Spotlight: Voices from America - John Adams, Philip Glass, Jennifer Higdon, Julia Wolfe

American classical music found its voice in the 20th century. But it was the generation of composers born in the middle of the century who were to re-define the vast continent’s musical accent by venturing off in startling new directions towards previously uncharted territory.

Threaded through National Symphony Orchestra Ireland’s season are four composers whose work changed the course and character of American music. 

Once contemporary music’s enfant terrible, Philip Glass is now a hugely influential elder statesman. Demurring from his anointing as ‘the Godfather of minimalism’, he insists, instead, he is a composer of ‘music with repetitive structures’.

Across a prolific output – 15 operas, 14 symphonies, 12 concertos, numerous film scores, chamber and solo works – Glass has become that rarest of composers: one whose music is instantly recognisable as belonging only to him.

Developed by the orchestra and Dennis Russell Davies – one of the composer’s longest and surely most articulate champions, having premiered many of his symphonies and much else besides – two Philip Glass Explored concerts include six Irish premieres.

They showcase his astonishing range and ear-catching immediacy, from his first work for full symphony orchestra, The Light, and excerpts from the operas, Akhnaten and The Voyage, to the remarkable fusion of minimalism and African chant in the Ifè Songs composed for Angélique Kidjo, and the hypnotic Mishima Piano Concerto spun from his earlier film score.

John Adams brought minimalism into the mainstream, threading it with American folk idioms and long-established classical traditions to boldly fuse old and new. His headline-grabbing operas addressed politics with a directness few other composers have dared, as did On the Transmigration of Souls, his powerful Pulitzer Prize-winning tribute to victims of the 9/11 atrocities for orchestra and chorus.

Adams’ music rewards even as it challenges; music for him can be fun as well as serious, those opposites illustrated by the exhilarating (and accelerating) Short Ride in a Fast Machine and his mesmerising choral symphony Harmonium.

More recent generations have seen female composers coming to the fore with striking contributions of their own. Fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner and child of the Sixties, Julia Wolfe came to prominence as co-founder of the influential New York-based Bang on a Can collective. Her issue-led music powerfully collides ‘high’ and ‘low’ art in a simmering compound of driving rock ’n’ roll and lyrical folk vernacular deftly contained within classical structures.

The Irish premiere of Pretty finds Wolfe at her most ferocious in a bracing orchestral display she describes as ‘a raucous celebration – embracing the grit of fiddling, the relentlessness of work rhythms, and inspired by the distortion and reverberation of rock and roll’.

Jennifer Higdon joined the elite cadre of Pulitzer Prize winners with her Violin Concerto in 2008. The influence of the open landscapes and folk melodies of her Tennessee childhood are everywhere to be found in her emotion-led music. A glowing reflection on love and loss, blue cathedral (another Irish premiere) is unabashedly anchored in the heart that beats and the soul that breathes within the very best of contemporary American music.