498 PART 4 | SINCE WORLD WAR II
in the tape studio and created music, both electronic and for live instruments, in
a minimalist style infl uenced by Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. By the
1980s he had moved on to a style that combined minimalism’s rhythmic energ y,
diatonic tonality, and love of repetition with a more varied sound palette drawn
from romantic orchestral music, big-band jazz, rock, and modernist music—what
may be called a postminimalist style.
Adams’s most signifi cant work of the 1980s is his opera Nixon in China, pre-
miered by the Houston Grand Opera in 1987. With a libretto by Alice Goodman
inspired by President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to Beijing in 1972, Nixon in
China brought minimalism into the musical mainstream, reaching a far wider
audience than even Glass’s successful Einstein on the Beach of the preceding
decade. The opera’s music ranges in style from the overt minimalism of its open-
ing to the foxtrot-inspired moment when First Lady Pat Nixon recalls her youth,
and to the highly eclectic pastiche that accompanies a parody of a communist
Chinese revolutionary ballet. Derided by some critics as a sensational attention-
getter that would have no lasting value, Nixon in China has been revived by sev-
eral opera companies worldwide and seems to be taking its place in the standard
operatic repertoire.
Some of the most compelling postmodernist music of the 1980s was created
in the context of performance art, which grew out of the “happenings” staged in
the 1960s by artists inspired by John Cage, in which groups of performers would
engage in seemingly irrational behavior that broke down the barrier between
performers and audience. Pioneering performance artists include Pauline
Oliveros, the dancer-fi lmmaker-composer Meredith Monk, and the multimedia
artist Laurie Anderson.
A composer entirely outside the academic music world, Laurie Anderson
came from a background in the visual arts to become an important perfor-
mance artist, combining visual images, music, movement, and words to create
an all-encompassing aesthetic experience. Anderson’s fi rst major compositionNixon in Chinaperformance artLaurie AndersonK Richard Nixon ( James
Maddalena) and Pat Nixon
( Janis Kelly) descend from
Air Force One in the English
National Opera’s 2006
production of John Adams’s
19 8 7 o p e r a Nixon in China.172028_20_495-513_r3_sd.indd 498 23/01/13 11:14 AM