John Adams- Doctor Atomic- Batter My Heart score

This is classified stuff from I don’t know where. “These are the sketchbooks, and here’s Peter Sellars’s various libretto drafts. There was virtually no order to the contents. “Let me go through to see if there’s anything personal in here,” Adams said as he opened one of the boxes. He had grabbed them from his storage unit in Emeryville the day before. He led me to his dining room, where several large boxes labeled “Doctor Atomic” rested on the sprawling table. He had spent the early part of that morning revising The Gospel According to the Other Mary (2012), a work whose premiere had taken place seven months prior, but one that required some re-writing for its next performance the following month. When I arrived for the first time at John Adams’s home in the hills of Berkeley, CA, the composer greeted me with a nervous smile and introduced me to his dog, Eloise. But in this restless space of revision, the best ideas evolve. The noise persists, the labor of writing and re-writing continues, the creative act remains unresolved. But just as often, the messy processes that precede the product deny perfect resolution. Once a draft is completed or a premiere carried out, the mind can rest, it seems. Even the physical labor of transcribing sketch after sketch can take a toll on the hand. There’s a flurry of pressure and risk, the thrill of the search, the understanding that success is uncertain.

For others, it’s the unknown, the chance to navigate unexplored terrain. For some, it’s the quiet of being alone with raw materials and shaping them into something to give back to a community. None of us is entirely sure what lures us to the creative act-or to studying it, for that matter.

John Adams- Doctor Atomic- Batter My Heart score