No Such Spring 2022

Program Note by Thomas May

The profound impact that the pandemic has had on contemporary composition will undoubtedly continue to be felt for years. Samuel Adams points to an important shift in his own musical thinking exemplified by No Such Spring, which he was asked to write in April 2020. “We were all still feeling optimistic that programming would get back to some normalcy by the 2021–22 season at that point,” Adams recalled. He began composing the piece in early 2021, but over the course of a couple of postponements, his concept underwent dramatic changes: he expanded its scope significantly and incorporated a central role for solo piano.

Adams moreover found himself reevaluating his priorities as a composer: “Pre-pandemic, my music had a tendency to create a certain kind of layering around the work that I expected the audience to sift through to get to the core. Since then, I’ve been rethinking what an audience expects when they come to a concert and have pushed myself to write more directly communicative music.”

Now 37, Adams came of age straddling the worlds of acoustic and electronic music, improvisation, and field recording; he also gained experience playing bass in jazz bands. Over the past dozen years, he has written a critically acclaimed oeuvre of orchestral and ensemble compositions, as well as innovative multimedia projects involving dance and film. His earliest long-form orchestral piece, Drift and Providence, originated in 2011 as a San Francisco Symphony co-commission and in part pays homage to his Bay Area upbringing. The Music

No Such Spring does not have a program, but its overall architecture conveys an implicit narrative related to the title. Adams recalls listening to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring around the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as he was writing the second movement of the piece. The feeling of “coming out of a two-year period of collective wintering and bearing witness to a very violent spring, both abroad and here in America” influenced his concept of the paradox that springtime itself entails, of being “both beautiful and brutally violent—think of Thoreau’s description of the pond booming and cracking free of ice in Walden.”

The durations of the three interlinked movements comprising the 30-minute No Such Spring increase successively, so that the third movement is nearly as long as the first two combined. Here, too, Adams rescripts expectations that might be associated with a concerto, with its conventional sequence of movements according to the pattern fast-slow-fast. The gradual expansion of durations as the work progresses, he explains, allies No Such Spring with his orchestral Variations. “The idea of a stanza of music that over the course of the piece gets larger and larger,” he explains, “articulates an opening up of space” as the form unfolds that in turn evokes “a sense of optimism.”

The solo piano begins the piece by tracing a theme whose placid simplicity soon takes on surprising dimensions. Titled Colorfugue, this first movement serves as an introduction to what the composer calls “the granular material” of the whole piece—not only in thematic and harmonic terms but its soundscape as well, for this is a fugue that methodically introduces the timbral palette of the orchestra as well, which comprises occasional hints of American blues. Rhythmically, Adams overlays the serene pulsation of West Coast Minimalism—as found in the earlier work of his father, John Adams, for example—with complex subdivisions that enhance the music’s expansiveness.

Adams regards the first movement as a kind of preface before the piece “really takes off” with Double Variations, the second movement, which begins without pause following the solo piano’s reprise of the opening passage. In formal terms, this unfolds as a series of alternating sets of variations which eventually merge to create “an ecstatic tipping point whereupon the orchestra swallows itself whole.”

The title of the final movement, Garden of Wire and Wood, subtly alludes to the sixth movement of Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphony (Garden of Love’s Sleep) and at the same time is Adams’s image for the way the piano works, “with the orchestra acting as a resonating body around the instrument, augmenting the pianist’s gestures and creating a consistently expanding, resonant space—all the way up into the very end of the piece.”

This expansiveness is enhanced by the composer’s sensitivity to timbres across the spectrum, particularly at the low end. To ensure the latter, he incorporates the warmth and “chaos of sound” of a small Moog analog synthesizer. The orchestra overall gently radiates outward from the piano’s gradually cresting, ecstatic waves in the final movement, which include an extended recapitulation of material from the first movement. Adams likens this to a “second spring” that suggests a cyclical quality to the whole. Dampened with Blu-Tack, which gives it an extremely percussive, pitch-less sound, the C at the keyboard’s uppermost limit is where the music finally sweeps ashore.

-Thomas May

(click outside to close)