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They built their experimental work on a solid conventional training in Western classical music and Adams has allied himself more consistently with this heritage, though he has also been extremely interested in the wide range of other musics – non-Western, jazz, rock – from which the minimalist approach in part derived. While only ten years younger than Glass, Adams could be said to have become the foremost figure in a second generation of composers inspired by the early explorations of sustained sounds and repetition undertaken by La Monte Young and Terry Riley in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Indeed, Adams’s success as an opera composer lies precisely in the extent to which he has incorporated narrative, characterisation and other aspects commonly thought essential to opera, but antithetical to minimalism, to forge an operatic style on minimalist foundations. Often described as a minimalist, he has moved even further away than have Reich, his erstwhile mentor, and Glass, the other major figure in so-called minimalist opera, from the pared-down rigour characteristic of this approach in the 1960s and 70s.

John Coolidge Adams b 15 February 1947, Worcester, Massachusetts, USĪdams is among the leading opera composers who emerged in the late-20th century and, it has been claimed, the most frequently performed living American orchestral composer of our time.

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