976)
Onyx (1976)
Light Over Water (1983)
Hoodoo Zephyr (1993)
Piano
Ragamarole (1973)
Blue Light (1976)
A Fox at Forty (1978)
Phrygian Gates (1977)
China Gates (1977)
Hallelujah Junction (for two pianos, 1996)
American Berserk (2001)
Roll Over Beethoven (for two pianos, 2014)
I Still Play (2017)
Film scores
Matter of Heart (1982)
The Cabinet of Dr. Ramirez (1991)
American Tapestry (1999)
I Am Love (Io sono l'amore) – preexisting pieces by Adams (2010)
Call Me by Your Name, contributions (2017)
Orchestrations and arrangements
The Black Gondola (Liszt's La lugubre gondola II (1882)) (1989)
Berceuse élégiaque (Busoni's Berceuse élégiaque (1907)) (1989)
Wiegenlied (Liszt's Wiegenlied (1881)) (1989)
Six Songs by Charles Ives (Ives songs) (1989–93)
Le Livre de Baudelaire (Debussy's Cinq poèmes de Charles Baudelaire, 1994)
La Mufa (Piazzolla tango, 1995)
Todo Buenos Aires (Piazzolla tango, 1996)
Discography & profile
Normalised profile
Percentiles are computed over every artist in the database, so a tier-3 artist can still sit in the 95th percentile on a single axis.
| Metric | Value | Percentile |
|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia language versions | 42 | 95.1th |
| Spotify monthly listeners | — | no data |
| Release groups in DB | 78 | 96.9th |
| Studio albums | 68 | 99.6th |
| Awards recorded | 14 | 99.2th |
| Timeline events | 78 | 99.5th |
| Recording span (years) | 51 | 91.8th |
| Genres | 9 | 95.7th |
Percentiles are computed at render time; missing values mean the artist has no data on that axis.
Discography (78 release groups · 68 studio albums)
Albums · 68
1975 · studio album
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Tracklist · 6 tracks
A1AranA2aAmerican Standard: I. John Philip SousaA2bAmerican Standard: II. Christian Zeal and ActivityA2cAmerican Standard: III. SentimentalsB1McCrimmon Will Never ReturnB21, 2, 1-2-3-41984 · studio album
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Tracklist · 2 tracks · 32:16
1Part 1: Negative Love10:392Part 2: Because I Could Not Stop for Death / Wild Nights21:371985 · studio album
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Tracklist · 3 tracks · 40:08
1Harmonielehre: Part I17:112Harmonielehre: Part II. The Anfortas Wound12:253Harmonielehre: Part III. Meister Eckhardt and Quackie10:321986 · studio album
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Tracklist · 2 tracks · 53:21
AShaker Loops28:22BPhrygian Gates24:591987 · studio album
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Tracklist · 5 tracks · 51:28
A1The Chairman Dances (Foxtrot for Orchestra)12:27A2Christian Zeal and Activity10:00B1Two Fanfares for Orchestra: Tromba Lontana4:11B2Two Fanfares for Orchestra: Short Ride in a Fast Machine4:13B3Common Tones in Simple Time20:371988 · studio album
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Tracklist · 41 tracks · 2:24:46
Disc 11Nixon in China: Act I, Scene I. Beginning2:532Nixon in China: Act I, Scene I. "Soldiers of heaven hold the sky"2:483Nixon in China: Act I, Scene I. "The people are the heroes now"2:494Nixon in China: Act I, Scene I. "Landing of the Spirit of '76"2:235Nixon in China: Act I, Scene I. "Your flight was smooth, I hope?"1:196Nixon in China: Act I, Scene I. "News has a kind of mystery"7:037Nixon in China: Act I, Scene II. Beginning4:058Nixon in China: Act I, Scene II. "You know we'll meet with your confrere the Democratic candidate if he should win"2:239Nixon in China: Act I, Scene II. "You've said that there's a certain well-known tree"2:4410Nixon in China: Act I, Scene II. "Founders come first, then profiteers"6:5311Nixon in China: Act I, Scene II. "We no longer need confucius"3:0312Nixon in China: Act I, Scene II. "Like the Ming Tombs"5:1813Nixon in China: Act I, Scene III. Beginning6:1414Nixon in China: Act I, Scene III. "Ladies and gentlemen, Comrades and friends"6:3715Nixon in China: Act I, Scene III. "Mr. Premier, distinguished guests"2:3716Nixon in China: Act I, Scene III. Cheers3:45Disc 21Nixon in China: Act II, Scene I. Beginning3:342Nixon in China: Act II, Scene I. "Look down at the earth"5:263Nixon in China: Act II, Scene I. "This is prophetic!"8:324Nixon in China: Act II, Scene I. "At last the weather's warming up"3:035Nixon in China: Act II, Scene II. Beginning2:546Nixon in China: Act II, Scene II. "Oh what a day I thought I'd die!"4:487Nixon in China: Act II, Scene II. "Whip her to death!"2:308Nixon in China: Act II, Scene II. Tropical storm4:459Nixon in China: Act II, Scene II. "Flesh rebels"3:0810Nixon in China: Act II, Scene II. "I have my brief"1:0511Nixon in China: Act II, Scene II. "It seems so strange"2:5212Nixon in China: Act II, Scene II. "I am the wife of Mao Tse-tung"6:30Disc 31Nixon in China: Act III. Beginning1:112Nixon in China: Act III. "Some men you cannot satisfy"3:173Nixon in China: Act III. "I am no one"4:014Nixon in China: Act III. The Maos dance2:015Nixon in China: Act III. "Sitting around the radio"1:166Nixon in China: Act III. "Let us examine what you did"2:437Nixon in China: Act III. "When I woke up, I dimly realized the Jap Bombers had given us a miss"1:218Nixon in China: Act III. "I have no offspring"1:559Nixon in China: Act III. "I can keep still"2:1110Nixon in China: Act III. "After that the sweat had soaked my uniform"2:2811Nixon in China: Act III. "Peking watches the stars"2:4312Nixon in China: Act III. "You won at poker"3:1413Nixon in China: Act III. "I am old and I cannot sleep"4:24Fearful Symmetries / The Wound-Dresser
1989 · studio album
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Tracklist · 2 tracks · 47:17
1The Wound-Dresser19:152Fearful Symmetries28:021991 · studio album
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Tracklist · 44 tracks · 1:05:48
1Good Living (a)2:372Good Living (b)2:283Fly Away (a)2:474Fly Away (b)2:475Pure Gold (a)2:516Pure Gold (b)2:517Pure Gold (c)2:498Feel Good (a)3:069Feel Good (b)1:0410Get Tropical! (a)2:1111Get Tropical! (b)2:1112Fresh Air2:3513Sunshine Calypso2:3914Sun Lovers (a)2:0015Sun Lovers (b)2:0016Going Great2:2317Work Out (a)1:4618Work Out (b)1:5919Cruisin' West2:3820Day's End2:3021Good Living 590:5922Fly Away 590:5923Pure Gold 590:5924Feel Good 590:5925Get Tropical! 590:5926Fresh Air 590:5927Sunshine Calypso 590:5928Sun Lovers 590:5929Going Great 590:5930Work Out 590:5931Cruisin' West 590:5932Day's End 590:5933Good Living 290:2934Fly Away 290:2935Pure Gold 290:2936Feel Good 290:2937Get Tropical! 290:2938Fresh Air 290:2939Sunshine Calypso 290:2940Sun Lovers 290:2941Going Great 290:2942Work Out 290:2943Cruisin' West 290:2944Day's End 290:29John Adams Conducts American Elegies
1991 · studio album
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Tracklist · 10 tracks · 49:36
1The Unanswered Question4:562Five Songs: Thoreau1:563Five Songs: Down East2:284Five Songs: Cradle Song1:255Five Songs: At the River1:176Five Songs: Serenity1:597Fog Tropes10:068Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety4:169Eros Piano14:5310Elegy in Memory of Maurice Ravel6:201992 · studio album
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Tracklist · 28 tracks · 2:15:13
Disc 11The Death of Klinghoffer: Chorus of Exiled Palestinians8:402The Death of Klinghoffer: Chorus of Exiled Jews8:383The Death of Klinghoffer: Act I, Scene I. "It was just after one fifteen" (The Captain)8:094The Death of Klinghoffer: Act I, Scene I. "My grandson Didi, who was two" (Swiss Grandmother)5:115The Death of Klinghoffer: Act I, Scene I. "Give these orders" (Molqi)2:016The Death of Klinghoffer: Act I, Scene I. "So I said to my grandson" (Swiss Grandmother)1:187The Death of Klinghoffer: Act I, Scene I. "We are sorry for you" (Mamoud)1:228The Death of Klinghoffer: Act I, Scene I. Ocean Chorus5:489The Death of Klinghoffer: Act I, Scene II. "Now it is night" (Mamoud)6:5810The Death of Klinghoffer: Act I, Scene II. "I think if you could talk like this" (The Captain)1:1211The Death of Klinghoffer: Act I, Scene II. "I have often relected that this is no ship" (The Captain)2:2912The Death of Klinghoffer: Act I, Scene II. "I kept my distance" (Austrian Woman)3:0913The Death of Klinghoffer: Act I, Scene II. "Those birds flying above us" (Mamoud)4:2414The Death of Klinghoffer: Act I, Scene II. Night Chorus3:34Disc 21The Death of Klinghoffer: Act II. Hagar Chorus5:272The Death of Klinghoffer: Act II, Scene I. "Come here. Look." (Molqi)3:583The Death of Klinghoffer: Act II, Scene I. "I've never been a violent man" (Leon Klinghoffer)3:294The Death of Klinghoffer: Act II, Scene I. "You are always complaining of your suffering" (Rambo)5:145The Death of Klinghoffer: Act II, Scene I. "I must have been hysterical" (British Dancing Girl)4:446The Death of Klinghoffer: Act II, Scene I. "It is as if our earthly life were spent miserably" (Omar)6:477The Death of Klinghoffer: Act II, Scene I. Desert Chorus5:058The Death of Klinghoffer: Act II, Scene II. "My one consolation" (Marilyn Klinghoffer)5:259The Death of Klinghoffer: Act II, Scene II. Klinghoffer's death3:2410The Death of Klinghoffer: Act II, Scene II. "Every fifteen minutes, one more will be shot" (Mamoud)5:1211The Death of Klinghoffer: Act II, Scene II. Aria of the Falling Body (Gymnopédie)7:2412The Death of Klinghoffer: Act II, Scene II. Day Chorus4:3213The Death of Klinghoffer: Act II, Scene III. "Mrs. Klinghoffer, please sit down." (The Captain)3:5314The Death of Klinghoffer: Act II, Scene III. "You embraced them!" (Marilyn Klinghoffer)7:461993 · studio album
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Tracklist · 7 tracks · 53:32
1Coast9:132Disappointment Lake8:143Tourist Song4:334Tundra10:355Bump5:136Cerulean5:267Hoodoo Zephyr10:18Carter: Night Fantasies / Adams: Phrygian Gates
1993 · studio album
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Tracklist · 8 tracks · 1:09:05
1Tango2:522The Dead Moth Tango5:093Night Fantasies21:364Tango From the Exiles' Cafe3:465Parchment5:346Phrygian Gates24:397The Curriculum Vitae Tango2:158Tango3:14Harmonielehre / The Chairman Dances / Tromba Lontana / Short Ride in a Fast Machine
1994 · studio album
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Tracklist · 6 tracks · 1:01:48
1Harmonielehre: Part I17:292Harmonielehre: Part II: The Anfortas Wound12:263Harmonielehre: Part III: Meister Eckhardt and Quackie10:354The Chairman Dances: Foxtrot for Orchestra12:475Two Fanfares: 1. Tromba Lontana4:076Two Fanfares: 2. Short Ride in a Fast Machine4:24Chamber Symphony / Grand Pianola Music
1994 · studio album
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Tracklist · 6 tracks · 52:53
1Chamber Symphony: I. Mongrel Airs7:502Chamber Symphony: II. Aria With Walking Bass8:133Chamber Symphony: III. Roadrunner5:514Grand Pianola Music: I. Part IA15:135Grand Pianola Music: II. Part IB7:516Grand Pianola Music: III. On the Dominant Divide7:551995 · studio album
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Tracklist · 13 tracks · 1:15:14
1Short Ride in a Fast Machine4:232Are You Experienced?: Introduction0:263Are You Experienced?: On Being Hit on the Head2:374Are You Experienced?: Dance5:585Are You Experienced?: On Being Hit on the Head (reprise)1:036Are You Experienced?: On Hearing the Voice of God2:527Are You Experienced?: Drop6:558Are You Experienced?: On Hearing the Siren's Song2:589Under Orpheus: Aria9:5710Under Orpheus: Chorale6:2611Grand Pianola Music: Part I14:4712Grand Pianola Music: Slow8:1313Grand Pianola Music: Part II: On the Dominant Divide8:391996 · studio album
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Tracklist · 7 tracks · 1:13:42
1Harmonium: I. Negative Love10:082Harmonium: II. Because I Could Not Stop for Death13:583Harmonium: III. Wild Nights11:124The Bells, Op. 35: I. Allegro6:335The Bells, Op. 35: II. Lento11:236The Bells, Op. 35: III. Presto8:247The Bells, Op. 35: IV. Lento lugubre12:041996 · studio album
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Tracklist · 5 tracks · 49:26
1Century Rolls: First Movement14:562Century Rolls: Manny's Gym6:233Century Rolls: Hail Bop7:544Lollapalooza6:525Slonimsky's Earbox13:211996 · studio album
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Tracklist · 4 tracks · 47:01
1El Dorado, Part I: A Dream of Gold12:402El Dorado, Part II: Soledades16:173Berceuse elegiaque (des Mannes Wiegenlied am Sarge seiner Mutter)8:164The Black Gondola9:48Shaker Loops / Phrygian Gates / Chamber Symphony
1997 · studio album
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Tracklist · 8 tracks · 1:12:48
1Shaker Loops: Part I. Shaking and Trembling8:042Shaker Loops: Part II. Hymning Slews8:113Shaker Loops: Part III. Loops and Verses8:014Shaker Loops: Part IV. A Final Shaking4:025Phrygian Gates23:466Chamber Symphony: I. Mongrel Airs7:037Chamber Symphony: II. Aria with Walking Bass8:098Chamber Symphony: III. Roadrunner5:32East of Eden / Rebel Without a Cause
1997 · studio album
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Tracklist · 15 tracks · 50:21
1East of Eden: Main Title2:032East of Eden: Cal and Sam2:503East of Eden: Cal Helps Father3:594East of Eden: Fog Scene2:545East of Eden: Cal’s Dance in the Fields0:596East of Eden: Ferris Wheel1:257East of Eden: Bedroom Window3:558East of Eden: Cal and Aron Visit Mother3:379East of Eden: Finale5:1410Rebel Without a Cause: Main Title2:5111Rebel Without a Cause: The Planetarium4:0212Rebel Without a Cause: Knife Fight6:0613Rebel Without a Cause: Love Theme1:2814Rebel Without a Cause: The Hunt5:0415Rebel Without a Cause: Plato’s Death / Finale3:54Gnarly Buttons / John's Book of Alleged Dances
1998 · studio album
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Tracklist · 14 tracks · 1:00:55
1John's Book of Alleged Dances: I. Judah to Ocean2:362John's Book of Alleged Dances: II. Toot Nipple1:163John's Book of Alleged Dances: III. Dogjam2:354John's Book of Alleged Dances: IV. Pavane: She's So Fine6:345John's Book of Alleged Dances: V. Rag the Bone3:046John's Book of Alleged Dances: VI. Habanera4:497John's Book of Alleged Dances: VII. Stubble Crotchet2:448John's Book of Alleged Dances: VIII. Hammer & Chisel1:169John's Book of Alleged Dances: IX. Alligator Escalator3:5510John's Book of Alleged Dances: X. Ständchen: The Little Serenade4:5911John's Book of Alleged Dances: Xi. Judah to Ocean (reprise)2:4312Gnarly Buttons: I. The Perilous Shore10:0113Gnarly Buttons: II. Hoe-Down (Mad Cow)5:5114Gnarly Buttons: III. Put Your Loving Arms Around Me8:32Piano Music of John Adams and Terry Riley
1998 · studio album
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Tracklist · 8 tracks · 1:08:08
1The Walrus in Memorium7:432China Gates5:063The Heaven Ladder, Book 7: Misha’s Bear Dance2:324The Heaven Ladder, Book 7: Venus in ’943:555The Heaven Ladder, Book 7: Ragtempus Fugatis6:286The Heaven Ladder, Book 7: Fandango on the Heaven Ladder11:167The Heaven Ladder, Book 7: Simone’s Lullaby5:138Phrygian Gates25:551998 · studio album
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Tracklist · 2 tracks · 29:29
1China Gates [1977]4:582Phrygian Gates [1978]24:31I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky
1998 · studio album
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Tracklist · 15 tracks · 1:10:02
1Ensemble - I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky8:062A Sermon on Romance3:123Consuelo's Dream4:564Mike's Song About Arresting a Particular Individual3:225Tiffany's Solo4:526Song About the On-Site Altercation2:527Song About the Bad Boys and the News6:208Your Honor My Client He's a Young Black Man5:409Leila's Song: Alone (Again or at Last)4:1810Three Weeks and Still I'm Outta My Mind5:1211Crushed by the Rock I Been Standing On4:3812Dewain's Song of Liberation and Surprise5:3013¡Este pais!/This Country4:2714One Last Look at the Angel in Your Eyes2:0115Finale4:36Harmonium / The Klinghoffer Choruses
2000 · studio album
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Tracklist · 10 tracks · 1:13:22
1Harmonium: I. Negative Love10:342Harmonium: II. Because I Could Not Stop for Death9:433Harmonium: III. Wild Nights11:364The Death of Klinghoffer: Chorus of the Exiled Palestinians8:345The Death of Klinghoffer: Chorus of the Exiled Jews8:366The Death of Klinghoffer: Ocean Chorus5:467The Death of Klinghoffer: Night Chorus3:368The Death of Klinghoffer: Chorus of Hagar and the Angel5:269The Death of Klinghoffer: Desert Chorus5:0310The Death of Klinghoffer: Day Chorus4:28Fearful Symmetries / Chamber Symphony / Four Songs / Christian Zeal and Activity
2000 · studio album
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Tracklist · 9 tracks · 1:17:00
1Fearful Symmetries26:232Chamber Symphony: I. Mongrel Airs7:213Chamber Symphony: II. Aria with Walking Bass8:114Chamber Symphony: III. Roadrunner5:165Four Songs: I. Song about the bad boys and the news6:046Four Songs: II. A sermon on romance4:567Four Songs: III. Leila's song4:068Four Songs: IV. Earthquake5:149Christian Zeal and Activity9:292001 · studio album
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Tracklist · 5 tracks · 58:05
1Fearful Symmetries27:052Symphony no. 2: Moderato tranquillo7:153Symphony no. 2: Interludium3:504Symphony no. 2: Spirituoso8:295The Chairman Dances11:262001 · studio album
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Tracklist · 24 tracks · 1:51:21
Disc 11El Niño: Part One. I Sing of a Maiden6:202El Niño: Part One. Hail, Mary, Gracious!4:483El Niño: Part One. La Anunciación9:354El Niño: Part One. For With God No Thing Shall Be Impossible1:165El Niño: Part One. The Babe Leaped in Her Womb3:306El Niño: Part One. Magnificat3:237El Niño: Part One. Now She Was Sixteen Years Old3:208El Niño: Part One. Joseph's Dream4:329El Niño: Part One. Shake the Heavens5:5410El Niño: Part One. Se Habla de Gabriel8:2611El Niño: Part One. The Christmas Star6:46Disc 21El Niño: Part Two. Pues Mi Dios Ha Nacido a Penar4:352El Niño: Part Two. When Herod Heard2:283El Niño: Part Two. Woe Unto Them That Call Evil Good4:224El Niño: Part Two. And the Star Went Before Them2:265El Niño: Part Two. The Three Kings5:256El Niño: Part Two. And When They Were Departed1:127El Niño: Part Two. Dawn Air4:238El Niño: Part Two. And He Slew All the Children1:439El Niño: Part Two. Memorial de Tlatelolco9:1310El Niño: Part Two. In the Day of the Great Slaughter3:2111El Niño: Part Two. Pues Está Tiritando3:3512El Niño: Part Two. Jesus and the Dragons2:5013El Niño: Part Two. A Palm Tree7:582002 · studio album
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Tracklist · 3 tracks · 44:20
1Naive and Sentimental Music: I. Naive and Sentimental Music18:122Naive and Sentimental Music: II. Mother of the Man15:093Naive and Sentimental Music: III. Chain to the Rhythm10:59Tromba Lontana / Violin Concerto / The Wound Dresser
2002 · studio album
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Tracklist · 5 tracks · 57:59
1Tromba Lontana4:202Violin Concerto: i) ♩ = 7814:433Violin Concerto: ii) Chaconne: Body Through Which the Dream Flows10:114Violin Concerto: iii) Toccare8:105The Wound-Dresser20:352004 · studio album
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Tracklist · 11 tracks · 1:08:04
1Road Movies: I. Relaxed Groove4:552Road Movies: II. Meditative5:383Road Movies: III. 40% Swing5:004Hallelujah Junction: I7:105Hallelujah Junction: II2:366Hallelujah Junction: III6:447China Gates4:348American Berserk6:089Phrygian Gates: Part 114:2310Phrygian Gates: Part 2 (A System of Weights and Measures)3:2511Phrygian Gates: Part 37:31Shaker Loops / The Wound-Dresser / Short Ride in a Fast Machine
2004 · studio album
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Tracklist · 7 tracks · 58:17
1Short Ride in a Fast Machine4:142The Wound-Dresser19:113Berceuse élégiaque9:304Shaker Loops: I. Shaking and Trembling8:285Shaker Loops: II. Hymning Slews5:326Shaker Loops: III. Loops and Verses7:137Shaker Loops: IV. A Final Shaking4:092005 · studio album
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Tracklist · 6 tracks · 1:08:52
1Phrygian Gates29:392Hallelujah Junction16:583China Gates5:214Road Movies: Relaxed Groove5:255Road Movies: Meditative6:066Road Movies: 40% Swing5:23I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky
2005 · studio album
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Tracklist · 24 tracks · 1:55:55
Disc 11I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky: Act I: I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky8:212I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky: Act I: A Sermon on Romance3:103I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky: Act I: Leila's Song of the Wise Young Women4:554I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky: Act I: Solo in Sunlight3:501I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky: Act I: Donde Estas?4:206I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky: Act I: Mike's Song About Arresting a Particular Individual3:287I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky: Act I: Tiffany's Solo4:468I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky: Act I: Song About the on Site Altercation2:539I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky: Act I: Song About the Bad Boys and the News6:3810I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky: Act I: Your Honor My Client, He's a Young Black Man5:4211I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky: Act I: Consuelo's Dream6:0912I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky: Act I: Rick's Cross-Examination of Tiffany and Mike4:1413I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky: Act I: Song About Law School as the Natural Follow-Up to Jail4:4914I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky: Act I: Leila's Solo: Alone (Again or at Last)4:4015I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky: Act I: Song About the Sweet Majority Population of the World4:40Disc 21I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky: Act II: Duet: Three Weeks and Still I'm Outta My Mind5:042I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky: Act II: Earthquake Sounds1:013I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky: Act II: Earthquake Music3:074I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky: Act II: Crushed by the Rock I Been Standing On4:285I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky: Act II: Duet in the Middle of Terrible Duress11:276I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky: Act II: Dewain's Song of Liberation and Surprise6:237I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky: Act II: Este país / This Country4:338I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky: Act II: One Last Look at the Angel in Your Eyes2:229I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky: Act II: Finale4:55Adams: Violin Concerto / Corigliano: Red Violin "Chaconne"
2006 · studio album
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Tracklist · 6 tracks · 1:03:46
1Chaconne from "The Red Violin"16:482Romanian Rhapsody no.1, arr. Franz Waxman2:263Tristan and Isolde Fantasia11:024Violin Concerto: I. ♩ = 7815:195Violin Concerto: II. Chaconne: Body Through Which the Dream Flows10:496Violin Concerto: III. Toccare7:22The Dharma at Big Sur / My Father Knew Charles Ives
2006 · studio album
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Tracklist · 5 tracks · 53:29
Disc 11The Dharma at Big Sur, Part I: A New Day14:302The Dharma at Big Sur, Part II: Sri Moonshine12:20Disc 21My Father Knew Charles Ives: I. Concord9:422My Father Knew Charles Ives: II. The Lake6:463My Father Knew Charles Ives: III. The Mountain10:112007 · studio album
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Tracklist · 4 tracks · 52:01
1Phrygian Gates24:372American Berserk6:043China Gates5:154Hallelujah Junction16:052008 · studio album
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Tracklist · 14 tracks · 1:13:43
1String Poetic: I. Jagged Climb2:082String Poetic: II. Nocturne4:463String Poetic: III. Bluie Hills of Mist7:434String Poetic: IV. Maze Mechanical3:225String Poetic: V. Climb Jagged2:406Mood6:007Grand Duo: I. Prelude7:388Grand Duo: II. Stampede5:479Grand Duo: III. A Round (Annable & April's)3:2810Grand Duo: IV. Air10:4211Grand Duo: V. Polka3:2812Road Movies: I. Relaxed Groove4:3913Road Movies: II. Meditative6:2014Road Movies: III. 40% Swing5:022008 · studio album
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Tracklist · 20 tracks · 1:52:33
Disc 11A Flowering Tree: Act I Scene 13:522A Flowering Tree: One Morning…8:413A Flowering Tree: Kumudha’s Prayer6:404A Flowering Tree: Scene 2: Flores Chorus2:445A Flowering Tree: Kumudha and Her Sister…8:536A Flowering Tree: Scene 3: Audience With the King2:257A Flowering Tree: Mamá Mamá, ¿Por Qué Nos Pegas?4:438A Flowering Tree: Scene 4: The Wedding3:509A Flowering Tree: They Brought Her to Me5:3810A Flowering Tree: Bride and Groom6:2411A Flowering Tree: The Bride Sunk Her Face…5:45Disc 21A Flowering Tree: Act Il Scene 1: Orchestral Prelude6:582A Flowering Tree: “You Are Cruel.”3:513A Flowering Tree: “Kumudha Once More…”5:454A Flowering Tree: “Days Passed…”5:125A Flowering Tree: Scene 3: Before I Laughed With Him Nightly6:316A Flowering Tree: Scene 4: Kumudha and the Beggar Minstrels10:037A Flowering Tree: Scene 5: We Had All but Forgotten You, Prince5:438A Flowering Tree: The Prince Recognizes Kumudha5:419A Flowering Tree: Kumudha’s Final Transformation3:142009 · studio album
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Tracklist · 4 tracks · 47:03
1Doctor Atomic Symphony: I. The Laboratory2:332Doctor Atomic Symphony: II. Panic14:313Doctor Atomic Symphony: III. Trinity7:194Guide to Strange Places22:402011 · studio album
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Tracklist · 13 tracks · 1:00:26
1Road Movies, for Violin and Piano: I. Relaxed Groove5:072Road Movies, for Violin and Piano: II. Meditative5:593Road Movies, for Violin and Piano: III. 40% Swing5:164John's Book of Alleged Dances, for String Quartet: Hammer & Chisel1:155John's Book of Alleged Dances, for String Quartet: Habanera4:476John's Book of Alleged Dances, for String Quartet: Ständchen: The Little Serenade5:017John's Book of Alleged Dances, for String Quartet: Judah to Ocean2:288John's Book of Alleged Dances, for String Quartet: Dogjam2:349John's Book of Alleged Dances, for String Quartet: Rag the Bone3:1010Shaker Loops, for String Septet: I. Shaking and Trembling8:1711Shaker Loops, for String Septet: II. Hymning Slews5:1612Shaker Loops, for String Septet: III. Loops and Verses7:1513Shaker Loops, for String Septet: IV. A Final Shaking4:01Son of Chamber Symphony / String Quartet
2011 · studio album
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Tracklist · 5 tracks · 54:00
1Son of Chamber Symphony: I.8:452Son of Chamber Symphony: II.7:453Son of Chamber Symphony: III.7:204String Quartet: I.21:215String Quartet: II.8:492012 · studio album
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Tracklist · 7 tracks · 30:00
1Am I in Your Light?5:462Rückert Lieder: Ich atmet einen linden Duft!2:413Rückert Lieder: Liebst du um Schönheit2:454Rückert Lieder: Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder1:265Rückert Lieder: Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen6:506Rückert Lieder: Um Mitternacht6:227Frondi tenere e belle ... Ombra mai fu4:10Harmonielehre / Short Ride in a Fast Machine
2012 · studio album
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Tracklist · 12 tracks · 2:21:21
Disc 11Harmonielehre: Part I (stereo)17:222Harmonielehre: Part II: The Anfortas Wound (stereo)12:543Harmonielehre: Part III: Meister Eckhardt and Quackie (stereo)11:474Short Ride in a Fast Machine (stereo)5:045Harmonielehre: Part I (5.1 surround)17:226Harmonielehre: Part II: The Anfortas Wound (5.1 surround)12:547Harmonielehre: Part III: Meister Eckhardt and Quackie (5.1 surround)11:478Short Ride in a Fast Machine (5.1 surround)5:04Disc 21Harmonielehre: Part I (stereo)17:222Harmonielehre: Part II: The Anfortas Wound (stereo)12:543Harmonielehre: Part III: Meister Eckhardt and Quackie (stereo)11:474Short Ride in a Fast Machine (stereo)5:04Fellow Traveller: the complete quartet works of John Adams
2013 · studio album
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Tracklist · 13 tracks · 1:07:12
1John's Book of Alleged Dances: 1. Rag the Bone3:042John's Book of Alleged Dances: 2. Alligator Escalator3:503John's Book of Alleged Dances: 3. Pavane (She's so fine)6:314John's Book of Alleged Dances: 4. Ständchen: The Little Serenade5:005John's Book of Alleged Dances: 5. Stubble Crotchet2:406John's Book of Alleged Dances: 6. Toot Nipple1:117John's Book of Alleged Dances: 7. Hammer and Chisel1:148John's Book of Alleged Dances: 8. Dogjam2:299John's Book of Alleged Dances: 9. Habanera4:5010John's Book of Alleged Dances: 10. Judah to Ocean2:3811String Quartet: Movement I19:5512String Quartet: Movement II8:3913Fellow Traveller5:11Harmonielehre / Doctor Atomic Symphony / Short Ride in a Fast Machine
2013 · studio album
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Tracklist · 7 tracks · 1:10:15
1Doctor Atomic Symphony: I. The Laboratory2:062Doctor Atomic Symphony: II. Panic. Agitato - Same tempo - New tempo -14:553Doctor Atomic Symphony: III. Trinity. Animato - Solennemente - Animato -7:324Short Ride in a Fast Machine4:135Harmonielehre: I. [Untitled.] Slow (new tempo) - Suddenly very slow -17:306Harmonielehre: II. The Anfortas Wound Very slow - New tempo - Floating -12:307Harmonielehre: III. Meister Eckhardt and Quackie. Slowly rocking - Precise, spirited, but not heavy ("scherzando")11:292014 · studio album
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Tracklist · 10 tracks · 49:47
1Hallelujah Junction: I. Movement 17:252Hallelujah Junction: II. Movement 22:353Hallelujah Junction: III. Movement 36:214Stumble to Grace: I. Stage 15:595Stumble to Grace: II. Stage 25:036Stumble to Grace: III. Stage 34:367Stumble to Grace: IV. Stage 44:108Stumble to Grace: V. Stage 57:019Sneaky March1:4610China Gates4:51The Gospel According to the Other Mary
2014 · studio album
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Tracklist · 37 tracks · 2:13:01
Disc 11The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act I, Scene I. "The next day in the city jail we were searched for drugs"4:092The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act I, Scene I. "Now a certain woman named Martha welcomed him Into her house"2:443The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act I, Scene II. "And she had a sister named mary"1:414The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act I, Scene II. "I am surprised that I am beginning to pray daily"3:265The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act I, Scene II. Chorus "En un día de amor"4:176The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act I, Scene III. "Now a certain man was sick, named Lazarus"4:017The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act I, Scene III. Lazarus Dies2:048The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act I, Scene III. "Why standest thou afar off, lord?"2:279The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act I, Scene III. "In my own quietly explosive here"2:4910The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act I, Scene III. "Don't touch my left arm!"1:5311The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act I, Scene III. "When mary was come where Jesus was"3:4212The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act I, Scene III. "Jesus said, take ye away the stone"1:5213The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act I, Scene III. Lazarus Rises From the Dead4:1914The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act I, Scene III. Chorus "Drop down, ye heavens"3:0815The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act I, Scene IV. Supper at Bethany0:4316The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act I, Scene IV. "For the grave cannot praise thee"6:3917The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act I, Scene IV. Mary Washes the Feet of Jesus4:4618The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act I, Scene V. "And there were some who had indignation within themselves"1:4019The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act I, Scene V. "We know there will be no utopias"5:2020The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act I, Scene V. "Tell me: how is this night different from all other night?"9:29Disc 21The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act II, Scene I. Chorus "Who rips his flesh down the seams"3:492The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act II, Scene I. Arrest of Jesus5:403The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act II, Scene II. Arrest of the Women2:264The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act II, Scene II. "Up at two A.M., picketed all day"1:295The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act II, Scene II. "The said defendants, on or about August 2nd"2:546The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act II, Scene II. Prayer of the Mexican Women3:027The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act II, Scene III. Golgotha6:148The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act II, Scene III. "Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me"3:039The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act II, Scene III. "Now there stood at the cross of Jesus"1:2710The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act II, Scene III. "When Jesus saw his mother"2:1311The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act II, Scene IV. Night7:3512The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act II, Scene IV. "His son cried out to him"1:3213The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act II, Scene V. The Sepulchre; Mary's Awakening4:3514The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act II, Scene V. Mary Awakes at Dawn2:0815The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act II, Scene V. Chorus "It is spring"4:0216The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act II, Scene VI. Earthquake and Recognition3:1817The Gospel According to the Other Mary: Act II, Scene VI. "Why seek ye the living among the dead?"6:252014 · studio album
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Tracklist · 6 tracks · 58:38
1Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64 No. 2: I. Allegro molto appassionato12:152Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64 No. 2: II. Andante7:083Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64 No. 2: III. Allegretto non troppo6:334Violin Concerto: I. —14:095Violin Concerto: II. Chaconne "Body Through Which the Dream Flows"11:046Violin Concerto: III. Toccare7:292014 · studio album
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Tracklist · 6 tracks · 1:03:02
1City Noir: I. The City and its Double13:472City Noir: II. The Song is for You9:223City Noir: III. Boulevard Night12:144Saxophone Concerto: I. Animato12:285Saxophone Concerto: I. (cont’d.) Moderato -9:206Saxophone Concerto: II. Molto vivo (a hard driving pulse)5:51Absolute Jest / Grand Pianola Music
2015 · studio album
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Tracklist · 9 tracks · 57:31
1Absolute Jest: I. Beginning10:352Absolute Jest: II. Presto3:313Absolute Jest: III. Lo stesso tempo1:084Absolute Jest: IV. Meno mosso3:185Absolute Jest: V. Vivacissimo1:496Absolute Jest: VI. Prestissimo5:207Grand Pianola Music: Pt. 115:248Grand Pianola Music: Pt 1B. Slow7:469Grand Pianola Music: Pt. 2. On the Dominant Divide8:402016 · studio album
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Tracklist · 4 tracks · 47:36
1Scheherazade.2: I. Tale of the Wise Young Woman; Pursuit by the True Believers15:012Scheherazade.2: II. A Long Desire (Love Scene)14:243Scheherazade.2: III. Scheherazade and the Men with Beards9:464Scheherazade.2: IV. Escape, Flight, Sanctuary8:252016 · studio album
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Tracklist · 7 tracks · 1:02:17
1Concerto for Violin and Orchestra: Section One8:452Concerto for Violin and Orchestra: Section Two9:533Concerto for Violin and Orchestra: Section Three6:054Concerto for Violin and Orchestra: Section Four3:235Concerto for Violin & Orchestra: I. –15:516Concerto for Violin & Orchestra: II. Chaconne. Body through which the dream flows10:587Concerto for Violin & Orchestra: III. Toccare7:22BBC Music, Volume 25, Number 5: Philip Glass: Symphony no. 10 / John Adams: The Dharma at Big Sur
2017 · studio album
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Tracklist · 7 tracks · 51:32
1Symphony no. 10: Movement 15:312Symphony no. 10: Movement 24:503Symphony no. 10: Movement 33:414Symphony no. 10: Movement 45:225Symphony no. 10: Movement 55:556The Dharma at Big Sur: I. A New Day13:317The Dharma at Big Sur: II. Sri Moonshine12:422017 · studio album
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Tracklist · 51 tracks · 4:57:39
Disc 11Harmonielehre: Part I.18:502Harmonielehre: Part II. The Anfortas Wound12:083Harmonielehre: Part III. Meister Eckhardt and Quackie11:184Short Ride in a Fast Machine4:125City Noir: 1. The City and Its Double –13:326City Noir: 2. The Song Is for You8:327City Noir: 3. Boulevard Night12:07Disc 21Lollapalooza6:362Scheherazade.2: 1. Tale of the Wise Young Woman – Pursuit by the True Believers15:273Scheherazade.2: 2. A Long Desire (Love Scene)14:224Scheherazade.2: 3. Scheherazade and the Men with Beards10:115Scheherazade.2: 4. Escape, Flight, Sanctuary8:156The Wound-Dresser18:31Disc 31The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act One, Scene 1: “The Next Day in the City Jail” (Mary, Chorus)4:192The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act One, Scene 1: “Now a Certain Woman Named Martha” (Countertenors, Martha)2:543The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act One, Scene 2: “And She Had a Sister Named Mary” (Countertenors, Martha)1:454The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act One, Scene 2: “I Am Surprised That I Am Beginning to Pray Daily” (Mary)3:285The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act One, Scene 2: Chorus “En un día de amor yo bajé hasta la tierra" (Women’s Chorus)4:436The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act One, Scene 3: “Now a Certain Man Was Sick” (Countertenors)4:197The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act One, Scene 3: Lazarus Dies While His Sisters Await Jesus2:068The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act One, Scene 3: “Why Standest Thou Afar off, O Lord?” (Martha, Countertenors)2:369The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act One, Scene 3: “In My Own Quietly Explosive Here” (Mary, Martha, Countertenors)3:0210The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act One, Scene 3: “Don’t Touch My Left Arm” (Mary)2:2411The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act One, Scene 3: “When Mary Was Come Where Jesus Was” (Countertenors, Mary)3:4612The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act One, Scene 3: “Jesus Said, Take Ye Away the Stone” (Countertenors, Martha, Chorus)2:1413The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act One, Scene 3: “And When He Thus Had Spoken” (Countertenors)4:4114The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act One, Scene 3: Chorus “Drop Down, Ye Heavens, from Above”2:5515The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act One, Scene 4: “Then Jesus Six Days Before the Passover” (Countertenors)0:4416The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act One, Scene 4: “For the Grave Cannot Praise Thee” (Lazarus)7:0817The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act One, Scene 4: “Then Took Mary a Pound of Ointment” (Countertenors, Mary, Chorus)4:4818The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act One, Scene 5: “And There Were Some That Had Indignation Within Themselves” (Lazarus, Countertenors)1:5319The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act One, Scene 5: “We Know There Will Be No Utopias” (Lazarus)6:1720The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act One, Scene 5: “Tell Me, How Is This Night Different” (Lazarus)11:3721The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act Two, Scene 1: Chorus “Who Rips His Own Flesh Down the Seams”4:0122The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act Two, Scene 1: “Martha and Mary, Not Knowing What Was Happening” (Countertenors, Chorus, Lazarus, Women’s Chorus)5:5823The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act Two, Scene 2: Introduction2:2024The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act Two, Scene 2: “Up at Two a.m., Picketed All Day” (Martha)1:5825The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act Two, Scene 2: “The Said Defendants” (Men’s Chorus, Martha)2:5226The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act Two, Scene 2: Chorus “Jesus, incomparable perdonador de injurias” (Women’s Chorus)3:1127The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act Two, Scene 3: “And They Were Come unto a Place Called Golgotha” (Countertenors, Mary)6:1428The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act Two, Scene 3: “Daughters of Jerusalem, Weep Not for Me” (Women’s Chorus)2:3729The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act Two, Scene 3: “Now There Stood by the Cross of Jesus” (Martha, Countertenors)1:1430The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act Two, Scene 3: “When Jesus Saw His Mother” (Countertenors)3:1331The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act Two, Scene 4: “When the Rain Began to Fall” (Mary)4:5432The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act Two, Scene 4: “On Earth When He Heard the First Rain” (Mary)3:3533The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act Two, Scene 4: “His Son Cried Out to Him” (Lazarus)1:5634The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act Two, Scene 5: “Now in the Place Where He Was Crucified There Was a Garden” (Countertenors)4:3035The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act Two, Scene 5: Mary Awakens on the Third Morning2:2436The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act Two, Scene 5: Chorus “It Is Spring” (Chorus, Mary)4:1737The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act Two, Scene 6: “And, Behold, There Was a Great Earthquake” (Soloists, Chorus)3:0938The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Act Two, Scene 6: “Why Seek Ye the Living Among the Dead?” (Women’s Chorus, Martha, Countertenors, Mary, Men’s Chorus, Lazarus)7:362017 · studio album
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Tracklist · 4 tracks · 57:22
1China Gates5:552Phrygian Gates28:133American Berserk7:144Halleluiah Junction16:002018 · studio album
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Tracklist · 3 tracks · 33:07
1Violin Concerto: ♩ = 7814:452Violin Concerto: Chaconne: Body through which the dream flows10:583Violin Concerto: Toccare7:24Naive and Sentimental Music / Absolute Jest
2018 · studio album
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Tracklist · 9 tracks · 1:11:02
1Absolute Jest: ♩. = 100 – Poco più mosso – Tranquillo (lo stesso tempo ♩. = 100) – Tranquillo ♩ = 98 –10:352Absolute Jest: Presto ♩. = 130 – Lo stesso tempo – 𝅗𝅥 = 97 – ♩. = 127 – Tranquillo ♩. = 116 – 𝅗𝅥 = 87 – ♩. = 116 –3:363Absolute Jest: Lo stesso tempo (♩. = 116) – 𝅗𝅥 = 87 – ♩ = 87 –1:084Absolute Jest: Meno mosso ♩ = 80 – ♩ = 76 Moderato e tranquillo – 𝅗𝅥. = 116 –3:205Absolute Jest: Vivacissimo (Lo stesso tempo 𝅗𝅥. = 116) –1:566Absolute Jest: Prestissimo ♩. = 116 – 𝅗𝅥 = 88 – 𝅗𝅥 = 102 – 𝅗𝅥 = 604:407Naive and Sentimental Music: I. Naive and Sentimental Music. ♪ = 92 – ♪ = 108 – ♪ = 116 – ♩ = 66 – ♩ = 132 – 𝅗𝅥 = c. 98 – ♩ = c. 145 – Agitato – ♩ = 152 – ♩ = 132 – ♩ = 14418:458Naive and Sentimental Music: II. Mother of the Man. Very calm ♩ = 72 – ♩ = 60 – ♩ = 120 – ♩ = 72 – ♩ = 110 – ♩ = 7215:459Naive and Sentimental Music: III. Chain to the Rhythm. ♩ = 92 – 𝅗𝅥 = 96 – 𝅗𝅥 = 72 – 𝅗𝅥 = 10011:172018 · studio album
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Tracklist · 48 tracks · 2:37:17
Disc 11Doctor Atomic: Overture5:112Doctor Atomic: Act 1: The end of June 19454:193Doctor Atomic: Act 1: First of all, let me say2:164Doctor Atomic: Act 1: We surround the plutonium core1:435Doctor Atomic: Act 1: We are bedeviled by faulty detonators1:316Doctor Atomic: Act 1: Many of us are inclined to say2:277Doctor Atomic: Act 1: The nation's fate2:178Doctor Atomic: Act 1: This is a petition2:439Doctor Atomic: Act 1: What if it's a dud?2:0310Doctor Atomic: Act 1: The test must go on as scheduled3:2111Doctor Atomic: Act 1: No. Before the bomb is used4:0712Doctor Atomic: Act 1: Am I in your light?4:3113Doctor Atomic: Act 1: Long let me inhale, deeply6:2714Doctor Atomic: Act 1: The motive of it all was loneliness4:2515Doctor Atomic: Act 1: Electrical storm2:1816Doctor Atomic: Act 1: What the hell is wrong with the weather?2:3417Doctor Atomic: Act 1: Five hundred US Superfortresses are raining incendiary bombs4:0718Doctor Atomic: Act 1: I'll sign the report, sir1:1919Doctor Atomic: Act 1: With respect, sir, anyone with good eyes3:0120Doctor Atomic: Act 1: I have been preoccupied with many matters2:3221Doctor Atomic: Act 1: Get them out of here. From now on I'm making my own weather predictions4:0522Doctor Atomic: Act 1: General, you are bearing up with remarkable fortitude3:1823Doctor Atomic: Act 1: Batter my heart7:34Disc 21Doctor Atomic: Act 2: Easter Eve 194512:002Doctor Atomic: Act 2: Interlude: Rain over the Sangre de Cristo2:573Doctor Atomic: Act 2: In the north the cloud-flower blossoms1:554Doctor Atomic: Act 2: It's midnight, Jack5:125Doctor Atomic: Act 2: I've dreamed the same dream2:496Doctor Atomic: Act 2: To the farthest west, the sea and the striped country3:367Doctor Atomic: Act 2: A delay in issuing the Potsdam ultimatum1:018Doctor Atomic: Act 2: Fermi is taking wagers2:169Doctor Atomic: Act 2: I've spent a great deal of time indulging in controlled fantasies3:3710Doctor Atomic: Act 2: Edward, the test will be delayed an hour3:0211Doctor Atomic: Act 2: Panic2:5312Doctor Atomic: Act 2: The Program has been plagued from the start1:3013Doctor Atomic: Act 2: To keep the weakness secret2:1214Doctor Atomic: Act 2: I just finished reading The Magic Mountain2:1515Doctor Atomic: Act 2: The winter dawned, but the dead did not come back1:5416Doctor Atomic: Act 2: And love which contains all human spirit3:0117Doctor Atomic: Act 2: The only saviors are the ham sandwiches2:2818Doctor Atomic: Act 2: Chorus: At the sight of this4:4219Doctor Atomic: Act 2: Lieutenant Bush. Keep a weather eye on Oppenheimer1:3320Doctor Atomic: Act 2: To what benevolent demon do I owe the joy of being thus surrounded2:4221Doctor Atomic: Act 2: That's their signal2:1822Doctor Atomic: Act 2: The sky is clear to the east2:5923Doctor Atomic: Act 2: In the midnight, in the flame-brilliant midnight3:0724Doctor Atomic: Act 2: Zero minus two minutes1:0425Doctor Atomic: Act 2: Countdown6:05Berlioz: Les nuits d’été / Ravel: Shéhérazade / Debussy/Adams: Le livre de Baudelaire
2019 · studio album
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Tracklist · 13 tracks · 1:03:53
1Les nuits d’été: Villanelle2:032Les nuits d’été: Le spectre de la rose6:043Les nuits d’été: Sur les lagunes5:454Les nuits d’été: Absence4:485Les nuits d’été: Au cimetière4:396Les nuits d’été: L’île inconnue3:507Shéhérazade: Asie9:118Shéhérazade: La flûte enchantée2:589Shéhérazade: L’indifférent3:3010Le livre de Baudelaire: Le balcon7:4911Le livre de Baudelaire: Harmonie du soir3:3712Le livre de Baudelaire: Le jet d’eau5:0413Le livre de Baudelaire: Recueillement4:352019 · studio album
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Tracklist · 5 tracks · 1:07:59
1Common Tones in Simple Time20:482Harmonielehre: 1. First Movement18:193Harmonielehre: 2. The Anfortas Wound12:574Harmonielehre: 3. Meister Eckhardt and Quackie11:485Short Ride in a Fast Machine4:07Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?
2020 · studio album
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Tracklist · 5 tracks · 31:01
1Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?: I. Gritty, Funky, but in Strict Tempo – Twichy, Bot‐like11:322Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?: II. Much Slower, Gently, Relaxed6:103Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?: Più mosso0:594Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?: III. L’istesso tempo. Obsession / Swing7:415China Gates. For Solo Piano4:39My Father Knew Charles Ives / Harmonielehre
2021 · studio album
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Tracklist · 6 tracks · 1:09:00
1My Father Knew Charles Ives: I. Concord9:412My Father Knew Charles Ives: II. The Lake7:123My Father Knew Charles Ives: III. The Mountain10:424Harmonielehre: I. —17:265Harmonielehre: II. The Anfortas Wound12:466Harmonielehre: III. Meister Eckhardt and Quackie11:13Chamber Symphony / Common Tones in Simple Time / Son of Chamber Symphony
2021 · studio album
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Tracklist · 7 tracks · 1:06:33
1Chamber Symphony: I. Mongrel Airs7:402Chamber Symphony: II. Aria with Walking Bass8:053Chamber Symphony: III. Roadrunner5:554Common Tones in Simple Time21:215Son of Chamber Symphony: I.8:366Son of Chamber Symphony: II.7:207Son of Chamber Symphony: III.7:362022 · studio album
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Tracklist · 6 tracks · 54:26
1Slonimsky’s Earbox14:262My Father Knew Charles Ives: I. Concord10:323My Father Knew Charles Ives: II. The Lake7:264My Father Knew Charles Ives: III. The Mountain10:215Tromba Lontana4:206Lollapalooza7:21City Noir / Fearful Symmetries / Lola Montez Does the Spider Dance
2024 · studio album
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Tracklist · 5 tracks · 1:09:06
1City Noir: I. The City and Its Double13:012City Noir: II. The Song Is for You8:483City Noir: III. Boulevard Night12:104Fearful Symmetries29:145Girls of the Golden West: Lola Montez Does the Spider Dance5:532024 · studio album
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Tracklist · 20 tracks · 2:06:46
Disc 11Girls of the Golden West: Act I: Scene 1: It was a driving, vigorous, restless population8:562Girls of the Golden West: Act I: Scene 1: Wagon Ride - Ned Peters was a hustler5:063Girls of the Golden West: Act I: Scene 2: My name is Joe11:014Girls of the Golden West: Act I: Scene 2: Now he consoles himself2:365Girls of the Golden West: Act I: Scene 3: A gambler’s life I do admire10:496Girls of the Golden West: Act I: Scene 3: Josefa, you remember4:157Girls of the Golden West: Act I: Scene 4: It’s bone, it’s backbone12:208Girls of the Golden West: Act I: Scene 4: Comin’ up from Red Dog3:29Disc 21Girls of the Golden West: Act II: Scene 1: The Raven5:082Girls of the Golden West: Act II: Scene 2: The attack on the Mexicans11:043Girls of the Golden West: Act II: Scene 3: It seems like midnight7:594Girls of the Golden West: Act II: Scene 3: What is this celebration to me?6:585Girls of the Golden West: Act II: Scene 4: This very nearly was the cause2:456Girls of the Golden West: Act II: Scene 4: Ven esta noche3:037Girls of the Golden West: Act II: Scene 4: Blessed and praised1:008Girls of the Golden West: Act II: Scene 4: I’m going far away from my creditors8:559Girls of the Golden West: Act II: Scene 5: The Downieville mob5:4110Girls of the Golden West: Act II: Scene 5: Tú me quieres alba6:1111Girls of the Golden West: Act II: Scene 5: It’s four long years (Lousy Miner)4:3812Girls of the Golden West: Act II: Epilogue: Sometimes I lounge forlornly to the window4:52— · studio album
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Tracklist · 41 tracks · 2:46:10
1Universal Logo0:212Decca Logo0:243The Death of Klinghoffer: Titles - Prison Scene1:214The Death of Klinghoffer: Prologue: Chorus of Exiled Palestinains9:045The Death of Klinghoffer: Prologue: Chorus of Exiled Jews8:386The Death of Klinghoffer: Act 1: Scene 1: It Was Just After One Fifteen3:147The Death of Klinghoffer: Act 1: Scene 1: My Grandson Didi, Who Is Five5:218The Death of Klinghoffer: Act 1: Scene 1: Give These Orders2:159The Death of Klinghoffer: Act 1: Scene 1: So I Said to My Grandson1:3110The Death of Klinghoffer: Act 1: Scene 1: We Are Sorry for You3:0111The Death of Klinghoffer: Act 1: Scene 2: Now It Is Night4:3412The Death of Klinghoffer: Act 1: Scene 2: I Think If You Could Talk Like This1:4813The Death of Klinghoffer: Act 1: Scene 2: I Kept My Distance3:2714The Death of Klinghoffer: Act 1: Scene 2: Those Birds Are Flying Above Us3:2815The Death of Klinghoffer: Act 1: Scene 2: Night Chorus6:3616The Death of Klinghoffer: Act 2: Scene 1: Come Here, Look3:1717The Death of Klinghoffer: Act 2: Scene 1: I Never Been a Violent Man4:0018The Death of Klinghoffer: Act 2: Scene 1: You Are Always Complaining of Your Suffering5:5719The Death of Klinghoffer: Act 2: Scene 1: I Must Have Been Hysterical5:2620The Death of Klinghoffer: Act 2: Scene 1: It Is as If Our Earthly Life Were Spent Miserably7:2221The Death of Klinghoffer: Act 2: Scene 2: My One Consolation4:4622The Death of Klinghoffer: Act 2: Scene 2: Klinghoffer's Death2:4223The Death of Klinghoffer: Act 2: Scene 2: Every Fifteen Minutes, One More Will Be Shot5:0524The Death of Klinghoffer: Act 2: Scene 2: Aria of the Falling Body (Gymnopédie)7:0625The Death of Klinghoffer: Act 2: Scene 2: Day Chorus4:4026The Death of Klinghoffer: Act 2: Scene 3: Mrs Klinghoffer, Please Sit Down3:3927The Death of Klinghoffer: Act 2: Scene 3: You Empraced Them!10:4828Filming "The Death of Klinghoffer": Commissioning the Film2:5629Filming "The Death of Klinghoffer": From Libretto to Screenplay5:3630Filming "The Death of Klinghoffer": Making Cuts3:0531Filming "The Death of Klinghoffer": The Budget0:5932Filming "The Death of Klinghoffer": Rehearsals, 11. September 20113:2333Filming "The Death of Klinghoffer": Locations1:5734Filming "The Death of Klinghoffer": Singing Live on Location8:0835Filming "The Death of Klinghoffer": Singing for John Adams4:2036Filming "The Death of Klinghoffer": Setting the Text4:3737Filming "The Death of Klinghoffer": Omar3:4238Filming "The Death of Klinghoffer": Opera Singers Acting3:1839Filming "The Death of Klinghoffer": Editing Opera1:4140Filming "The Death of Klinghoffer": Contemporary Opera2:1741Filming "The Death of Klinghoffer": Credits0:20
Album · 9
| Cover | Year | Title | Notes | First release |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1987 | Shaker Loops / Light Over WaterSearch SpotifySearch YouTube MusicTracklist · 4 tracks · 1:10:251Shaker Loops28:46 2Light Over Water: Part I12:20 3Light Over Water: Part II11:14 4Light Over Water: Part III18:05 | Compilation | 1987 | |
| 1987 | Music From 'Nixon in China'Search SpotifySearch YouTube MusicTracklist · 16 tracks · 1:05:021Nixon in China: Act 1: Beginning2:55 2Nixon in China: Soldiers of Heaven Hold the Sky2:47 3Nixon in China: The People Are the Heroes Now2:49 4Nixon in China: Landing of the Spirit of '762:23 5Nixon in China: Your Flight Was Smooth, I Hope?1:19 6Nixon in China: News Has a Kind of Mystery6:45 7Nixon in China: Ladies and Gentleman, Comrades and Friends6:37 8Nixon in China: Mr Premier, Distinguished Guests.2:36 9Nixon in China: Cheers3:50 10Nixon in China: Act 2: This Is Prophetic8:42 11Nixon in China: At Last the Weather's Warming Up3:04 12Nixon in China: Beginning2:53 13Nixon in China: Oh What a Day I Thought I'd Die!4:48 14Nixon in China: Whip Her to Death2:30 15Nixon in China: Tropical Storm4:35 16Nixon in China: I Am the Wife of Mao Tse-Tung6:29 | Compilation | 1987 | |
| 1996 | Violin ConcertoSearch SpotifySearch YouTube MusicTracklist · 7 tracks · 58:381Violin Concerto: I. ♩ = 7814:56 2Violin Concerto: II. Chaconne: Body Through Which the Dream Flows11:31 3Violin Concerto: III. Toccare7:46 4Shaker Loops: I. Shaking and Trembling8:25 5Shaker Loops: II. Hymning Slews5:09 6Shaker Loops: III. Loops and Verses6:55 7Shaker Loops: IV. A Final Shaking3:56 | Compilation | 26 April 1996 | |
| 1999 | The John Adams EarboxSearch SpotifySearch YouTube Music | Compilation | 19 October 1999 | |
| 2008 | Grand Pianola Music / Shaker Loops / Short Ride in a Fast MachineSearch SpotifySearch YouTube MusicTracklist · 8 tracks · 1:14:271Grand Pianola Music: 1st & 2nd movements23:52 2Grand Pianola Music: 3rd movement8:18 3Shaker Loops: I. Shaking and Trembling7:58 4Shaker Loops: II. Hymning Slews5:23 5Shaker Loops: III. Loops and Verses7:51 6Shaker Loops: IV. A Final Shaking3:47 7The Chairman Dances: Foxtrot for Orchestra12:49 8Short Ride in a Fast Machine4:29 | Compilation | 2008 | |
| 2008 | Hallelujah Junction: A Nonesuch RetrospectiveSearch SpotifySearch YouTube MusicTracklist · 18 tracks · 2:26:31Disc 1 1Harmonielehre: I.17:10 2Shaker Loops: I. Shaking and Trembling8:30 3Harmonium: III. Wild Nights11:41 4Nixon in China, Act I, Scene 3: "Ladies and Gentleman"6:36 5Nixon in China, Act I, Scene 3: "Mr. Premier, distinguished guests"2:37 6Nixon in China, Act I, Scene 3: "Cheers"3:49 7Chamber Symphony: I. Mongrel Airs7:53 8Gnarly Buttons: III. Put Your Loving Arms Around Me8:34 9Hoodoo Zephyr10:21 Disc 21The Death of Klinghoffer: Chorus of Exiled Palestinians8:39 2The Death of Klinghoffer: Chorus of Exiled Jews8:39 3I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky: ¡Este Pais! (This Country!)4:31 4Violin Concerto: III. Toccare7:45 5Naive and Sentimental Music: III. Chain to the Rhythm11:00 6El Niño: The Babe Leaped in Her Womb3:30 7El Niño: Magnificat3:31 8A Flowering Tree, Act II, Scene 4: Kumudha and the Beggar Minstrels7:12 9The Dharma at Big Sur: I. A New Day14:33 | Compilation | 7 October 2008 | |
| 2009 | Nixon in ChinaSearch SpotifySearch YouTube MusicTracklist · 41 tracks · 2:33:44Disc 1 1Nixon in China: Act I Scene 1: Beginning2:44 2Nixon in China: Act I Scene 1: Soldiers of Heaven Hold the Sky (Chorus)2:45 3Nixon in China: Act I Scene 1: The People are the Heroes Now (Chorus)2:50 4Nixon in China: Act I Scene 1: Landing of the Spirit of '762:33 5Nixon in China: Act I Scene 1: Your Flight Was Smooth, I Hope (Chou, Nixon)1:26 6Nixon in China: Act I Scene 1: News Has a Kind of Mystery (Nixon, Chou, Kissinger, Chorus)7:29 7Nixon in China: Act I Scene 2: Beginning - I Can't Talk Very Well. My Throat… (Mao, Nixon, Chou, Kissinger, 3 Secretaries)4:19 8Nixon in China: Act I Scene 2: You Know We'll Meet With Your Confrere, the Democratic Candidate (Mao, Nixon, Kissinger)2:40 9Nixon in China: Act I Scene 2: You've Said That There's a Certain Well-Known Tree (Chou, Nixon, Mao, Kissinger, 3 Secretaries)2:48 10Nixon in China: Act I Scene 2: Founders Come First, Then Profiteers (Mao, 3 Secretaries, Nixon, Chou, Kissinger)7:25 11Nixon in China: Act I Scene 2: We No Longer Need Confucius (Mao, 3 Secretaries)3:09 12Nixon in China: Act I Scene 2: Like the Ming Tombs (Nixon, 3 Secretaries, Mao, Chou)5:39 13Nixon in China: Act I Scene 3: Beginning - The Night Is Young (Nixon, Pat, Chou, Kissinger, Chorus)6:27 14Nixon in China: Act I Scene 3: Ladies and Gentlemen, Comrades and Friends (Chou, Chorus, Pat, Kissinger)7:00 15Nixon in China: Act I Scene 3: Mr. Premier, Distinguished Guests (Nixon, Chorus)2:48 16Nixon in China: Act I Scene 3: Cheers! (Chorus, Nixon, Chou, Pat, Kissinger)4:16 Disc 21Nixon in China: Act II Scene 1: Beginning - I Don't Daydream and Don't look Back (Pat)3:47 2Nixon in China: Act II Scene 1: Look Down at the Earth (Chorus, Pat)5:51 3Nixon in China: Act II Scene 1: This Is Prophetic! (Pat)7:58 4Nixon in China: Act II Scene 1: At Last the Weather's Warming Up (Pat)3:19 5Nixon in China: Act II Scene 2: Beginning - Young as We Are (3 Secretaries)3:02 6Nixon in China: Act II Scene 2: O What a Day I Thought I'd Die! (Kissinger as Lao Szu, Chorus as Ching-hua, 3 Secretaries, Pat)4:41 7Nixon in China: Act II Scene 2: Whip Her to Death! (Kissinger as Lao Szu, Pat, Nixon)2:58 8Nixon in China: Act II Scene 2: Tropical Storm: There There, There There (Pat)4:57 9Nixon in China: Act II Scene 2: Flesh Rebels (Chorus as Militia)3:09 10Nixon in China: Act II Scene 2: I Have My Brief (Kissinger as Lao Szu, Nixon)1:11 11Nixon in China: Act II Scene 2: It Seems So Strange (Chorus as Ching-hua, Chiang Ch'ing, Pat, Nixon, 3 Secretaries)3:02 12Nixon in China: Act II Scene 2: I Am the Wife of Mao Tse-tung (Chiang Ch'ing, Chorus)7:05 Disc 31Nixon in China: Act III: Beginning1:08 2Nixon in China: Act III: Some Men You Cannot Satisfy (Kissinger, Nixon, Pat, Chou, Chiang Ch'ing)3:09 3Nixon in China: Act III: I Am No One (Mao, Chou, Kissinger, Chiang Ch'ing, Pat)3:47 4Nixon in China: Act III: The Maos Dance (Chiang Ch'ing, Mao, Pat, Nixon, Chou)2:05 5Nixon in China: Act III: Sitting Around the Radio (Nixon, Pat)1:17 6Nixon in China: Act III: Let Us Examine What You Did (Mao, Chiang Ch'ing, Chou)2:55 7Nixon in China: Act III: When I Woke Up I Dimly Realized the Jap Bombers Had Given Us a Miss (Nixon, Pat)1:22 8Nixon in China: Act III: I Have No Offspring (Chou, Mao, Chiang Ch'ing)2:05 9Nixon in China: Act III: I Can Keep Still (Chiang Ch'ing)3:14 10Nixon in China: Act III: After That the Sweat Had Soaked my Uniform (Nixon, Pat, Chiang Ch'ing, Mao, Chou)2:55 11Nixon in China: Act III: Peking Watches the Stars (Chiang Ch'ing, Mao)3:30 12Nixon in China: Act III: You Won at Poker (Pat, Nixon, Chiang Ch'ing, Mao)4:02 13Nixon in China: Act III: I Am Old and I Cannot Sleep (Chou)4:57 | Live | 28 September 2009 | |
| 2010 | I Am LoveSearch SpotifySearch YouTube MusicTracklist · 9 tracks · 1:05:421The Chairman Dances (Foxtrot for Orchestra)12:33 2Century Rolls: I. First Movement (excerpt)4:19 3Lollapalooza6:43 4Shaker Loops: III. Loops and Verses6:56 5Shaker Loops: IV. A Final Shaking3:56 6The Death of Klinghoffer: Desert Chorus5:08 7Fearful Symmetries (excerpt)3:07 8Harmonielehre: Part II. The Anfortas Wound12:26 9Harmonielehre: Part III. Meister Eckhardt and Quackie10:34 | Soundtrack | 14 June 2010 | |
| 2022 | Collected WorksSearch SpotifySearch YouTube Music | Compilation | 1 July 2022 |
EP · 1
| Cover | Year | Title | Notes | First release |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | John Adams: Saxophone ConcertoSearch SpotifySearch YouTube MusicTracklist · 2 tracks · 27:331Saxophone Concerto: I. Animato (Moderato)21:57 2Saxophone Concerto: II. Molto vivo (A Hard Driving Pulse)5:36 | 22 May 2026 |
Stats & PK
Percentile within all 23,672 published artists.Put John Adams head-to-head →
| Metric | Value | Percentile |
|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia language versions | 42 | 95.1th |
| Spotify monthly listeners | — | no data |
| Release groups in DB | 78 | 96.9th |
| Studio albums | 68 | 99.6th |
| Awards recorded | 14 | 99.2th |
| Timeline events | 78 | 99.5th |
| Recording span (years) | 51 | 91.8th |
| Genres | 9 | 95.7th |
Awards & honours
| Year | Award | Category | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1989 | Grammy Awards | won | |
| 1994 | Royal Philharmonic Society Award (Chamber-Scale Composition) | won | |
| 1995 | Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition | won | |
| 1995 | Grawemeyer Awards | won | |
| 1997 | Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences | won | |
| 2003 | Pulitzer Prize for Music | won | |
| 2015 | Officer of Arts and Letters | won | |
| 2019 | Erasmus Prize | won | |
| 2021 | Dresdner Musikfestspiel-Preis | won | |
| — | Classic Brit Awards | won | |
| — | Ditson Conductor's Award | won | |
| — | Harvard Centennial Medal | won | |
| — | Rome Prize | won | |
| — | Royal Philharmonic Society Music Awards | won |
Where this record comes from
portrait—Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0 · retrieved 11 October 2026
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:JA-portrait-1-LW.jpgaliases/urls—musicbrainz · CC0 · retrieved 10 October 2026
https://musicbrainz.org/artist/94f46f90-f220-458d-acd6-5f14c55ab9b2discography—musicbrainz · CC0 · retrieved 10 October 2026
https://musicbrainz.org/artist/94f46f90-f220-458d-acd6-5f14c55ab9b2core—wikidata · CC0 · retrieved 10 October 2026
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q84114genre—wikidata · CC0 · retrieved 11 October 2026
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q84114seed-list—wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 · retrieved 10 October 2026
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Adams_%28composer%29biography—wikipedia-en · CC BY-SA 4.0 · retrieved 10 October 2026
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Adams_%28composer%29
Why this artist is in the database
- List of composers by name
Tier rule: notable long tail (listeners 0, 42 language versions)
Image: The original uploader was Macror at English Wikipedia . ( Original text: Deborah O'Grady ) · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Wikidata: Q84114 · MusicBrainz: 94f46f90-f220-458d-acd6-5f14c55ab9b2
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