Studies On The Compositional Techniques Of John Adams's Orchestra

John Adams is one of the most frequently performed contemporary music in American. He is a world-famous composer through political events as the theme. In his works, whether opera or instruments reflect minimalism musical style. However, he composed mostly in accordance with his "intuition", and his music revealed the profound lyricism and contained rich cultural theme. Among the genres of his works, orchestra is a genre reflecting mostly the changing process of composer's techniques from inheriting minimalism musical style to form and develop post-minimalism musical style.The dissertation selected seven orchestral works of composer as research subjects to accurately reflect the style changes of Adams's composition, and divided into first, middle and final three sections, a total of nine chapters to analyze comprehensively and in-depth his compositional techniques on inheriting minimalism, returning to traditional, and integrating a variety of techniques, and summarized the composer's achievements in techniques of musical language inheriting and developing minimalism.The first section consists of four chapters, studied Adams how to apply four classical and marked compositional techniques of minimalism, "Static Harmony", "Pattern Repetition", "Phase Shifting" and "Additive Process" which created respectively by American Composer La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. At the same time, the section also summarized Adams's personality when he applied four minimalism techniques, and revealed composer' writing characteristics in his orchestral works to inherit and develop minimalism.The middle section also consists of four chapters. Respectively, it analyzed deeply the characteristics of orchestral techniques from formal structure, pitch organization, polyphony technique and orchestration so on. Among them, in addition to the formal structure analyzed the formal structures of the orchestral works and its developments, embodied the unique aspects of Adams's individual thinking of the structure, that is the significance of symbolic means for "Tape Loops", "Electric Gates" and "Dovetailing Structure" to the division of musical structure. The pitch organization studied mostly the characteristics of diatonic systems, scales and unfunctional chord progression in the Slonimsky's Thesaurus of scales and melodic pattern that applied in his orchestral works. Polyphony technique analyzed mostly its rhythm counterpoint that polyrhythm constituted, imitation, linear counterpoint and characteristics that its combine with minimalism music style. The orchestration studied prominently the case of composer's orchestra, discussed the individuation of timbre processing and layout in composition, and investigated composer used synthesizer as an important instrument. Thus the section demonstrated in four aspects composer's creative features of the eclecticism combining the minimalist musical style with traditional music styles.Using one chapter, the final section analyzed the compositional techniques of the orchestral work On the Transmigration of Souls created elaborately to commemorate the victims among the "9.11 terrorist attacks" after into the twenty-first century. Reflects the creative concept that composer integrated highly compositional technique of the minimalism and other modern techniques of the twentieth century.