John Adam's Concerto Century Rolls

The player piano, Fats Weller, Gershwin, Zes Confrey, Ravel, and Debussy influence the maestro.

Jul 13, 2006

Capturing the spirit of a post-industrial world, John Adams turned to the player-piano for inspiration in this concerto commissioned by pianist Emanuel Ax.

When Emanuel Ax commissioned John Adams to write him a concerto, the pianist probably didn't realize that the composer would draw his inspiration from a mechanical keyboard performer: the player-piano.

In the liner notes for Century Rolls, John Adams relates how, in listening to recordings from the 1920s, he was struck by the leveling effect of the player-piano mechanism: no matter what the genre of music happened to be, the player-piano gave everything the same tinny quality of sound and a rhythmic brightness.

John Adams incorporated these elements into his concerto for piano and orchestra, and like the player piano itself, respected no barriers of genre when drawing upon musical influences: the sounds of Fats Weller, Gershwin, Zes Confrey, Ravel, and Debussy all play a role in Adams' music.

This recording, featuring Emanuel Ax on the piano and Christoph von Dohnányi conducting the Cleveland Orchestra, captures the mechanical sound John Adams sought to imitate through Ax's percussive touch on the piano.

The first movement rushes relentlessly onwards, slowing only for "Manny's Gym," the second movement, a chordal gymnopédie that utilizes the piano's upper registers. The third movement, "Hail Bop," was titled when John Adams' misheard the name of the comet that appeared at the time that he was wrapping up work on the concerto, and resumes the first moment's frantic energy.

Included on the album are two more compositions performed by the Hallé Orchestra, conducted by Kent Nagano. Lollapalooza's rhythmic structure loosely follows the cadence of the word itself. Although Lollapalooza is also the name of a grunge music festival started in the 1990s, John Adams' choice of the title appears to have more to do with the vague meaning of the word rather than to any connection to grunge.

The last track, Slonimsky's Earbox, is named for Russian Nicholas Slonimsky, a man with a photographic memory whose book on scales and modes influenced Adams' own sound.

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