Composer, conductor, and creative thinker – John Adams occupies a unique position in the world of classical music.  His works, both operatic and symphonic, stand out among contemporary classical compositions for their depth of expression, brilliance of sound, and the profoundly humanist nature of their themes. Over the past twenty-five years, Adams’s music has played a decisive role in turning the tide of contemporary musical aesthetics away from academic modernism and toward a more expansive, expressive language, entirely characteristic of his New World surroundings. 

Born and raised in New England, Adams learned the clarinet from his father and played in marching bands and community orchestras during his formative years. He began composing at age ten and heard his first orchestral pieces performed while still a teenager. The intellectual and artistic traditions of New England, including his studies at Harvard University and attendance at Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts, helped shape him as an artist and thinker. After earning two degrees from Harvard, he moved to Northern California in 1971 and has since lived in the San Francisco Bay area.   Adams taught at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music for ten years before becoming composer-in-residence of the San Francisco Symphony (1982-85), and creator of the orchestra’s highly successful and controversial “New and Unusual Music” series. Several of Adams’s landmark orchestral works were written for and premiered by the San Francisco Symphony, including Harmonium (1980-81), Grand Pianola Music (1982), Harmonielehre (1984-85), and El Dorado (1991).

In 1985, Adams began a collaboration with the poet Alice Goodman and stage director Peter Sellars that resulted in two groundbreaking operas: Nixon in China (1984-87) and The Death of Klinghoffer (1990-91). Produced worldwide, these works are among the most performed operas of the last two decades. Three further stage collaborations with Sellars followed: the 1995 “songplay”, I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, with a libretto by June Jordan; El Niño (1999-2000), a multilingual retelling of the nativity story, composed for the celebration of the millennium; and Doctor Atomic (2005), about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the creation of the first atomic bomb. Commissioned by the San Francisco Opera and premiered there in 2005, Doctor Atomic was quickly taken up worldwide by the Netherlands Opera, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Metropolitan Opera, and the English National Opera. A Flowering Tree, written for the 250^th anniversary of Mozart’s birth and premiere in Vienna in 2006, is John Adams’ most recent stage work. The small-scale opera has already been produced around the world in Japan, Australia, England, Germany, and numerous American cities.

Other recent Adams works include: Dharma at Big Sur (2003), for electric violin and orchestra, inspired by literary impressions of the Californian landscape by such writers as Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and Henry Miller;  My Father Knew Charles Ives (2003), an evocation of Adams’s boyhood in central New Hampshire; the Doctor Atomic Symphony (2005), drawn from the opera; and Son of Chamber Symphony, Adams’s sequel to his popular Chamber Symphony of 1992; and a string quartet commissioned by the Juilliard School and Stanford University for the St. Lawrence String Quartet.  Adams's newest work is City Noir (a co-commission from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Netherlands Radio Orchestra and the Toronto Symphony) premiered in October 2009 on an internationally televised gala concert featuring Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Adams’s works are among the very few written in our own time that have achieved repertory status, appearing regularly on programs by orchestras throughout the world.  

John Adams is an active conductor, appearing with the world’s greatest orchestras in programs often combining his own works with a wide variety of repertoire from all time periods. In the current season, he conducts frequent collaborator Leila Josefowicz in performances of his Violin Concerto with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, on a program that includes the West Coast premiere of Philip Glass’s Ninth Symphony and Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten. He also conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group in music by Stockhausen, Cage, and a world premiere by Oscar Bettison. In the summer of 2012, he leads a collaboration between the Juilliard Orchestra and the Royal Academy of Music, with concerts at Lincoln Center and at the BBC Proms.

During the 2010-2011 season, Adams made his Metropolitan Opera debut conducting the Met premiere of his opera Nixon in China, in a production by Peter Sellars that was also broadcast live in high-definition to cinemas around the world. He returned to the San Francisco Symphony for holiday performances of his Nativity oratorio, El Niño; conducted the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic in City Noir, along with works of Stravinsky and Milhaud; joined the Toronto Symphony’s New Creations Festival to conduct City Noir and Mason Bates’s Liquid Interface; and participated in a residency with the New World Symphony, conducting pieces by Bartók and Julia Wolfe, as well as City Noir during the inaugural season of their new concert hall designed by Frank Gehry. In his ongoing role as Creative Chair of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Adams conducted several world premieres by emerging composers as part of that orchestra’s ongoing Green Umbrella series.

Adams's 2009-2010 season included appearances as Artist in Residence at Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival, the West Coast/Left Coast Festival with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, two Carnegie Hall appearances with the Orchestra of St. Luke's and Ensemble ACJW, an engagement with the London Sinfonietta, a two-week residency with the London Symphony Orchestra in Paris, and a two week residency with the National Symphony Orchestra at Washington DC's Kennedy Center.  In past seasons, he has conducted the New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, New World Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and London Symphony Orchestra, among others.  In 2009 he was Composer of the Year with the Pittsburgh Symphony, conducting several weeks of concerts of his own and other music with that ensemble.

Adams has also received critical acclaim for his creative programming. In 2003, Lincoln Center presented a festival titled “John Adams: An American Master”, the most extensive festival that the venue has ever devoted to a living composer. As the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall from 2003-07, Adams conducted the first public concert in Carnegie’s Zankel Hall and founded the annual “In Your Ear” festival. In 2006, he curated the hugely popular “Minimalist Jukebox” for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. As Artist-in-Association with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, he regularly conducted the orchestra at London’s Barbican Centre and the annual BBC Proms concerts at Albert Hall.   Adams has also served as Music Director of the Cabrillo Festival and Creative Chair of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.

In 1985, Nonesuch Records released Adams’s Harmonielehre, a landmark recording of American symphonic music. Since then, Nonesuch has released first recordings of all of his works, both symphonic and theatrical. Nonesuch’s ten-disc set, The John Adams Earbox, documents his recorded music through 2000.

Hallelujah Junction, John Adams’ autobiography, was named by the New York Times as one of the “most notable books of 2008.”  In its August 25th issue of 2008 The New Yorker Magazine published an extended excerpt from the book under the title “Sonic Youth,” covering Adams’s early years in San Francisco. The John Adams Reader: Essential Writings on an American Composer, edited by Tom May and published by Amadeus Press, is a 400-page summary of writings about Adams and his music, and the first in-depth anthology of texts dealing with more than 30 years of the composer’s creative life.

Harvard University has twice given Adams significant awards: in 2004 he received the Centennial Medal of the university’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences “for contributions to society,” and in 2007 he received the Harvard Arts Medal. He has received from Northwestern University both the 2004 Michael Ludwig Nemmers Prize in Music Composition (the first ever awarded) and in 2008 an honorary doctorate. Honored with a proclamation by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California for his distinguished service to the arts in his adopted home state, he has also been awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Cambridge and an honorary membership in Phi Beta Kappa. He was honored by his home city of Berkeley, California, for his 60th birthday.  He is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Opera Honors Award and was inducted into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame. A noted lecturer, John Adams delivered the 2009 Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Yale University.