3/15/2024 0 Comments Doctor atomic batter my heart poem![]() ![]() I think the topic ought to be Robert Oppenheimer and the Los Alamos story.” About 1999 or so, she came to me, she had just taken the job, and she said, “I want to commission an American ‘Faust.’ You’re the composer, there’s no doubt in my mind. I was drawn to this topic-actually, it was a suggestion by a woman named Pamela Rosenberg, who is the General Director of the San Francisco Opera. In a sense, that’s a description of my job. I don’t think people, when they watch television or when they go to the movies, are quite aware of just how subversive and how incredibly precise on an emotional level music is, and how it really dictates the way we feel about something. You can make it seem ironic, you can make it seem maudlin, you can make it seem heroic, you can make it seem romantic, all by the choice of the tones that the composer puts to it. An example of that is that you can take a scene, let’s say a scene in a movie, and you can completely color the emotional and psychological content of that scene by the use of music. ![]() I realize this is a rather unique idea: a composer, a person who deals in sound, and essentially, I think of my craft as one of feeling-that music, above and beyond everything else, is the art of feeling. People who are deep thinkers. But at the same time, very broad thinkers. It’s particularly a special honor to be amongst so many of these brilliant minds who-from what we’ve heard this morning-always see the bigger picture, are not the kind of “tunnel vision” that has become kind of a cliché in our society. ![]() I’m a performer and a conductor, and podiums are usually something you stand on, so I’m very restless on a stage. ![]() John Adams: Thank you very much, thank you. I’d like to invite John to come and get wired up and begin. We are absolutely thrilled to have him here, as an artist who has grappled with the deeper meanings and expressed them most dramatically in music and in theater in this opera. Cindy Kelly: The next speaker is John Adams, who is a composer, as you all know, and composed most recently an opera about the Manhattan Project, “Doctor Atomic,” which opened in San Francisco last October. ![]()
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