It is useful to think of chamber music as ] a narrow deep area between the novel and film.”
— Lewis Baltz.
There was a time when we thought it was enough just to photograph objects at eye level, standing with both feet on the ground. But then we began to move around, to climb mountains, to fly in space, to go to the bottom of the sea—and to document what was there and our responses to what was there. John Adams’s compositional ‘concision’ is tremendous—he is able to imply so much with so few notes, with so few compositional gestures! He is not satisfied with things apprehended at eye level.
Adams’s opera, Dr. Atomic, is nominally about the history of J. Robert Oppenheimer and others who participated in the Manhattan Project in the 1940s, to create the atomic bomb. But the text fragments that were incorporated into the opera or adapted to become part of its libretto offer close-ups so extreme as to become abstract—studies of textures, microscopic studies of the ethos of the period. In places, it’s as though we have waveform-sampled, electroacoustic still-lives of Oppenheimer and colleagues. The opera is painterly—or, more accurately I think, photographerly.
The images affect us on the physical level, the depictive level, the mythic level. The setting of a John Donne sonnet is made to sound archaic by Adams’s choice of a slow, solemn D minor chaconne. All the typical 17th-century ingredients of a breakfast still-life painting are here. On the left is a large römer, a green wine glass with prunts on the stem. Next to it is a salt cellar with a Chinese porcelain dish on top. It contains capers, which go well with fish. The still-life is subdued in color—only the yellow of the lemon grabs the eye. Delightful details, such as the curling lemon peel and pewter plates jutting out from the table, divert our attention. Dr. Atomic has still-life compositional qualities like these.
R eality has started to be understood as a type of writing—one that can be decoded [through photographs]… Photographs are not so much an instrument of memory as an invention of it, a replacement for it.”
— Susan Sontag, On Photography.
This type of still-life is sometimes called a ‘vanitas painting’, in which arrangements of fruit and flowers, or lavish banquet tables with fine silver and crystal, are accompanied by symbolic reminders of mortality. A skull, an hourglass or pocket watch, a candle burning down, a book with pages turning, serve as a moralizing message on how short life is. Look! The fruits and flowers themselves are starting to spoil and droop. Look! The boy comes to get a glass of milk from the nanny! Look! The bomb!
D r. Atomic came out very fluidly, and largely without my analyzing it [in the process of composing it]. [Don’t] make the mistake of walking through the kitchen to get to the restroom—and come back having lost your appetite. [Don’t] look in my kitchen here, but for the moment just enjoy what’s on the plate.”
— John Adams, in interview with Thomas May, FEB-2005, p. 233.
Interplay among the levels of experience that Adams devises for us is what creates tension and meaning in this opera. The collapsing of depth, foreshortening of events, telescoping of time by way of the festinating micro-marches that Oppy and Groves make together across the stage—these create new relationships; they don’t just reveal and characterize existing historical ones.
Some of the moral or ethical implication of Dr. Atomic is diminished by the libretto’s obsessing over trivial and self-absorbed dialogue of the scientists and military characters. But this, too, is a choice on Adams’s and Sellars’s part. Possibly their intent is to portray the Americans’ inhumanity and hubris even more brutally, by downplaying the characters’ attention to the destructive implications and casualties that the bomb will have. But the effect of this choice—minimizing the characters’ attention—also tends to reduce our own.
General Groves’s candy-bar eating and weight management issues—his recitative about the 200-calorie brownies and three pieces of chocolate cake—are maybe genuine historical artifacts, but their inclusion here is conspicuous for the vacuousness and/or sociopathy they imply.
Kitty Oppenheimer spends the majority of the second half of the opera on center stage, passed out in her chair from consuming too much scotch whiskey. This, too, may be historically accurate. But the choice to have one character inert and stationary—whether due to psychological strain or moral incontinence or some other cause—is a curious one for the composer and librettist to make.
T he photographer can identify with the circumstances. Choosing is the final, essential act of creativity. If, as Poincaré suggests, the subconscious brings up ideas in pairs or in crowds, then it is up to us to choose what makes sense to us. If, as he suggests, this bringing into consciousness is directed by an aesthetic force, the best one can do is not undo it but take it as it is... What I call imagination is simply that active link between intuition and rationality.”
— David Travis, p.77.
Dr. Atomic is a work that can hold special significance to people of a certain age, say, those who are today 55 years and older and who have a clear personal recollection of the milieu of the 1950s or of the 1940s. Adams and Sellars take imagery and texts from that period and make them more complex and multi-layered by injecting them into this latter-day composition. Although in many ways the historicism of the quoted texts and images makes them ‘stay the same’, the farther we go in this process the more different they become and the more intriguing the results are—and the more those results play to our imagination and compound the complexity. There’s a ‘fractal’ quality of memory that Adams evokes in us—and we’re led to recognize a mathematically recursive quality of our memory—led to recognize the inherently, unavoidably ‘revisionist’ nature of our human cognitive process. Our minds continually re-contextualize everything! We cannot help it!
V ertov is right. The task of cinema and of the camera is not to imitate the human eye, but to see and record what the human eye normally does not see. The cinema and photo-eye can show us things from unexpected viewpoints and in unusual configurations, and we should exploit this possibility.”
— Ossip Brik, in Wells, p. 90.
This opera is chock-full of implication—open-ended imagery that empowers the audience to enter into constructing individualized meanings. Adams is aiding and abetting curiosity and conjecture. This is not mere ‘optical’ fidelity—a claim to correctly transcribe visual appearances (‘It happened, and it looked this way.’). It’s emotional fidelity—accurate, in part, because we’re engaged by Adams in actively generating its truth. That said, this is not an opera for anyone incurious—anyone who’s unprepared to be engaged and unwilling to be actively implicated.
The sparseness of the set, its raising and lowering mountains-scrim and bomb and gantry/scaffolds, and the repetitiousness of the choreographed movements all present challenges to audience members who are expecting activity on-stage to have a purpose, advance the story, or make a point. In many ways, the point seems to be the utter lack of a point—the absurdity of the process of making the bomb, the impersonal and unstoppable momentum that the process has when it is underway, the existential horror that that zombie-like activity has.
Unexpectedly, the imagery in the Dr. Atomic production was reminiscent of the Pieter Ombregt XYZ photographs I had seen earlier in the day, at the Columbia College Chicago exhibit at the Water Tower on Michigan Ave.
Angular, inhuman geometry and architecture. Harsh, inhuman light bathing depersonalized human figures as morally impoverished objects, not subjects. Entering and exiting doors and apertures, to fulfill purposes unknown or no purpose at all.
Found Art’ can be the epitome of a consumptive, exploitative capitalistic political economy. But this opera is not ‘Found Art’. It’s not shameless appropriation and naked, direct presentation of historical texts set to music. Instead, it creates new connections, creates an aura—empowers us to find these connections, discover our own aura. The aura may be ugly and disheartening, though. The quiet recorded Japanese voices that percolate down on us from the balconies as we wait for the bomb test detonation in the final 5 minutes of Dr. Atomic are terrible reminders of how needless, how cruel, and how avoidable the deployment of these weapons was. There is no catharsis here. And it is difficult to applaud afterward. Dr. Atomic might be best done with instructions to the audience to exit the theater silently, to go home and meditate on how to make amends and how to be better human beings.
I have never attempted to squelch the kind of energies inherent in my music in order to avoid a catharsis or ‘crisis’ or climax. I don’t view my expressive world as teleological. Rather, I try to allow what’s latent in the material to flower naturally. I think a lot of being a good composer is like being a good gardener. You have to know when to wter something, to cultivate it, and also when something needs judicious pruning.”
— John Adams, in interview with Thomas May, FEB-2005, p. 28.
Adams is—in this opera and in other of his work—a specialist in creating quasi-historical scenic wonderment for the audience. It’s as though, say, he (re-)introduces the mid-Century concept of phosphorescence, as it was before the era of television and fluorescent lights—before the wide public experience of phosphors and phosphorescence had expunged the cultural remembrance of what ‘phosphorescence’ had been in the literary age that went before.
T he concept of revelation—one hears, one does not seek; one accepts, one does not ask who gives... Everything happens involuntarily but, as in a gale of a feeling of freedom... The involuntariness of image and metaphor is strangest of all: one no longer has any notion of what is an image or a metaphor... It actually seems as if the things themselves approached and offered themselves as metaphors.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
Adams’s detached, clinical observation—leads him to compose still-lives of these carefully selected and edited ‘found’ objects. His material and inspiration lead him to construct views through barn doors and beyond relay-racks filled with arrays of meters and glowing pilot-lights, to mountains and prairie grass and historical people outside. It is very much in the aesthetic realm between the novel and the film, as photographer Lewis Baltz once said. Very much like the objectification that happens in the Ombregt photographs.
Adams’s wife, Deborah O’Grady, is a photographer. I wonder whether she sees photographerly influences in his work, with regard to John’s compositions and compositional techniques. I wonder if harmonious ways of seeing are part of what brought them together.
Truth in photography may involve some degree of verisimilitude to the objects seen, but the primary reference shifts from object to subject. Truth now refers not to accurate representation of the objects but rather to accurate representation of the artist’s response or interpretation of the object. Truth now means fidelity to the subjective experience, of the artist and the viewer.”
— Jerry Thompson, p.22.
- Lyric Opera production of Dr. Atomic
- Earbox, John Adams’s website
- John Adams on MySpace
- Deborah O’Grady website
- Science, Morals, & Music. Podcast/Exploratorium, San Francisco Opera, 2005.
- Pieter Ombregt photography exhibition, Columbia College Chicago, City Gallery
- Pieter Ombregt XYZ project
- Adams J. Portrait and Concert of American Music. (Arthaus, 2003.)
- Adams R. Why People Photograph. Aperture, 2005.
- Barrett T. Criticizing Photographs. McGraw-Hill, 2005.
- Bird K, Sherwin M. American Prometheus. Atlantic, 2008.
- Coleman A. Light Readings. Univ New Mexico, 1998.
- LaGrange A. Basic Critical Theory for Photographers. Focal, 2005.
- May T. The John Adams Reader. Amadeus, 2006.
- Palmer T. Hail, Bop! A Portrait of John Adams. (Kultur, 2006.)
- Rian J. Lewis Baltz. Phaidon, 2001.
- Shore S. The Nature of Photographs. Phaidon, 2007.
- Szarkowski J, Friedlander L, Evans W, Klein W, Strand P. The Photographer's Eye. MoMA, 2007.
- Szarkowski J. Looking at Photographs. Bulfinch, 1999.
- Thompson J. Truth and Photography. Dee, 2003.
- Travis D. At the Edge of the Light: Thoughts on Photography and Photographers. Godine, 2003.
- Wells L, ed. The Photography Reader. Routledge, 2002.
- Woolcock P, et al. Adams: Death of Klinghoffer. (Philips, 2003.)
