ROLL OF THE CENTURY.

Byline: Rob Lowman Entertainment Editor

Perhaps the conversation was a timely interruption from his creative ice fishing. Composer John Adams was just starting a new piece and having the usual horror.

``I'm having the blank-page syndrome,'' says Adams, ``where I notice that I'm walking around the house doing the things I shouldn't be rather than sitting down working.''

Considering that Adams, who lives in the Bay Area, has completed three major - and widely hailed - pieces in the past three years, a lull in the creative process might be understandable. The most recent of these, ``El Nino,'' Adam's celebration of the Nativity and a collaboration with Peter Sellars, was unveiled in San Francisco in January. The multimedia work, which includes singers, dancers and a silent film, was described in the New York Times review as bearing ``so many gifts that the senses stagger under the load.''

The line is a double-edge sword; the reviewer was enthusiastic about the work but also seems somewhat overwhelmed by the scope of ``El Nino,'' urging audiences to see it twice - once to take in the spectacle, once to take in Adams' music.

Sounding somewhat dubious about the review, the 53-year-old Adams ultimately concedes that a recommendation that you go see a piece twice is ``good news.'' Certainly, Adams has known the slings and arrows of critics during his career, but in recent years his reputation has grown to the point that many consider him America's leading composer.

Still, Adams is realistic about what this means. When orchestras invite him for a performance, he says, ``It's not going to be a wild, over-the-top box office like if Pavarotti or Yo Yo Ma were coming.''

Nevertheless, he was hearten by the recent concert success of ``El Nino.'' ``You absolutely couldn't find a ticket - it was completely sold out. But that's something quite new. I'm not used to that.''

All this, of course, begs the question of what does Adams' music sound like if you hadn't heard it? He's been called a second-generation minimalist, even a neo-romantic (a label that annoys him even more). A recent New Yorker article by music critic Alex Ross perhaps captures the composer's style best. Ross compared Adams' music to Highway 1, the road that travels up the California coast. ``It's a cut-up paradise, a sequence of familiar elements arranged in unfamiliar ways. A gaudy Hollywood fanfare gives way to a trancelike sequence of shifting beats; billowing clouds of Wagerian harmony are dispensed by a quartet of saxophones. Adams is not the only composer who has combined a classical education with a pop sensibility, but he is the one who's made it stick.''

And while Adams, who will be conducting the L.A. Philharmonic tonight in a program of his own works, is at the top of his game, he does sound an ominous note or two about the future of the medium he is working in.

``First of all, my friends hate it when I say this because they think it's disingenuous of me, but I really think that I'm composing orchestra music at the end of the tradition of that art form,'' says Adams.

Adams takes his time when he speaks, halting to choose the right word or phrase, so you know he means what he says. He hopes he's wrong, but explains his reasoning.

``It seems that most of the composers in the Western world that I know of my age or younger - those who have really commanding imaginations, those who are doing truly original work - are not writing for the orchestra. I think that is a major symptom of a massive sea change,'' he says.

Before you can ask it, Adams then answers the next question, ``What about John Adams?''

``I grew up as a child of the orchestra,'' says Adams, who was raised in New Hampshire before attending Harvard. ``I loved orchestra music as a little boy. I loved LP records all through my childhood. I started playing in an orchestra, and I started conducting. So it's largely the way I experienced music. But I think that for most young composers it's not the interesting medium.''

Adams makes a number of references to his youth during the conversation. When asked if he did much research for one of the pieces being performed tonight, ``The Nixon Tapes,'' scenes from his 1987 opera ``Nixon in China,'' Adams laughs, ``I didn't have to,'' describing himself as an ``old Democrat.'' ``My whole life was surrounded by Richard Nixon. When I was a kid, he was vice president during the Cold War and Eisenhower years. When I was in college, he was elected president. When I graduated from college, he was trying to draft me and send me to Vietnam.''

It was Sellars who brought the idea of ``Nixon in China'' to Adams, who enjoys the intellectual challenges that such pieces bring.

``I love doing all these theater pieces because I think I work really well in large forms,'' he says. ``I don't know exactly why that is. Perhaps my early roots as a minimalist - minimalism seemed to be a style of music that was best suited to larger forms. My mother was a dramatic person in real life and she was also a an actress and a singer and did musical comedy, so I think I picked up a flare for theatrical composing from her.''

While the idea of ``Nixon in China'' might be dismissed as chic or campy or in any number of other ways, you can't dismiss Adams' full-blooded music, which travels that dual road of the familiar and the unfamiliar.

Adams says he got the signature sound for Nixon from something he was familiar with - white big-band music. ``That was pretty easy for me because my grandfather owned a dance hall in New Hampshire and I use to hear all those big bands - Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey.''

Adams says he is often asked if the late former president ever saw the opera, but says he doesn't really care. ``My Nixon bears as much resemblance to the real Nixon as Shakespeare's Julius Caesar did to the real Julius Caesar. You know that he's a presidential everyman rather than a studiously faithful depiction of the real person''

The composer, however, suspects that Nixon may have seen the opera when it was performed on PBS; the former president's one-time lawyer Leonard Garment, a fan of Adams' music, once told him that ``Nixon sees everything.''

When the conversation turns to ``Century Rolls,'' the other work being performed tonight, Adams thoughts return to the ``blank-page syndrome'' and growing up. He says he now finds himself in the same state he was in when he was commissioned by Emanuel Ax to compose a concerto.

When it came time to write it, he says, he didn't have any ideas and thought, ``This is a really stupid thing to do.''

Finding inspiration for writing is ``like ice fishing,'' Adams says. ``Something we used to do in New Hampshire when I was growing up. You go out and drill a hole in the ice and drop a line and you just sit there freezing cold, shivering, hoping suddenly this line will go taut.''

Eventually, someone sent him a CD of composers playing their own works on piano rolls and he was off. ``It was just a little intuition, and that's all you need to get a piece going. And that's often the way it is with me.''

Adam says that if you listen to piano roll music you'll notice that it has a funny kind of quality to it that he's convinced is a result of the technology; he used that as a whimsical starting point for composing ``Century Rolls,'' which was recently released on Nonesuch Records. Adams has also just recorded ``El Nino,'' which will be out on Nonesuch in the fall.

In the meantime, it's back to ice fishing. While Adams may be pessimistic about the future of orchestral music, he likely has many compositions ahead. For the moment though, he is pleased to be called an important composer without being placed into a stylistic niche.

``I think that's important not just for me but as an acknowledgment of what's happened to classical composers in the last 10 or 15 years,'' says Adams. ``I think we're in a kind of post-style period now, which is kind of exciting because it means composers are trying to transcend a sort of modernist approach of spending their whole lives refining a very, very limited, rigid language, and (who) are attempting to do a more broadly embracing humanist statement in the way that the really great composers like J.S. Bach or Mahler or Beethoven attempted to do.''

JOHN ADAMS

What: The composer conducts the L.A. Philharmonic in a program of his own works - ``Century Rolls'' with pianist Emanuel Ax and ``The Nixon Tapes,'' scenes from the opera ``Nixon in China'' with James Maddalena, Susan Narucki, William Sharp and the L.A. Master Chorale.

Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles.

When: 8 tonight and Saturday night, 2:30 p.m Sunday

Tickets: $10 to $70. Call [phone].

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Photo:

`It seems that most of the composers in the Western world that I know of my age or younger - those who have really commanding imaginations, those who are doing truly original work - are not writing for the orchestra.'

- Composer John Adams