A Yankee named John Adams with a penchant for politics has once again played a crucial role in building our national identity.

John Adams

This Adams is a composer, and before someone gets Paul Giamatti and David McCullough on the phone, he is more than capable of telling his own story in words and music.

Born in New England (Worcester, Mass.) in 1947, John Coolidge Adams has mimicked the United States president in a number of ways, if you allow some poetic license. He has united disparate musical factions, elevated American standing in the world and influenced the next generation.

This season, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra patrons will learn firsthand about Adams as he serves as its composer of the year, even conducting a few concerts. They will discover that what separates Adams from many living composers is his hearty embrace of current events, politics and social issues.

Examples abound: Adams' opera, "Doctor Atomic" (2005), which makes its New York premiere at the Metropolitan Opera next week and in select local movie theaters, examines the personalities and anxieties that swirled around the development of the nuclear bomb in Los Alamos. Another opera, "The Death of Klinghoffer" (1991), takes a frank look at the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. His songplay, "I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky" (1995), revisits the Northridge, Calif., earthquake of 1994. Other works are evocative of America's musical past and landscape, such as "Dharma at Big Sur," "The Wound-Dresser," "Heavy Metal," "My Father Knew Charles Ives" and "Shaker Loops."

But Adams' plunges into the American psyche that have had the widest resonance are the opera "Nixon in China" (1987) and the orchestral work "On the Transmigration of Souls."

The former is a surrealistic peek into Richard Nixon's landmark visit to Mao Tse-tung's China in 1972, premiered by Houston Grand Opera in 1987. "Nixon in China" showed that contemporary -- and American -- subjects were fertile for artistic treatment and its insightful look behind the scenes brought new discussion to a significant moment in history.

The latter is an aural monument to the victims of 9/11, premiered by the New York Philharmonic in 2002. "On the Transmigration of Souls," which won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2003, showed that new classical music can have as strong a public role for reflection as older repertoire.

Throughout these and other works, Adams is anything but a cerebral academic. His music has a live-wire electricity with "emotional impact and payoff," as conductor Marin Alsop once described it.

Adams' journeys through political landscapes often are controversial to a fierce level all but unknown in the classical music industry. The composer has endured the cancellation of works. The London Symphony canned his minimalist fanfare, "Short Ride in a Fast Machine," after Princess Diana died. "Klinghoffer," based on the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro by Palestinian terrorists in 1985, has faced stringent opposition from the U.S. Jewish community. The Boston Symphony Orchestra chose not to perform choruses from "Klinghoffer" in a concert occurring soon after the 9/11 attacks. In all cases, Adams fought the cuts, lamenting the reducing of a complex piece to one aspect.

"It is art, and the reason art is different from advertising is that you can't consume it in one easy soundbyte and get it," he said.

But Adams does not look for sensationalism. In his recently published autobiography, "Hallelujah Junction" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26), he tells of being "instantly drawn to the story." Adams is not simply a contemporary composer but someone inspired by the contemporary.

Adams' journey is, foremost, a musical one. For a composer once steadfastly associated with minimalism, he actually has approached a maximum of influences, forging them into an astoundingly varied yet recognizable language. He cites disparate figures as Ludwig van Beethoven, Jean Sibelius, Duke Ellington, Jimmy Hendrix and Pakistani singer Ali Khan -- a list of influences you might hear from an American rock band, further connecting Adams to current culture.

And like rockers, Adams rebelled to find his own voice.

"[When] I was in college and graduate school, a lot of composers definitely signed on to one or another orthodoxy and became wedded to that point of view, whether it was serialism or John Cage or the kind of music that George Rochberg wrote," says Adams.

In hindsight, there was little chance a single style could ever hold Adams down. As he details in his memoirs, as a youth he listened to Ellington and other swing bands play at his grandfather's musical marina in Winnipesaukee Gardens. He learned the clarinet at first from his father, playing orchestral music and jazz, and even met two doyens of Americanism, Walter Piston and Aaron Copland.

He was profoundly influenced by Cage's book "Silence," a present from his mother. He studied composition at Harvard, where serialism held a prominent place, but also adored the Beatles. Adams delved into electronic and tape music, eventually building his own modular synthesizer after his move to California in 1971. The minimalism of Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass made a strong impact on Adams -- and he is still usually referred to as a "post-minimalist" composer -- but he moved beyond it.

"Minimalism was a major style that I absorbed, but I have a larger palette and part of the reason is that have not been exclusive about my style but I have been very open," he says on the phone from his home near San Francisco. That range includes the pioneer of synthesized sounds to the reintroducing of older forms, such as arias and variations. As long as it fit his musical conception at the time.

Indeed, at a time when composers still live down their mid-20th century reputation as unmusical misfits who hate melody, Adams has had a golden touch. Just as the naysayers were getting ready to call composers irrelevant, he launched captivating piece after piece in the 1980s. Then in the '90s, when many critics, historians and even composers were concluding that the past 25 years produced no composer of the worth of Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Copland or Shostakovich, Adams wrote two of arguably the greatest works of the century, his Violin Concerto and his symphony, "Naive and Sentimental Music."

In both, as well as much of the music the PSO will perform this season, sleek melodies fly over repeating harmonic and rhythmic modules, passing through definite dramatic moments.

Adams says that some of his output can be understood by imagining being in a vehicle traveling across a landscape. "An object that is way in the distance gets closer and then suddenly fills the screen and is gone and then something else has arisen and begins to take center stage."

Adams' success with this technique and at examining major events of our time has brought the joy of listening back into the concert hall -- and audiences, too.

You'd have to say he has worn the name well.