Music for Meditation - John Adams

By Mark George, President and CEO

A weekly recommendation of music for meditation. Find a comfortable chair or lie down, turn on a smart speaker or put in earbuds, and just listen.

My recommendation this week is a solo piano piece by composer John Adams. The work is entitled China Gates and the performance is approximately 4’ 30” in length. Adams wrote China Gates in 1977 and it was his first composition in what can described as a “minimalist” style. The styles is characterized by repetition of a limited set of musical materials, in this case four musical modes. Modes are like scales, but with a different set of half-steps and whole-steps for each one. Four modes are used in China Gates, mixolydian and aeolian, which resemble the major and minor scales we know best in Western music; and lydian and locrian, which sound slightly exotic. The latter modes may be related to the China part of the title. The Gates refer to a phenomenon in digital electronics, where triggers (or gates) allow space for a new signal to enter a program.

In the music, a process unfolds whereby individual notes in the modes are carefully added and subtracted over time. In the composer’s words, the piece, “…oscillates between two modal worlds, only it does so with extreme delicacy. It strikes me now as a piece calling for real attention to detail of dark, light, and the shadows that exist between them.”
China Gates was inspired by falling rain around the composer’s Northern California home and its effect is gentle and hypnotizing.

China Gates (1977)...............................John Adams (b. 1947)  (4'34")
Nicolas Hodges, piano

Composer, conductor, and creative thinker – John Adams occupies a unique position in the world of American music. His works, both operatic and symphonic, stand out amoung contemporary classical compositions for their depth of expression, brilliance of sound, and the profoundly humanist nature of their themes. Over the past 30 years, Adams’s music has played a decisive role in turning the tide of contemporary musical aesthetics away from academic modernism and toward a more expansive, expressive language, entirely characteristic of his New World surroundings.

Born in London, Nicolas Hodges is a professor at the Musikhochschule Stuttgart, Hodges approaches the works of Classical, Romantic, 20th century and contemporary composers with the same questing spirit, leading the Guardian to comment that: “Hodges' recitals always boldly go where few other pianists dare ...”