Chamber Symphony (1992)

The Chamber Symphony bears a suspicious resemblance to its eponymous predecessor, the opus 9 of Arnold Schönberg. (…) I was sitting in my studio, studying the score to Schönberg's Chamber Symphony, and as I was doing so I became aware that my seven-year-old son Sam was in the adjacent room watching cartoons (good cartoons, old ones from the ‘50s). The hyperactive, insistently aggressive and acrobatic scores for the cartoons mixed in my head with the Schönberg music, itself hyperactive, acrobatic and not a little aggressive, and I realized suddenly how much these two traditions had in common. (…) Chamber Music, with its inherently polyphonic and democratic sharing of roles, was always difficult for me to compose. But the Schönberg symphony provided a key to unlock that door. 

[John Adams]