Composer John Adams embraces the new, blending synthesizers and samplers into his work, and tackling modern themes such as international terrorism. But he's not populist, and he's not political, he tells Michael Dervan

OHN Adams, who turns 60 the day after Valentine's Day, is in many ways the ideal composer. He's successful and he's controversial. There probably isn't an orchestra of note that hasn't played his music. Yet his opera The Death of Klinghoffer seeks for an even-handed balance on its subject matter - terrorism - that still makes many people hot under the collar. He embraces the new, using computers to compose, blending synthesizers and samplers into the symphony orchestra, yet he's conservative enough to write out the final drafts of his orchestral scores with pencil and paper, a hugely laborious undertaking.

He's the man who has most successfully steered minimalism towards the musical mainstream. He's articulate, informed, open, an ambassador for classical music (that's the term he uses, "because we know what we're talking about") that the wider world relates to with ease.

It wasn't always so. Back in the 1970s he was a lot wilder. "I consider my first 'keeper', my Opus 1, to be a piano piece, Phrygian Gates [ 1977], which is also my most consciously minimalist piece. But it's a mature work, it's an original work, and I enjoy hearing it. Anything I wrote before then I consider the product of someone still struggling to find his voice. I had all kinds of crazy pieces that I made during the 1970s, some of which were live electronics. I had a piece called Strident Bands, which was a graphic score that was to be played by three soprano saxophones playing into microphones and being just hideously amplified, Metallica strength. That sort of thing."

Even today, however, he doesn't see himself as writing for the proverbial man in the street. "I'm writing for an audience of people who share my interests, who share my tastes, who know the canon of Western classical music but who also listen to jazz and some pop music - good pop music - who listen to ethnic music from India, the Far East, the Middle East, South America, people who read novels.

"If you're going to listen to my operas you need to be literate, you need to be able to appreciate poetry in depth, and it probably helps if you read the news, if you're in touch with what's going on in the world at the moment, and if you're particularly attuned to what I call archetypes in our contemporary life. Today, the obvious archetypes are terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, and also things like politics and the struggle between the haves and the have-nots.

"I don't write for an unknown audience; I write for an audience that's basically a double of myself. And I think most composers do. We talk about academic composers who have an extremely personal and largely inaccessible language. They're writing for composers who share their interests. I think that's a wonderful thing, in a way, that you're not just casting a line out into the pool without knowing where the trout are."

In his youth he had a flirtation with the ideas of John Cage, the man who notoriously gave the 20th-century the "silent" piece, 4'33".

"But Cagean avant-gardism in the end didn't satisfy me, because I felt there was something very much lacking in communicative warmth about it.

"One could be entertained, enlightened, educated, but ultimately, for all its profession of equanimity, I found Cage's way of making art profoundly didactic. It ultimately was always about teaching a lesson. Maybe that lesson had to do with Zen openness to the world. But ultimately it was very pedantic. I responded to music that had great communicative force to it, whether it was a great jazz composer like Ellington or Coltrane or Miles Davis, or whether it was masters of Indian sitar or Bach or Stravinsky or Mahler."

The high European avant-garde he rejected because he felt it to be "very forbidding and just a continuation of a very grim view of the future of music". He distances himself from minimalism, too. "What was interesting about minimalism is that it was a profoundly shocking departure from what was au courant at the time. It was so refreshing, because those composers just completely turned their backs on these very prestigious movements, the Schoenbergian legacy or whatever. But in retrospect these early pieces by Phil Glass, like Music with Changing Parts, or Music in 12 Parts, that follow their patterns through to the bitter end, or even much more accessible works, user-friendly works like Reich's Drumming, ultimately if you look at them, they really were an extension of the modernist aesthetic, in the sense that they were about themselves, about their construction, and the main event was watching a process unfold.

"I've always seen myself more like a romantic composer, like Schumann or Tchaikovsky or Wagner. I believe that the composer should have an immense arsenal of technique, a deep affinity for harmony, and be able to do everything. But the act of composing itself should be spontaneous. When you compose you compose in an almost automatic writing mode, the music comes out of you and your technique is there to allow it to happen.

"But the creative act isn't about the technique. I find that boring. But I realise that's the essence of modernism. For me what's important is using music to express and to communicate. That is one of the reasons why I was so severely criticised, and to this day continue to be criticised, by people who feel that there's something suspect or slightly cheap about my work because it seems so ready to want to communicate. I find that strangely ironic, that we've come to a point in the history of Western art music where accessibility or communication has become a controversial issue."

His aspiration is that listeners will see in his works "a reflection of an artist who is living very much in his time and absorbing psychological and historical currents and transforming them into art." Yet in spite of the subjects of his operas (including the historic visit of Richard Nixon to China and the development of the atomic bomb), he doesn't see himself as a political composer.

"I don't like the word political, because I think all life is political. I think The Marriage of Figaro is political, and I think most of the Verdi operas are political, and in a sense so are the Wagner operas. Why tag me with that term? What I'm talking about is human relations. I've chosen these stories because they are at the focal point of the American experience."

There is a kind of paradox that America's most successful composer is famous for his orchestral music at a time when so many orchestras in his own country are finding it difficult to survive. Does he think the early 21st century is a good time for classical music?

"I can't tell. I mean, we look back on the past and think times for Mahler or Stravinsky or Mozart were great, and today it's terrible. But I don't know. You read about how the public did or did not receive their works . . it's very hard to say.

"For Beethoven, there were tens of thousands of people showed up for his funeral. I know that won't happen when I die. Because what I do in my society doesn't have the importance that Beethoven had in his very, very small society. I think it's impossible to know. And one really shouldn't worry about that. One should be grateful to be able to do what one's doing.

"If a young person comes to me and says, I want to be a composer, I'm deeply impressed by that. Because the models these days are business and power and law and money. And the thought that a young person would want to make art, make a life out of making art, it's deeply moving."

THIS is a breakout year for the RTÉ Living Music Festival, with festival director Ronan Guilfoyle choosing to devote as much if not more space to jazz than to actual performances of the music of featured composer John Adams. The jazz line-up includes the Stockholm Jazz Orchestra with Jim McNeely, Tim Berne's Big Satan, White Rocket and Simon Nabatov.

The major Adams works new to Irish audiences include the piano concerto Century Rolls (1996) and the complete Harmonielehre (1985), both played by the RTÉ NSO under Pierre-André Valade, and the clarinet concerto Gnarly Buttons (1996) from the London Sinfonietta under Bradley Lubman.

There are also two works by Bang on a Can composer Michael Gordon, regarded by Adams as "a genius," who works with, in Adams's description, "a musical language that is purposely very hard-edged, very industrial sounding, very acoustically aggressive, and it's kind of a ne plus ultra evolution of minimalism". The Crash Ensemble play Gordon's Acid Rain and the London Sinfonietta his ac dc. There are also new works from Kevin Volans and Ed Neumeister.

For information on the festival - which is performed in Vicar Street, the National Concert Hall, the National Gallery and the Sugar Club, Dublin from February 16th to 18th - visit www.rte.ie/livingmusic, or call 01-2083143