John Adams - Modes, Jazz Chords & Slonimsky
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 ก.ย. 2024
- John Adams is one of the most performed living composers. From his origins as a minimalist his music has developed incorporating late romantic sounds, and jazz harmonies. Here I look through some of the approaches he has taken to harmony throughout his career.
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David Bruce on John Adams's Harmonielehre:
• David Bruce on John Ad...
#johnadams #composer #harmony
Research
Process vs. Intuition in the Recent Works of Steve Reich and John Adams by K. Robert Schwarz
www.jstor.org/...
Counterpoint and Polyphony in Recent Instrumental Works of John Adams by Alexander Sanchez-Behar
Musical Aesthetics and Creative Identification in Two Harmonielehren by John Adams and Arnold Schoenberg
Scott M. Strovas
Slonimsky's Thesaurus
www.amazon.com...
Process vs. Intuition in the Recent Works of Steve Reich and John Adams by K. Robert Schwarz
www.jstor.org/...
Interview with John Adams
web.archive.or...
Quincy Jones Interview
www.vulture.com...
Performances:
John Adams - Phrygian Gates
• [1] John Adams - Phryg...
John Adams - Chairman Dances
• Video
John Adams - Shaker Loops
• Video
John Adams - Harmonielehre
• John Adams - Harmoniel...
Steve Reich - Music for Mallets instruments Voices and Organ
• Video
Philip Glass - Music in Fifths
• Video
![[TH] FS vs BME - VCT Ascension Pacific - Lower Bracket Final](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/wnygqsR2Fig/mqdefault.jpg)
Glad I saved the money on music school and just subscribed to David Bruce.
Saam You are lucky
Yep a very good channel
Astute comment!
as a working composer and conductor that tries to learn every single day - THANK you for making this channel!!! You rock.
Greetings from Bulgaria :D
I still remember vividly the first time I heard John Adams... when "The Chairman Dances" played over the opening credits for the film "I Am Love". He's been one of my favorite composers ever since. Thanks as always for the great video!
Anyone else fell in love with John Adams thanks to the Civ 4 soundtrack? I had the destiny to have it play over my ears constantly when i was 13-14 years old. First, i understood nothing, then, it was like a revelation! I think this experience has been the best harmonic training i could have ever asked for!
Yay! I love John Adams! I got to see him in person conduct the Seattle Symphony. The program included his violin concerto Scheherazade 2.0, with Leila Josefowicz as the soloist. Fantastic performance. I can't wait for the episode on Harmonielerhe, which is definitely my favorite Adams piece.
Amazing video !!! 7:20 overlayed hands was epic :))
planning to write a whole piece for that format some time!
@@DBruce get Nahre to record it! That'd be so damn wholesome I'd burst.
@@DBruce What is that video editing technique called?
There are 2 kind of people in this world.
1) Those who extrapolate from incomplete data.
...abnod tuhiopste wxhio ijnotuefrspqoplmabtue. :)
2) and Flat Earthers :)
@@thromboid Just what I was going to say.
I always thought that I didn't know shit about music and this video confirms it.
I think naive and sentimental music is one of John Adams finest achievement and especially the first movement which build in 3 waves just to come back to the beginning again. He know how to build music in the most exhilarating. The climax of the movement always give me goosebumps and breathless, sheer genius. A very underrated piece.
What a great video! John Adams is one of my favorite composers of the 20th- and 21st-century classical music!
Great compositionsl tool for creating sonic landscapes, especially for ceratin scenes in films (travel, moving from place to place, visiting interiors of certain, sometimes scary looking buldings, and structures etc.). Great idea for all sorts of backgrounds - minimalistic approach to scoring cues...
Gah, and that chord from Harmonielehre has always been one of my favorite moments in the whole thing.
Thank you David! This is very insightul. Im a painter , but i used to study the piano and sang in choirs early in life, so some of the terms i definitely recognize. I love minimalist composers, so to find out more about Adams' way of composing definitely helps me to understand his process more.
David, this was so interesting. I've been a huge fan of John Adams and am always seeking to understand more. lately my ear has been drawn to Stravinsky... I'm a Jazz Musician and now (from your other video) understand why it might have caught my ear. To see a 'link' between Adams, Stravinsky and .. the Slonimsky book that EVERY jazz student has is a real eye opener. What a brilliant video. Thanks.
John Adams has some very cool harmonies. These types of videos are great. Keep up the good work.
YES! "Like some sea creature trying to break free!" I think we've all waited for a composer to express that universally perceived phenomena!!!!!!
Just discovered Adams. Stunned I hadn't earlier. Your videos have been most enlightening. Thank you.
Thank you for including your research references in the video descriptions. This is a very engaging subject that I look forward to learning more about in the future.
Every composition teacher: don't make parallel fifths.
Philip Glass: OK.
Ravel: OK.
@@nihilumaeternum6555 lmao
Beethoven made parralell fifths in Beethoven's Piano Concerto no. 3, op. 37, mvt. 1, mm. 32-34.
This wars really informative for me. Awesome work putting together this video, it was a real joy to watch! I can’t wait to see more of them if you continue! Thank you 🙏
It's always fascinating to see how classical musicians and jazz musicians feedback each other through harmony and build new music. Thanks for the video!
Now I'm listening to Harmonielehre while reading that Quincy Jones interview, and loving them both. Thank you!
Great video, the Slonimsky explanations were fun - great inspiration to get the horn out and do some practicing. I've always wanted to see a break down of how the rhythms work in short ride in a fast machine.
Love your channel. Thanks a million for your inspiration and information.
Thank you very much for introducing Slonimsky and the components of Adams' style.
Thank you, Dave. Again, you opened a brand new musical cosmos for me. I appreciate that.....
I was introduced to John Adams through The Death of Klinghoffer, this video is making me want to go deeper.
Hi David! I really liked when you talked about the continuous sensation of (non)stasis (around 3:50)!
It really feels like having both macro and micro universes all-in-one.
And what about that entry of the basses on the 3rd movement (meister eckhardt and quackie)... pure poetry!
Being a composer, your videos and always interesting!
Yeeees ! I love Adam's and his music- thanks for these next videos!
Most enjoyable and educational. Love how one can experiment with these ideas in a DAW these days to listen if the idea is any good, versus back in the 1970’s when all you had was a piano and hoped the musicians could play your at times wacky ideas.
And one more thing : EVERY single musician who spent several years diligently and thoroughly studying Slonimsky's GOLD mine of ideas, became a world class improviser/composer/educator. Coltrane, M.Brecker, J.Goldsmith, C.Ogerman, K.Jarrett, Ch.Corea, A.Silvestri, J.Adams, Aydin Esen - and the list goes on and on... Slonimsky's book is ESSENTIAL. Period.
What if I can’t read but I’m desperate to learn these things
@@OGStazzyWell… Can you still make great music without reading music notation ? The answer is : absolutely yes ! All music is based on certain “feel”, and that’s something that can’t be notated on paper or on the screen. On the other hand : ability to read written sheet music notation opens up a completely new world to your imagination; it enriches you as an artist in many different ways. It speeds up the process of creation, it gives you immediate hints to new forms of putting notes together, creating new sonic landscapes that otherwise wouldn’t have been possible. I would strongly recommend learning music notation, even if it is a pretty mundane process and a lot of people just give up because it doesn’t produce immediate results- it may take time to acquire it, not to mention mastering it…
But once you do - the reward is immediate : all of the sudden the masterpieces of music become available to you and you can fully understand them and digest every single detail 😊 So, either find a course online or get a professional music teacher in your vicinity and devote your time and energy to study it. Even after several lessons and few months of practice things like Slonimsky’s theory book will become available for you. It’s NOT that hard… And one more, perhaps the most important thing : after you compose some music on your own : strive to notate it 😅 Even if it is hard at the beginning, it will produce immediate results ! Because you will be notating… yourself ! Your own music. I discovered that all my students learned and mastered music notation that way. Because all of a sudden it becomes personal to you. You understand your own music the best, better than anyone else. And after you notate your own creation suddenly this knowledge applies to everything else…
Brilliant
Hi David, thanks for all your interesting deepening! My preferred John Adams's piece is "Common tones in simple time". Maybe that's a topic for one of your future videos. Thanks
Brilliant.
Thanks this is bloody amazing information
This was lovely, thanks for shedding your light on Adams' musical language! I found Adams' music in the computer game civilization 4, where his music plays in the background during the "modern era". I think the atmosphere in his music is so raw and full of gravity. I love harmonilehre, and also grand pianola music, chairman dances, and short ride in a fast machine to mention a few. I was a bit turned off both his earlier and later works, but scheherezade 2 really hit me, I guess it has the atmosphere, and it also sounds exciting with some unusual instruments. Again, thanks for this 🙂.
Btw, his inspiration for harmonilehre is really strange and fun, hope you bring it up in the LSO video ☺️.
That’s quite the revelation regarding Giant Steps! Wow!
Just bought the thesaurus of scales book. It really got me started with some fascinating ideas
Thank you very much for your videos, David!
I love most of John Adams' new music. Big fan of the Dharma at Big Sur, Gnarly Buttons and Century Rolls, but I bounced off all three pieces initially. Sometimes it takes a few listens for it to "click".
Amazing video David! I'm truly thanked, now I've like 4 books to check :D
I just stumbled upon something amazing!!! Thank you. Pitched perfectly for my time and tide.
Amazing video!
Hi, I'm primarily a jazz/rock listener with occasional classical listening. Thanks for turning me on to John Adams, those were some really nice samples you presented. This video struck a chord (sorry for the pun) in me, as some of the musical concepts very much seemed to have something in common with my favourite improviser, Allan Holdsworth. Holdsworth, too, was an avid student of Slonimsky, and like Coltrane applied the ideas to improvisation. His harmonic language seems to be concurrent with Adams in some ways. I think you can hear these ideas in this piece, for example, where Holdsworth improvises on the SynthAxe, a guitar-like synth controller: th-cam.com/video/1yTCQ1-GzIg/w-d-xo.html Thanks for a great video!
Another fantastic video!
Great Video. Brilliant, inspiring. Cheers.
I’ve been writing a composition assistant (that sounds remarkably like what David described) in max msp for a few months now. I’m don’t qualify myself as a composer in any way, but I’m using Max as a way to make composition easier by using markov chains to run through permutations of melody and harmony modally. I broke out slonimsky’s thesaurus the other day to use as another source for markov choices. Much remains to be done, but if adams has worked in this track, it seems like a good direction.
Excellent video. I love Adams music and it’s great to see background to it. Thanks for sharing. You didn’t mention Eros piano which I remember reading was influenced by Takemitsu’s riverrun and I’m curious how that fits in since Takemitsu arguably had different influences?
Again - amazing.
Excellent video.Thank you for upload.
great video!!!
Thank you David. A beautifully explained clip.
Minor chord with 13 is very first chord from Blue in Green (song from Miles Davis ‘Kind of Blue’ album).
11:25 Jackie McLean played alot of these patterns too. Very cool!
Really cool, I have a feeling that those series are very promissing. I hope you can make something about Gil Evans someday, I talk about his arrangements with Miles Davis specifically, someday maybe, It doesn't hurt to dream
Thank you very much!
Excellent analysis, thanks so much! Slonimsky's Thesaurus was a revelation to me when I first came across it while studying music at university. I should say, though, that I didn't come across it at school, but while studying jazz on my own. Adams is a very fine composer, but I must say that I much prefer his later works over the earlier, more minimalist material, which didn't much move me when I first heard it. Much like the music of Phillip Glass, which I find quite tedious.
Such brilliant insights !
I'm not sure if it's just a matter of taste, or ignorance on my part (which I readily admit to), but I have to say a lot of modern classical music does sound like "too many notes" to me. I know almost nothing about composing, and only the rudiments of music theory, and I have an intuitive approach to playing and composing my own music, so musical theory on this advanced level is a dark art to me. I've just found this channel a while ago and I find it fascinating. I've just returned to playing piano as I approach 60, having had lessons as a kid and then taken to guitar, flute, penny whistle, etc., with a folk and baroque interest, and I started to listen to a bit more "modern classical", thinking I might expand my horizons, but I find almost nothing to my taste (but then a fair amount of romantic music leaves me flustered or nauseous). I enjoy a few pieces of Philip Glass for the structural simplicity and relatively traditional harmonic progression (e.g. in "Opening"). I enjoy Steve Reich. But most I find unapproachable and/or unpleasant. I listened to the first Patreon Etudes on DBC2 and was disappointed to find almost nothing of interest, or nothing appealing to my sense of harmony. Surely humans have an *ancient*, *innate* sense of harmony? Sometimes it seems that the decades of bending and breaking those rules have been too much about realising (pointless) academic possibilities and not enough about the pleasure of the listener. I'm aware that the "ear" becomes attuned to different sounds and greater complexity over time (so dischords become enjoyable), and presumably advanced composers live in a world very far removed from mine, which makes sense and is beautiful or important or whatever music is supposed to be. But it sometimes seems elitist and sounds offensive. I'm trying to imagine an analogy - if modern art was such that you walked into a gallery and the installations jabbed infinitely clever, intricate, but sometimes painful, spiky shapes out of the walls, because that's where the logical progression of 4D art has taken us. Or if perfumes were judged on the number of complex organic chemicals that could be placed in a vial together without actually melting your face.
David, informative and stimulating as ever thx a bunch for making my day.
Quick question: Are you aware of Timoczko's A Geometry of music, if so what do you think of it?
10:00 This video has been copyright claimed by: "Holst, Gustav" for using material found in "The Planets, Mars - Bringer of War"
Wow
Crazy I could totally hear that too. Then I saw this comment AI is taking over the world.
That's exactly what I thought of and immediately stopped the video - went and listened to Mars and then came back and finished it XD
indeed
I'm glad, I found this comment
Read Slonimsky's autobiography, Perfect Pitch. A perfect accompaniment to his wonderful Thesaurus.
Amazing, thank you
What a helpful (too brief) tutorial, thank you !
You asked our thoughts on later Adams music, I personally love Son of Chamber Symphony
I love your channel
Brilliant more like that
Adams has passed me by, largely, although I know of his reputation. This was a useful introduction to his handling of harmony, although I'm not sure his earlier material sounds quite like what I generally prefer (never been a huge fan of minimalism - although ironically, I'm currently working on a piece that is heavily process-driven and slow to develop...).
Slonimsky's book is invaluable, and I love it - constructing lines out of some of the scales/patterns or hybridising different scales/patterns, then trying to find ways to harmonise the result is an exercise I enjoy very much.
You can really hear how Don Davis was influenced by John Adams when composing for The Matrix.
Great Vid... I like Adams use of Slonimsky inspired lines... coming from a jazz angle I don't think it's too 'notey'... my studies with Charlie Banacos had similar approaches to the content in that Slonimsky book... i'm only just getting into it that book now after it being on the shelf for years... great resource & fun to practice..
Excellent video as per usual, David. I was wondering if you would be maybe interested in talking about the work of saxophonist Steve Lacy, especially during the 70s? I think you'll find it very interesting.
thank you very much I will try this in electronic music
Brilliant video - however, I think common tone and enharmonic modulation are two different things:
Common tone [keys] CM (C E G) to Ab (Ab C Eb)
Enharmonic modulation Db to C#
There are some examples whereby the two feature in tandem:
DM to GbM (whereby the F# is respelled enharmonically to act as the tonic to the new key).
Enharmonic modulation is one of the few modulations that is technically unheard.
Always interesting...
You wrote "Slominsky" in the title. Apart from that, great video.
ach! Thanks. I've been saying Slominsky all the way through, I just find it impossible to say Slonimsky! Corrected, thanks.
I will mention Thelonious Monk at 3:17 and continuing..... One might also check out Yuseff Lateef´s Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns.
I'd love to see you do one of these analysis-type videos on Jennifer Higdon. (I'm specifically interested in the Chaconni movement of her violin concerto.)
I really enjoyed his earlier operas, Nixon and Klinghoffer, so I bought a ticket to Doctor Atomic when it was in Atlanta expecting that same style............. I was not a happy camper haha.
Really enjoyed A Flowering Tree, though.
Great work! Could there be a better music teacher? Looking forward to the next chapters on John Adams!
Interesting! Strangely, I recently invented a similar techniques of extending and transformin simple patterns myself I should definitely look more into this!
Good stuff.
Wonderfully instructive. Thank you. Is this the Slonimsky who wrote the Baker's Dictionary?
Personally I’m not drawn to Adams’ recent compositions as much as his kinda minimalist/post-minimalist ones. However I’m not sure I could directly place it on harmony. In part I think Adams’ harmonic rhythm is what has changed too. I feel in his more recent works harmonic rhythm moves quicker than it did in his earlier (possibly due to diminishing minimalist influence?). That’s at least what puts me off a little bit. I’m only an A level music student though so not exactly a valid authority on the matter.
Great vid. Made me appreciate Adams a bit more.
I assume that someone somewhere has created midi files of the Slonimsky material. Any idea where I might find something like that? Thanks!
Just a quick headsup before you go ahead with making more videos on Adams as you mentioned.
The stress in *Harmonielehre* goes on the /i:/, not on the /a/.
Cheers.
you're the worst
wow you're so brilliant
@@lepistanuda thank you. I will make sure to never point out any mistakes that you make, so you have no chance to fix them. After all, that's what this channel is all about: never learning anything new or how to do something right.
@@alex_evstyugov that would be good keep doing that
Great video. Slonimsky book within reach. I wonder if some YT guy would go through every scale, would be interesting. Do you know the "other" scales book Lateef Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns?
The question: early compared to late ... do I like his later stuff as much as those great early triumphs, such as Shaker Loops and The Chairman Dances? While I think Adams’ later music is hit or miss, the hits are some of my favorites of his work. His Violin Concerto was a revelation....
Eb major first in-virgin? 4:14
i thiiink you're joking but if you are honestly confused he meant Inversion
I believe Frank Zappa was a friend and neighbor of Slonimsky ...who was greatly influenced by the book as well as young contemporary stars like Jacob Collier im sure ....Adams violin concerto with Gordon Kremer is brilliant
Main difference between Adam as and Bach's experiments in chromaticism, is no matter how far away Bach goes it is quite functional (usually founded on I IV V, I ii V, I II V progressions). Adam as and non- minimalists composers try to get away from any common practice affiliation.
It would be great if you had some kind of udemy courses so you can go full in depth. What a treat THAT would be.
@David Bruce: Great video. I'm very familiar with Adams' earlier works, from the early 80's - Chairman Dances, Harmonielehre. I think they are quite accessible and enjoyable. When I tried to listen to the violin concerto (1993) I didn't get too far - - seems his style had changed quite a bit - like he was trying to write serious European music. What are your thoughts on this piece?
for some reason that infrapolation and ultrapolation reminded me of vector programs like illustrator
👍
I just know one composition by John Adams: Nixon in China :-0
Go listen to Fearful Symmetries or the Chairman Dances, both from the same period. You'll love them...well, if you loved Nixon in China.
Hello where would I find the list of variations at 10:58
My preference is for Adams, style from the first half of his career. I enjoy tonality, modality, and jazz. As long as his pieces have a unified affectation that I can "relate" to, I prefer it more. I'm not so partial to his more chromatic language. Pieces like Naive and Sentimental Music, his Chamber Symphony, or even his Clarinet Concerto at times, is *just* a little too much for me.
And what you rave about Stravinsky's work as genius is the least we can do as contemporary composers.
Yes, too many notes! ha! Nice, subtle reference... Just a couple quick observations: these obique sounding patterns serve their purposes well, but I think they are more enjoyable (for my tastes anyway) when used sparingly as opposed to a long continuum. Much of what I heard sounded like music from old Alfred Hitchcock movie scores.