John Adams interviewed by Alex Ross
Recorded 11/20/2008
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John Adams | Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life

Winner of several Grammy Awards and the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in music for On the Transmigration of Souls, John Adams is a renowned contemporary composer. Employing minimalist techniques evident in pieces like Nixon in China and Harmonielehre, Adams’s work has helped turn the tide of musical aesthetics away from European modernism toward a more expansive and expressive New World lexicon. In Hallelujah Junction, Adams discusses the pleasures and challenges of composing serious music in a country largely preoccupied with pop culture.

Alex Ross | The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

New Yorker music critic Alex Ross has received two American Society of Composers, Authors, and Deems Taylor Awards for music criticism, a Letter of Distinction from the American Music Center for his contributions to contemporary music, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Rest is Noise, a cultural history of music since 1900. Geoff Dyer in the New York Times Book Review writes: Rilke once wrote of how he learned to stand more seeingly in front of certain paintings. Ross enables us to listen more hearingly.