John Adams, composer: Part I

John Adams

Every so often music is written that is so powerful it makes your scalp tingle and your hair stand on end. Sometimes total body. Maybe it’s just my scalp, my body. I don’t know. I’d like to know if it happens to others.

Many musical pieces bring tears, but there is something special, thrilling, about the scalp tingling. Somewhat different than the music that elicits tears, such as the Adagietto in Mahler’s 5^th Symphony (search adagietto on youtube), or Barber’s Adagio for Strings, or several operatic duets I could name, or Joe Cocker’s You Are So Beautiful. 

Very few pieces do the scalp tingle thing. A full body cringe of pleasure is close to the scalp tingling, but slightly different, more cerebral.  In jazz, several tunes by Weather Report make me cringe; a high-register attack by Wayne Shorter on his soprano; a high piercing note by Miles Davis in Right Off from the Jack Johnson album, or the long tones in Fast Track from We Want Miles. Pleasure cringes for sure, but not the eerie magical scalp tingle.

For me recently, renowned composer John Adams’s minimalistic piece from the 1980s called Shaker Loops (sadly I only recently discovered the piece) is the one with the most precise effect. It consistently happens during the third movement, about twenty-two minutes in, all strings rising in tension and tempo until a chord is struck repeatedly by all the players, slow at first and then faster and faster repetitions that approach a solid chord, then bang! onto a new chord more powerful than the first, again slow at first and accelerating to a final new chord, more complex and powerful than the prior two, followed by a fade, and the tingling stops.

I would like to know if John Adams ever gets tingling with music, or if those chords do the same thing to him. Or anyone else. It’s not the notes per se. One note or chord identical to the one in Shaker Loops wouldn’t do it. It’s the composition, the build up, the intensity. To be able to experience that neurological response, the tingling, the emotion that causes it, is a privilege. Like being in love, it is one of a limited number of experiences that give the most intense meaning to life. Thank you, John Adams. 

May 6, 2015

https://www.jameschanningshaw.com