Alarm Will Sound

“It’s a door you’re not supposed to go through. It suggested something forbidden, exciting—and loud.”

In fact, it was a specific door, an emergency exit at a local gym. And the sign on it gave the New York–based ensemble its name: Alarm Will Sound.

The group, known for its unconventional nature and often described as more of a rock band than a chamber ensemble, moves fluidly about the stage during performances. But the theatrics are “not a gimmick,” insists member Gavin Chuck; they “grow out of the relationships in the group and the music we’re performing.”

Alarm Will Sound is John Adams’s group of choice for his Son of Chamber Symphony, which receives its East Coast premiere at Carnegie Hall on February 28. The composer is no stranger to the Hall, where he held the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair for four years. Adams exercises his playful sense of humor with the title of his new work, a “child” of his first Chamber Symphony (1992), a longtime staple of Alarm Will Sound’s repertoire. The lineage of Adams’s Son does not stop with the composer himself—oddly enough, he drew inspiration for the first Chamber Symphony from Arnold Schoenberg.

While studying Schoenberg’s 1907 score, Adams overheard the erratic din of 1950s cartoons that his son was watching in the next room. He was so struck by the similarities between these supposedly contrasting genres that in his own Chamber Symphony, Adams decided to combine Schoenberg’s linearity and chromaticism with the “unreasonably difficult passages and alarmingly fast tempi” of the cartoon music. The new Son is soloistically driven, like Adams’s “mother” symphony, yet is “a little funkier,” as Alarm Will Sound’s conductor Alan Pierson puts it.

From cartoon music to the atom bomb, Adams brings an assortment of 1950s-inspired music to Carnegie Hall this February. In addition to Son of Chamber Symphony, Carnegie Hall audiences will hear the New York premiere of a symphony that grew from his acclaimed opera Doctor Atomic, in a performance on February 16 by the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra under David Robertson. Adams mimicked science-fiction movie music in the opera, which explores the emotional turmoil of atom bomb creator J. Robert Oppenheimer. For the opera’s offspring symphony, the composer orchestrated vocal lines and even composed new material for the four movements: The Laboratory, The Bedroom, Panic, and Trinity. As Adams himself says of music’s power: “Music, more than any other art form, is the most emotionally precise.”