The composition recalls both Steve Reich's experiments in combining several instruments of the same timbre, as well as the shifting rhythmic fluidity driving Louis Andriessen's more frenetic works.
It's not the ending I'd have chosen, but when you've been composing for more than 20 years, I guess you get sick of transcendental finales. After exploring grand pastoral beauty in movements I and II- and hinting at various styles of folk and popular music along the way- movement III loses itself in a frenzied, dissonant boogie. The music effortlessly flows from one rhythmic and harmonic figure to the next as each piano compels the other into new territory.
That's not to say that the works on Road Movies don't vary in quality however, the two standout pieces, "Hallelujah Junction" and "Phrygian Gates", are both inspired compositions that stand as prime distillations of Adams' style.ġ996's "Hallelujah Junction" is a vertiginous composition for two pianos, exhibiting the unbroken stream of consciousness apparent in Adams' best work. Unlike most of his peers, Adams' music has grown neither stagnant nor obtuse as he's aged, probably because he hasn't committed himself to a particular musical dogma. Road Movies gathers piano pieces written throughout most of Adams' career (the selections were originally composed between 19). It is his unique style, as well as a tempering of any romanticized views of his country, that usually prevents these influences from carrying his music into realms of fluff and cheese. Where his peers have turned to world or academic music for inspiration, he's comfortable referencing the sweeping pastorals of Aaron Copland, the jumbled marching-band Americana of Charles Ives, or the so-called "Jewish melancholy" embedded in the past century of New York art music.
Adams cares deeply about the state of American music past and present, and has always been a populist post-minimalist. in favor of academy composers" over the past 50 years, noting that they had failed to recognize popular figures Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson, pioneers like John Cage, or any jazz artists such as Thelonious Monk. Instead, he blasted the awards committee for ignoring "many, if not most of the country's greatest musical minds. When John Adams was awarded the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in music for his September 11th memorial piece "On the Transmigration of Souls", he was expected to greet the honor with polite gratitude.
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