John Adams (composer)
He studied music at Harvard University. After he graduated from Harvard, he went to California. Soon, he became part of the musical community of San Francisco. He listened to the music of minimalist composers like John Cage, Terry Riley and Morton Feldman. By the mid-1980s he was working as composer and conductor. The piece that made him famous was called Harmonium. Harmonium is made to sound like a harmonium, but the title also refers to "harmony". This shows that he is writing tonal music, unlike some composers at the time whose music was getting more difficult to understand because it was not in any key.