ABSTRACT
This chapter examines John Adams's opera Doctor Atomic in light of Adams's post-minimalist orientation: while Adams's music offers a complex tapestry of polyrhythmic and textural procedures, it is richly intertextual in referencing musical styles and conventions from the past. It explores John Adams's deployment of musical topics and style quotations that pertain to 'counting down' time and the opera's narrative trajectory, which in Thomas May's words, moves 'from the very specific out into a kind of mythological universal'. The ensuing analysis discusses prominent scenes from the opera based on the timings drawn from the DVD production of Doctor Atomic with the Netherlands Opera. The musical narrative unfolds through the oscillation between the two topical representations of time and culminates in the electronic soundscape that simulates the bomb's explosion. Doctor Atomic belongs to the genre of postwar operas that adopts multimedia presentation in order to emphasize inner expression, symbolism and metaphor.
