Naive and Sentimental Music is a symphonic work by American composer John Adams.
The title of the work alludes to an essay by Friedrich Schiller, On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, that contrasts a creative personality that creates art for its own sake (the "naïve") versus one conscious of other purposes, such as art’s place in history (the "sentimental").
It received its first public performance by the Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen on February 19, 1999.
[1] The piece has a duration of approximately 48 minutes, and has three movements: The work is scored for 4 flutes (3, 4 double piccolos), 3 oboes (3 doubles English horn), 3 B♭ clarinets (3 doubles bass clarinet 2), bass clarinet, 3 bassoons (3 doubles contrabassoon), 4 horns in F, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, 2 tubas, amplified steel string guitar, piano, celesta, keyboard sampler, 2 harps, 5 percussion parts (including 3 who are principally mallet players, for a huge variety of percussive instruments: almglocken, high anvil, large bass drum, chimes, small Chinese gongs, crotales, suspended cymbals, glockenspiel, Japanese temple bowls, low gongs, marimba, “ranch” triangles, shaker, large sleigh bells, tam-tam, triangles, vibraphone, and xylophone), and strings.
[4] Five years later, in its local premiere with the San Francisco Symphony, Joshua Kosman, music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, praised the work in its scope and composition, writing that it "takes its rhetoric and sense of scale from the symphonies of Bruckner, Mahler and Sibelius, and its musical content from the nexus of pop melody and old-style minimalism a la Steve Reich".