The Rock You Stand On

The Rock You Stand On was composed as a gift to Marin Alsop, a close friend, a deeply intuitive musician and a longtime enthusiast for my music. She is one of the very few conductors whom I can trust to do the right thing with what I’ve written. She knows what I want. She “gets it.” As a person, she embodies inner strength and calm and generosity, qualities that have helped her endure the long and sometimes difficult course of her career, an odyssey that has taken her to where she is now, the indisputable model for a new generation of women conductors.

The piece is a 10-minute essay in powerful, pulsating rhythms that begin as individual strokes and morph into rocking syncopations passed from one section of the orchestra to another. There is a certain “big band” quality to the ensemble writing with the full orchestra at times executing irregular, bouncing figurations that are driven by an underlying jazz-inflected pulse.

The title, The Rock You Stand On, is non-specific and is not meant to suggest anything other than perhaps hinting at the qualities—loyalty, determination, devotion—that make Marin Alsop so very special to me.

-John Adams