You may wonder if John Adams ever gets tired of being celebrated. In 2002 London's Barbican mounted a big celebration of his work; the year before that, BBC Radio 3 did a series on him; next year, Rotterdam will host an Adams festival. Nevertheless, there is something of a landmark feeling about Lincoln Center's upcoming retrospective, John Adams: An American Master. It's a muscular title, but one that no longer requires a lot of justification, since, over the course of two and a half decades, Adams has become the nearest thing to classical music's modern vox Americana -- though he'd probably hate the label.

John Adams Photo by Deborah O'Grady

Adams is an eloquent, measured speaker, his words weighed and his opinions carefully considered. Touching on the question of composers today, he takes a long view: "I think that right now we're in what I sometimes whimsically call a 'post-stylistic' period -- it really seems that style is no longer an overriding issue. The question would be, 'what is?' I think the answer is that composers are really grappling to forge a language that has a very universal reach." And it's Adams's reach that gets you; from his earliest minimalist works to his later, more agile pieces, there is a sense -- fairly uncommon these days -- of an artist able to continuously embrace the epic without ever sacrificing the personal. And it has helped make him America's most performed living composer.

It is that reach that the Lincoln Center festival celebrates, encompassing film, dance, theater, and the concert hall -- including a concert with the Juilliard Orchestra and pianist and faculty member Emanuel Ax, conducted by Adams himself. "For first time, we're doing a collaboration with the Brooklyn Academy of Music, with Juilliard, with the New York City Ballet," says Jane Moss, director of programming for Lincoln Center and organizer of the festival. "This is the first time on the Lincoln Center campus that there has been a multi-constituent approach to a living American composer -- which again speaks to John's diverse range of work, which is part of what we're trying to illuminate in this festival. There is also something about that diversity that feels deeply American. Part of it is the style, part of it is the early minimalist influence -- you pick it up in different works in different ways."

Adams's upbringing certainly had a vintage American patina. The son of a musician father and a singer-actress mother, he was raised in small New Hampshire town in a household where (as he notes) "Benny Goodman and Mozart were not separated." His first composition was performed to an audience of mental-hospital patients when he was 13. ("They loved it," he recalls.) At 18, he won a scholarship to Harvard to study clarinet, conducting, and composition -- plunging the unsuspecting Adams into a hotbed of modernism of the fried-nerve-endings variety, where post-war serialism was preached. After class, while the geeks were boning up on Boulez, Adams immersed himself in the rich pop culture of the '60s. Despite Harvard's uncongenial creative atmosphere, Adams flourished as a musician. He played clarinet occasionally with the Boston Symphony and his conducting won the attention of Leonard Bernstein, who invited Adams to study at Tanglewood. By then, however, Adams had resolved to be a composer. Anxious to escape the Eurocentric strictures of East Coast academicism, he turned down Bernstein's potentially career-making offer and in 1972 drove west to San Francisco, where he has lived ever since.

After a short stint as a forklift driver, he took a job at the San Francisco Conservatory teaching composition and organizing concerts of contemporary music. Soon after, Adams heard his first minimalist works. Their re-evaluation of basic musical ingredients -- harmony, rhythm, and pulse -- appealed to him greatly. "People have forgotten how controversial minimalism was in the '70s, but 25 years ago it was a tremendously confrontational thing to write that kind of music, and many people were enraged by those minimalist compositions because they thought that they were flying in the face of musical progress."

In freeing minimalism from its early ticker-tape hypnoticism, Adams imbued it with what conductor Simon Rattle has described as "a mixture of esctasy and sadness."

But he was never a wholesale minimalist. Early pieces such as Shaker Loops (1977), a series of hazy, autumnal images for string orchestra, seemed to breathe a poignant emotional life into minimalism's sterile pulsations. Then there came Harmonium (1981), a 30-minute work for chorus and orchestra whose ravishing waves of harmony revealed Adams as a true poet of sound and put him squarely on the map as a composer.

Nor was his output schematic or predictable. After the ground-breaking and utterly serious Harmonium came Grand Pianola Music (1982), a sort of good-humored musical bliss-out, a bask in popular musical experience, complete with a pop-anthem exhortation that seemed to invite highbrow derision. If Adams's music has come some distance since then, trading in his early, spacious harmonies for a more chromatic, contrapuntal palette, perhaps the most uniquely American quality of his music, its inclusiveness, remains constant through more recent works such as the Chamber Symphony (1992) and Gnarly Buttons (1996) (which, along with Grand Pianola Music, will be performed by the London Sinfonietta as part of the festival). Among the remnants of his minimalist pedigree drift echoes of, among others,jazz, big band, Sibelius, Stravinsky, Schoenberg -- even cartoon scores. The conductor Michael Tilson Thomas has said of him, "John is one of those people who knows classical and popular culture completely, and who delights in making off-the-wall references, one to another..."

Adams is more expansive: "I think that the best artists, any kind of artists, are very open, and have a very sort of playful approach towards stimulus. One of the really pernicious mindsets which I had to get over as a student was that there was an ethic involved in the creative act. This was part of the mindset that was floating around in the '60s -- this idea that there was a proper way to compose. In fact, you know, one of the great [discoveries] for me in my creative life has been understanding that, when it comes to creativity, the more open, the more promiscuous one is, the better -- because, if you have an attitude of elimination, then life can be become extremely barren... I think that the best creators -- Stravinsky, Picasso -- are infinitely open and infinitely ready to receive any idea."

The Juilliard Orchestra Plays John Adams Alice Tully Hall Sunday, March 30, 5 p.m. For ticket information, please see the calendar.

In distilling his relationship to the minimalists, the composer himself may have put it best: "What sets me apart from Reich and Glass is that I am not a modernist. I embrace the whole musical past, and I don't have the kind of refined, systematic language that they have." In other words, whatever the simplicity of its materials, early minimalism was process-oriented, abstract, and in search of a fundamentally different way of regarding the experience of music. The underlying emotional experience in Adams's music has always been more tangible, existing in a clearer and more referential relationship to the canon. And in freeing minimalism from its early, ticker-tape hypnoticism, he imbued it with what conductor Simon Rattle has described as "a mixture of ecstasy and sadness."

Perhaps inevitably, Adams found himself drawn to the theater. "I'm not a composer who's slavishly bonded to a certain stylistic purity, and I think the best dramatic composers have that kind of flexibility. I think my music is very dramatic... even the orchestral music, and this may go back to childhood. My mother was an actress and singer, and my first experiences of performing were on the stage with her, so that was really part of my musical pedigree." Through an ongoing alliance with provocateur stage director Peter Sellars, Adams steered clear of traditional operatic bastions, wrestling instead with subjects with direct relevance to modern America. His first stage work, Nixon in China (1987), put three of the century's best-known political icons onto the opera stage and hoisted Adams to widespread attention, though not everyone approved. "Mr. Adams does for the arpeggio what McDonald's did for the hamburger, grinding out one simple idea unto eternity," quipped Donal Henahan in The New York Times. Adams's next opera, The Death of Klinghoffer (1990), dealt in the incendiary complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian problem, and his 1995 "song-play" I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky was a real rarity -- written by an American classical composer in the genre of musical theater.

His latest theatrical work, if somewhat more distanced in time, is no less ambitious. El Nino, a multimedia oratorio on the Nativity story, will receive two performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of Lincoln Center's festival. "I suppose I could say I always wanted to write Messiah," Adams chuckles. "I always loved that piece and I always had a very close association in my childhood with that time of year, and also with the whole myth of birth -- real, anatomical birth as well as spiritual birth.…"

Also showing at the festival is the premiere of the film production of The Death of Klinghoffer. Based on the story of Leon Klinghoffer, an American Jew murdered by Palestinian terrorists during the hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise liner in 1985, its libretto, by Alice Goodman, articulates both Israeli and Palestinian viewpoints with a ruminative eloquence. The piece has a troubled history in the U.S., not least because its arrival coincided with the Gulf war aftermath; its first U.S. performances in San Francisco were picketed by Jewish protesters, and shortly thereafter a planned Los Angeles production was cancelled without explanation. "It's been controversial before, and I'm sure [the film] will be as well," says Jane Moss. "People have very deep feelings about this subject.... I'm not sure they see the work clearly. I think, in reality, the work is more balanced than the person who feels very deeply on one side or the other would acknowledge."

If Adams's output -- and his theater works in particular -- have helped to begin putting modern classical music back on the cultural radar, Adams himself resists any simplistic analysis of the problems facing contemporary music. "It's a very complex thing -- what happened to classical music in the 20th century -- and a lot of it has to do with mass media. You know, in 1900 you didn't have electronic media of any kind, so music was something experienced on a very different level, and a hundred years later, music has become a completely different thing -- it's so multi-faceted. A lot of the expressive content of music was taken on by pop music [and] a lot of potentially musically literate audiences for contemporary music were lost to good popular music. I think that one of the things that I've been trying to do in my life is to compose a music written for musically literate audiences -- [but] on the other hand, I'm not composing a specialist music which is aimed only at other composers, and I think that's really the key issue of what happened to contemporary classical music in the West: composers wrote for each other."

A highlight of the festival for the Juilliard community will be Adams conducting the Juilliard Orchestra in a performance of his 40-minute-long Harmonielehre (1984), a powerful, prismatic fusion of minimalist gusto and fin-de-siècle harmony. "It's a piece that I suppose -- although I didn't know the term at the time -- [shows] the post-modern sensibility. It looked back over certain procedures of the past, and put those expressive qualities and harmonies through the black box of my minimalist technique. It was what poets would call a conceit: a certain point of view you take when going into the piece. It was just an idea I thought I'd try once and it seems to have worked; it's one of my most-performed pieces." The concert also includes a rousing Adams perennial, Short Ride in a Fast Machine (1986), and Century Rolls (1998), a bristling piano concerto penned for Emanuel Ax, who will reprise his soloist role for this concert.

Adams's preeminence as classical music's leading American voice might seem to invite cultural (if not musical) comparisons to figures such as Copland, so it's interesting that both Jane Moss and Adams himself think of another American master, Charles Ives, whose upbringing, Adams notes, bore striking similarities to his own childhood: the small New England town, the musician father, the marching bands.Talking of his next orchestral piece, which will be performed in April by the San Francisco Symphony, Adams says, "I think that, in this piece and the previous piece I wrote [his 9/11 memorial piece, On the Transmigration of Souls], I'm sort of publicly working out my relationship to Ives, a composer who is tremendously important to me and whose ideas I think were profoundly original and important -- and yet, is a composer most of whose pieces are, in one way or another, very unsatisfying to me. It's very complex... it's like talking about a parent you never got along with, but who you still love dearly..." Adams has titled the piece My Father Knew Charles Ives. Of course, he never did.

Tim Whitelaw is a graduate diploma student in composition.