Born on February 15, 1947, in Worcester, Massachusetts; Currently resides in San Francisco, California.
Century Rolls for piano and orchestra
First Movement
Manny's Gym
Hail Bop
Composed: 1996
Estimated length: 30 minutes
Sometime before he began composing Century Rolls in the mid-1990s, John Adams spent a late night listening to recordings of old player-piano rolls—and the strange, superhuman energy of those mechanical performances lit the fuse for what became his first piano concerto. The result is one of the earliest examples of Adams’s deep and ongoing engagement with the concerto form. It has proved particularly suitable since its flexibility gives him space to reinvent the relationship between soloist and orchestra each time, and to shape the music around the personality of a particular performer.
In this case, the spark came from the pianist who requested the piece, Emanuel Ax—an artist celebrated for warmth, lyricism, and Classical-Romantic depth, and an early admirer of Adams’s work. Their friendship dates back to the late 1970s, making the collaboration feel unusually natural.
The title Century Rolls points directly to the image that ignited the score. Adams remembers hearing those old rolls and being struck by how the technology transformed everything it touched—Gershwin, Rachmaninoff, Jelly Roll Morton—into something “that could not have been anticipated before what Walter Benjamin called the ‘age of mechanical reproduction,’” he writes in his commentary on the piece.
The phrase “century rolls” refers to these relics. In the concerto, Adams tried to recapture his startled, delighted response to their mechanical bravura. Yet the concerto is no period pastiche. As the composer puts it (from the perspective of the end of the 20th century), Century Rolls “takes a kind of polymorphous-perverse pleasure in the whole past century of piano music, both popular and classical.” It folds the grand European concerto tradition together with American strains that run through Ellington, Gershwin, swing, and Conlon Nancarrow, the American expatriate who spent decades in Mexico creating some of the most astonishingly complex player piano studies of the mid-20th century.
WHAT TO LISTEN FOR
Like Beethoven, Adams builds drama from sheer kinetic force. The outer movements revel in velocity and precision. The first, untitled movement opens with deceptively delicate sonorities high in the orchestra that gradually descend before the piano enters. Tirelessly energetic patterns echo the bright motor rhythms of the old rolls, but are animated here by the characteristic rhythmic bite that is an Adams signature.
The temperature cools as the music slips—without a break—into the very different world of the second movement, “Manny’s Gym.” The title is a double entendre: a nod to Emanuel Ax’s nickname and a playful allusion to Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies—those gentle, slightly hypnotic piano pieces by the early-20th-century French composer that drift along in a calm, cradle-like rhythm. Adams notes that here he aimed “to tame my normally clangorous style” so as to allow the warmth of Ax’s keyboard personality to come through.
The finale’s title, “Hail Bop,” is another play on words, deliberately confusing the Hale–Bopp comet—which became a worldwide spectacle in the mid-1990s while Adams was writing the concerto—with the quick-footed spirit of jazz bop, whose off-kilter rhythms animate so much of the movement. Here the relationship between piano and orchestra becomes almost comic: Adams joked that “the orchestra seems at the piano’s heels like a barking terrier.”
In addition to solo piano, scored for piccolo and 2 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 3 horns, 3 trumpets, 2 trombones, timpani, percussion (vibraphone, chimes, glockenspiel, marimba, xylophone, woodblock, bongo), harp, celesta, and strings.
− Thomas May is the Nashville Symphony's program annotator.
Featured on Mozart's Jupiter Symphony — January 9 & 10, 2026.
Nashville Symphony
Gemma New, conductor
Conrad Tao, piano
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