Rumination Haj Poem by gershon hepner

Caught in an expressive cul-de-sac,
all imagery goes down the tube
iconoclastically, with lack
of space that curves when artists cube,
on a rumination haj,
searching an interior Mecca
thoughts collected as collage,
minimally like a Necker.


David Hadjou reviews John Adams’s Hallelujah Junction (“Music Lessons: A memoir by the composer John Adams is a collage of memory criticism, theory and ruminations on creativity, ” NYT Book Review, October 26,2008) :
Commonly mistaken for a minimalist, Adams has employed the minimalist aesthetic primarily as a point of departure. He recognized fairly early that “minimalism as a governing aesthetic could and would rapidly exhaust itself, ” as he writes here. “Like Cubism in painting, it was a radically new idea, but its reductive worldview would soon leave its practitioners caught in an expressive cul-de-sac.” Adams’s importance as a composer is rooted not so much in his having done anything new, but, rather, in his having done very well the things he has done: operas (“Nixon in China” and “The Death of Klinghoffer, ” both staged by Peter Sellars) , symphonic choral works (“On the Transmigration of Souls, ” an elegy to the victims of the Sept.11 attacks, which won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2003) , piano pieces and a dozen or so other major compositions of various kinds. His music is minimal in the sense that Adams employs as few materials as necessary, rather than as few as possible, though he strives for and tends to achieve a maximalism of effect. With “Hallelujah Junction, ” Adams has put in prose an argument against the ideology of aesthetic continuum, a case that his music has always articulated eloquently by example. “That particular continuum I found ridiculously exclusive, being founded on a kind of Darwinian view of stylistic evolution, ” he argues. If a composition “didn’t in some way advance the evolution of the language, yielding progress either by a technological innovation or in the increasing complexity of the discourse, it was not even worth discussing.” Who cares? John Adams. And, so, now do we.


10/26/08