A great profile of John Adams and his music on BBC4 on 11 March 2013.
The profile was accompanied with very effective visuals.
Adams started composing in the days of Serial Music, moves to minimalist but neither satisfies and he gets back to tonal music but he is a fan of Beethoven and it shows as does his American background. The music is superb (post) modern music.
He reminds of a very favourite artist of mine, Paul Nash, who painted in the first half of the 20th century. He was a landscape painter from the start but managed to go through a phase of surrealism and come out having synthesised surrealism into landscape painting – he was a war artist in both WW1 and WW2
The reminder is helped by the visuals to the TV programme and the paintings I know well of Paul Nash
Below for Harmonium by Adams and We are building a New World from WW1 and Nash
And Transmutation of Souls, commissioned as a requiem for 9/11 by Adams and Mansions of the Dead by Nash
Mike Vickers' Blog 
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