John Adams grew up in a musical New England household, learned clarinet from his father, and met Duke Ellington as a child, then hit a wall at Harvard where serialism dominated composition classes while he blasted Hendrix, Dylan, and the Beatles in his dorm. A copy of John Cage's book Silence, mailed by his mother, gave him permission to drive to San Francisco, build a homemade synthesizer he nicknamed the Studebaker, and reshape minimalism into a vehicle for sweeping orchestral emotion, culminating in the rocket-launch pulses of Harmonielehre.

This episode follows Adams and director Peter Sellars as they turned recent history into opera, from Nixon in China to the fiercely contested The Death of Klinghoffer, and traces his later works On the Transmigration of Souls, Doctor Atomic, and Scheherazade.2. Along the way it explains how twelve-to ...