»Tonal harmony is like a natural force«

Composer John Adams, born in 1947, is one of the most frequently performed and best-known composers of our time. He achieved international recognition with his early string septet Shaker Loops (1978) and his later opera Nixon in China (1987), which associated him with American minimal music. However, this term can no longer be meaningfully applied to his music from the mid-1980s onwards. In his orchestral works Harmonium and Grand Pianola Music, written at the beginning of the 1980s, Adams began to distance himself from minimal music. The growing distance to his former role models Steve Reich and Terry Riley prompted him to make the later famous remark that he felt like a minimalist bored with minimalism. The orchestral work Harmonielehre, composed in 1985, is particularly revealing in this context. In this composition, Adams refers to Arnold Schönberg's music theory treatise of the same name. The analysis of this work, which is significant for Adams' compositional development, examines quotations from individual compositions of the fin de siècle, establishes the references to Schönberg's music theory writing and discusses harmonic rhythm as a compositional formal principle. The study, which primarily examines the chordal harmonic structure, shows that John Adams' music is much closer to the European major-minor tonal tradition than to American minimal music. In conjunction with his statements from the interview in the appendix, the theory is substantiated that this work can be regarded as a prototype of musical postmodernism.

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