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Less than a week after the 60th anniversary of the dropping of the Atomic Bomb, John Adams and Peter Sellars gave a brief sneak preview of their new A-bomb-creation-themed opera Dr. Atomic to a group of journalists and other music industry professionals in Manhattan. (Perhaps appropriate despite the opera’s San Francisco premiere since the A-bomb grew out of the Manhattan Project.) The SF Opera’s musical administrator Kip Cranna and general director Pamela Rosenberg, who first initiated the project, were also on hand for the discussion at Avery Fisher Hall’s Helen Hull Room, which was filled to maximum capacity.

The opera, scheduled for a ten-performance run in San Francisco beginning October 1, 2005, followed by subsequent performances at the Lyric Opera of Chicago and De Nederlandse Opera, has been one of the most anticipated premieres of the 2005-06 concert season, and the sense of countdown was imminent. Rehearsals have only begun two days ago and not even John Adams has been able to attend them yet.

Adams’s third opera, which has been in the making for five years, is his first return to the medium 14 years after achieving worldwide notoriety with two provocative and now seminal works, Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer. According to Ms. Rosenberg, it took a bit of persuading to lure Adams, whom she described as “the greatest composer alive today,” back to the world of opera. But ultimately the saga of the bomb’s conflicted inventor J. Robert Oppenheimer, which Rosenberg proposed to Adams, proved too operatic to turn down.

Sellars described recently declassified government documents, incorporated into the libretto, which might fundamentally change everyone’s perception of this world-changing event. At one point during the presentation, Adams read a passage from a 1946 book about atomic weapons quickly taken out of circulation by the FBI, gleefully adding that he had used the text for a chorus in the opera.

What is perhaps most exciting about Dr. Atomic, however, is the music, which explores some unusual sonic terrain for the opera house.

“I always need some kind of guardian angel when I write a piece,” said Adams, who described how he was only able to tackle a project as emotionally charged as the 9/11 New York Philharmonic commission On the Transmigration of Souls by thinking of Charles Ives. For Dr. Atomic, Adams’s angel was Edgard Varèse, whom he described as the “original post-nuclear composer.” And Varèse’s unique soundworld of dense angular harmonies pervaded the MIDI-generated excerpt of the overture Adams shared with the audience.

Even more startling, however, is Adams’s use of musique concrète (although he reminded me afterwards that this technique had been in the musical vocabulary of his earliest work). Here, however, the technique resurfaces, albeit through digital sampling software rather than good old reel-to-reel cut and splice, in a remarkably authentic-sounding simulacrum of early electronic music experiments such as those by Varèse and composers of ’50s sci-fi movie scores. Adams, in fact, acknowledged that the scores of classic sci-fi films such as Them were also an important musical influence for this opera even though the narrative takes place in the 1940s. Adams said that he “wanted to honor the sensibilities of the ’50s” admitting, as someone born two years after the dropping of the bomb, that was when he was first conscious of these events as a child growing up during the Cold War.

In addition to these experiments there’s also plenty of Adams’s trademark energy as well as some traditional orchestral tone painting associated with opera. “I had more fun than Berlioz writing storm music,” he admitted with a smile.

Of course, opera, more than any other musical form, is the product of a multiplicity of creative voices as Sellars pointed out quite eloquently in his opening remarks. “It is always more than one person’s point of view and no one voice prevails.” As such, he likened it to democracy making this work as much a political statement about our own time as a reflection of events more than half a century ago. Sellars argued for the power of opera to present audiences with contradictory views.

The narrative’s metamorphosis from documentary history to the larger-than-life mythology of the operatic stage will probably be heightened by the San Francisco Opera’s decision to avoid finding look-alikes to see the roles of Oppenheimer and the other real-life characters featured in the story. In fact, Sellars went further in describing Dunya Ramicova’s costume designs, in which no two uniforms are the same for any of the military officers featured in the cast, and some of which look quite contemporary.

The events of our own time are certainly on the mind of Adams as well who pointed out that the atomic bomb was the first “weapon of mass destruction.”

A web site for Dr. Atomic features further information about the production as well as a few MIDI excerpts from the score.

Alyssa Timin Photo by Ross Hoffman

In the dead of Philadelphia’s summer, when even the haze is too lazy to lift, there’s at least one venue still cranking out cool concerts every Friday afternoon. The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s popular Art After 5 series hosts local jazz artists all summer long, this week with pianist Mark Kramer, lauded by Nate Chinen as “an unheralded Philly jazz institution,” and Eddie Gomez, longtime bassist for the Bill Evans Trio.

Kramer grew up taking violin lessons from members of the Philadelphia Orchestra, transitioned to bass and saxophone, then eventually settled on jazz piano. All About Jazz credits jam sessions at Kramer’s apartment on Ridge Avenue as the locus of “an unwritten portion of jazz history.” And while Kramer served as jazz director at Ye Olde Temperance House in the Bucks County suburbs—winning Philadelphia Magazine‘s “Best of Philly” Jazz Award in 1999—Kramer was simultaneously holding it down as the head of psychopharmacology at Merck Research Laboratories. Around 2001, Kramer moved on from both gigs and began playing more in Center City Philadelphia, as well as “recording a lot of music” with Gomez, as Gomez himself put it.

The Art After 5 performances are held in the museum’s Great Stair Hall—early birds get seats at cafe-style tables and can order dinner and drinks. Latecomers perch on the wide, cool stone of the Stair, which rises amphitheater-style from the stage and affords an excellent opportunity for people-watching as curious museum-goers wander into the hall. Indeed, these concerts are ideal for the relaxed Friday evening when you’re looking for great live performance but don’t mind the low effervescence of ambient conversation. On the “portico,” the entrance facing the famous Rocky steps, and, as advertised, the best view of downtown Philadelphia, your first martini is a dollar off. I watched a wedding party sweat through some photos while their stretch Hummer limousine waited to be on its way. Another shoot was occupying a nearby bench, and some kids, outsmarting us all, were splashing around in the courtyard fountain.

Back inside, Kramer and Gomez seemed pleased to entertain the crowd, were chatty themselves, and offered context for most of their songs. Their duets were lively and expressive, Gomez’s strings slapping eagerly while Kramer’s touch leaned toward the emotional. To me, the sound was somehow naked, vulnerable in the echoing hall, despite the substantial audience. And though Gomez gave an amiable warning to crowd about a piece being “kind of challenging,” the duets retained an appropriate lightness, floating up among the branches of the Calder above, into the wings of the museum. I followed it back past the stained glass windows and the Indian temple, then lost track of time at the Japanese tea house.

Julia Werntz Photo by Michele Macrakis

First, the good news for composers and friends of contemporary music: the Brandeis University graduate program in composition and theory is alive and well after surviving a proposal for its elimination announced last year. The program, created by composer Irving Fine at the University’s inception in 1948, has contributed the following figures to the new music world: graduates Elaine Barkin, Sheila Silver, Peter Child, Ross Bauer, Alvin Lucier, Peter Lieberson, Steven Mackey, Marjorie Merryman, and Scott Wheeler, to name a few, and now the program will continue to contribute. Its faculty has included Irving Fine, Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Berger, Seymour Shifrin, Alvin Lucier, Harold Shapero, Yehudi Wyner, and, currently, Martin Boykan, Eric Chasalow, and David Rakowski, and now that lineage will continue as well.

Now, the bad news: small groups of composers poring over the details of this art form evidently seem as obscure and puzzling to the rest of the population as ever, and this can affect “life-or-death” choices at some universities, even at liberal arts schools such as Brandeis. And so, having made my complaint here in NewMusicBox in mid-May about the academic ambience of the new music scene here in Boston, it’s time to speak out in defense of the university musician: without university support, American contemporary music would lose its primary, nurturing home.

In October of 2004, Brandeis Dean of Arts and Sciences (and economist) Adam Jaffe announced his proposal to eliminate the graduate program in composition and theory—along with undergraduate linguistics and ancient Greek—as part of a plan to reallocate funds within the School of Arts and Sciences. In his proposal, Jaffe cited the need at Brandeis to “globalize and diversify our curriculum and faculty,” a sentiment closely tied to the University’s mission to address issues of social justice. Although sympathies elsewhere in the administration fell in favor of the music department, whose record for excellence is widely known, Jaffe had great support on this point. In the end, the graduate composition and theory program was saved—though admissions will be trimmed down somewhat—and in exchange, the dean and the administration won a promise from the music department to add more undergraduate courses on topics in world music and popular music, even to add a “cultural studies” track to the undergraduate music major.

Composer Eric Chasalow, who was chair of the music department until this past year, when he went on sabbatical, sees in all this a danger that some American universities are adopting a sort of “cultural tourism” in the name of diversity, at the expense of art music. He takes care to distinguish this sort of requisite, lip-service-paying survey course from genuine, in-depth ethnomusicology of the sort that some universities offer.

My own take would be this: if today’s college students graduate with even a superficial knowledge of music from other cultures, this will certainly enhance their understanding of the world, and for the better. The music majors among them will inhabit a richer musical world, as well. (I can attest to this based on my own experience taking non-Western music courses as an undergraduate at the New England Conservatory.) Classroom study of American popular music also may help students to understand themselves better, for what it’s worth.

On the other hand, if schools choose to replace in-depth training in the craft of musical composition and analysis with these sorts of undergraduate survey courses, which are of a less musical, more sociological or anthropological nature, as Chasalow suggests they are doing, then where will future generations of composers learn to compose? And where will they learn to teach?

New music is in big trouble as long most of the world sees it as an unnecessary and obsolete indulgence. In the end, I return to the same theme I wrote about in May: the profession suffers from its lack of connection to the general population. The burden is on us, the practitioners—not to change the music we are writing (as some would argue), but to work to make the field as a whole more relevant to the rest of society.