This one involved a brief moment of what Melville called "the shock of recognition": I was sitting in my studio, studying the score to Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony, and as I was doing so I became aware that my seven year old son Sam was in the adjacent room watching cartoons (good cartoons, old ones from the '50s).
The hyperactive, insistently aggressive and acrobatic scores for the cartoons mixed in my head with the Schoenberg music, itself hyperactive, acrobatic and not a little aggressive, and I realized suddenly how much these two traditions had in common.Chamber Symphony was first recorded with the London Sinfonietta, conducted by the composer, in 1994,[2] followed by the Ensemble Moderne in 1997, the Absolute Ensemble in 1999, and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Montpellier in 2000.
[3] More recently, the Aurora Orchestra recorded the piece on Road Trip, its album of American music.
Adams thought the first movement so difficult that he initially entitled it "Discipliner et Punir".
As finally published, however, the movements are: The instrumentation is similar to that of Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony No.