Adams: Harmonielehre

John Adams (b. 1947)

Harmonielehre


1. Part I (Untitled)

2. Part II: The Anfortas Wound

3. Part III: Meister Eckhardt and Quackie


Harmonielehre takes its title from a book written in 1911 by Arnold Schoenberg. It is far more than simply a student’s textbook: as well as an exhaustive treatise laying out the full extent of traditional tonal harmony, it is also a philosophical rumination on that tradition. It was written at a crucial point in Schonberg’s career, when he was in the process of abandoning the very tradition that he exhaustively documents in his book. Although usually translated as “Theory of Harmony”, the title’s literal translation, “Harmony Book”, perhaps better reflects its author’s approach. Schoenberg is dismissive of abstract theory, insisting that knowledge of composition must be learned not by absorbing received wisdom, but through practical experience. “If I should succeed in teaching the pupil the handicraft of our art as completely as a carpenter can teach his,” he writes, “then I shall be satisfied.”

Although John Adams’ Harmonielehre sounds little like anything Schoenberg wrote, it is fundamentally connected to him, and to Adams’ ambivalence about him. One of Adams’ teachers at Harvard, Leon Kirchner, had studied with Schoenberg in the 1940s. Although he was not interested in Schoenberg’s compositional innovations, Kirchner nevertheless inherited his teacher’s high seriousness, and in turn transmitted it to his own pupil. For Adams, Schoenberg stands as a Master in the lineage of Bach and Beethoven. Adams is attracted to this notion of the “Great Composer”, and admires and loves Schoenberg (and could be heard recently on Radio 4 vigorously defending him from an attack by Howard Goodall). However, he feels uneasy about what he sees as Schoenberg's adoption of a “priestly” role, taking 19th-century individualism to an extreme. He also faced a contradiction between his awe of Schoenberg’s persona, and the fact that he found much of his music unattractive. By day Adams and his fellow pupils would enthuse over the revolutionary scores of the European avant-garde; by night Adams returned to his rooms to play Jimi Hendrix records.

After he graduated, Adams rejected the high modernism that held sway in academia. Instead he turned to a style that in its own way was just as revolutionary: Minimalism. The primary features of this music were the exact things that Schoenberg’s disciples went out of their way to avoid: regular pulses, repetition, and explicit tonality. This would hardly raise an eyebrow now, even in American universities, but in the 60s and 70s to use such techniques was tantamount to a declaration of war on the academic establishment.

While taking up much of the sounds and textures of minimalist music, Adams nevertheless remained in many ways attached to the traditional concert-hall, and wanted not simply to reject Schoenberg as an influence, but to settle his relationship with him. In the early 80s he wrote a number of works that address Schoenberg’s legacy directly: in his Chamber Symphony, he parodies the hyperactive late-romantic style of early Schoenberg by juxtaposing it with cartoon-like music. Harmonielehre is also a parody, but in an older sense of the word: Adams uses a number of key works from the early 20th century, particularly Schoenberg’s cantata Gurrelieder and Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony, as bases on which his own music is built, fusing their harmonies and expression with Adams’s minimalist-derived technique. Adams makes it clear that here no irony is intended.

All three movements take further inspiration from dreams and concepts from psychoanalysis. Adams has a long-standing interest in the ideas of Carl Jung, and Schoenberg as a resident of early 20th-century Vienna was likewise fascinated by the then new ideas of Freud about the role of the subconscious. The pounding chords that open and close Part One are inspired by a dream Adams had in which he “watched a gigantic supertanker take off from the surface of San Francisco Bay and thrust itself into the sky like a Saturn rocket.” In contrast to the vigorous ouster sections, Adams describes the central part of the movement as a “Sehnsucht”. This German word is generally translated as “yearning”, but this does not convey the full force of its meaning. C.S. Lewis perhaps came closer when he defined it as “an inconsolable longing in the human heart, for we know not what.”

Anfortas, King of the Knights who protected the Holy Grail, suffered a self-inflicted wound from his spear, which would not heal. Anfortas is an example of a Jungian archetype; a mythical figure which stands for a personality trait. He represents a condition of depression which the patient feels incapable of escaping, and which hence becomes self-perpetuating and debilitating. Here Adams has in mind early 20th-century angst; in an interview with the New Yorker columnist Alex Ross, Adams describes Schoenberg “like some religious zealot cutting off his genitals to prove how totally pure he is, how dedicated to the Lord.” Part Two alludes to such music, particularly Sibelius’ Fourth Symphony, and at its climax, screams in evocation of Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony.

In utter contrast, the opening of Part Three floats in bright light. The title (“Zappa-ish”, in the composer’s words) refers to another dream of Adams’s, in which he saw his daughter (briefly known as “Quackie” as a baby) flying on the shoulders of the medieval theologian, mystic and accused blasphemer Meister Eckhardt, “as they hover among the heavenly bodies like figures painted on the high ceilings of old cathedrals.” Perhaps Eckhardt here is an avatar for Adams himself, questioning and rejecting elements of the academic truths he inherited. The music builds to a triumphant climax which may seem a definitive rejection of Schoenberg. But in forging his own path, Adams has remained true to Schoenberg’s ideals: “Had I told [my pupils] merely what I know, then they would have known just that and nothing more. As it is, they know perhaps even less. But they do know what matters: the search itself!”