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John Adams's Nixon in China: Musical Analysis, Historical and Political Perspectives. By Timothy A. Johnson. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. [xv, 278 p. ISBN 9781409426820. $99.95.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.
Richard Nixon's diplomatic mission to the People's Republic of China in 1972 was one of the most important political events of the twentieth century, as it marked the first time a U.S. president had visited the emerging superpower since its transformation into a Communist nation. The meetings held between Nixon and his counterpart Mao Zedong were an important part of the former's strategy of détente with the Communist world. John Adams's opera Nixon in China-premiered fifteen years later in 1987-was one of the most important musical events of the twentieth century, as it was the composer's first foray in the world of opera and helped to secure his place as one of the preeminent composers in the United States.
For scholars of diplomacy and political science who wish to examine Nixon's visit, the amount of secondary source material is almost embarrassing in its magnitude. The landscape is altogether different for those who wish to study Adams's opera. While there are a number of articles and essays about it, it had not been the subject of extensive, monograph-length discussion. Timothy Johnson's new book, John Adams's "Nixon in China": Musical Analysis, Historical and Political Perspectives, aims to correct that deficiency. Johnson had focused his previous work on bridging the gap between music and other disciplines. His first two books-Foundations of Diatonic Theory: A Mathematically Based Approach to Music Fundamentals (Emeryville, CA: Key College Publishing, 2003) and Baseball and the Music of Charles Ives: A Proving Ground (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2004)-paired music theory with mathematics and baseball history. This new book returns Johnson to an area he began studying more than twenty years ago, when he wrote the first published dissertation on the music of John Adams ("Harmony in the Music of John Adams: From Phrygian Gates to Nixon in China," Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Buffalo, 1991).
In the present book, Johnson sets out "to correlate historical events with those depicted onstage and to highlight the actions, emotions,...