Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #130175 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-30
• Released on: 2008-09-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780374281151
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Best known for his groundbreaking musical works Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, Adams helped shape the landscape of contemporary classical music. Combining the narrative power of opera, the atonal themes of 20th-century classical music, the spooky modulations of jazz and the complex rhythms of the Beatles and the Band, Adams created a new music that could express the fractiousness of the political scene of the 1960s and 1970s. In this entertaining memoir, Adams deftly chronicles his life and times, providing along the way an incisive exploration of the creative process. A precocious musician, Adams began playing clarinet in the third grade, and, after hearing his teacher read Mozart's biography, tried his hand at composing music. During his undergraduate years at Harvard, he threw himself into performing and conducting when his own inadequacies as a composer began to dawn on him. By his final year at Harvard, however, the chaos of the late 1960s and the creative turbulence of the music scene drove him back to composing. After two years in graduate school, Adams set out for California, where he taught numerous composition classes and private clarinet lessons while working on his own music and with a who's who of the music world, from Cage and Leonard Bernstein to Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Adams's searingly introspective autobiography reveals the workings of a brilliant musical mind responsible for some of contemporary America's most inventive and original music. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal
Celebrated American composer and conductor Adams's memoir chronicles his life from his upbringing as a talented clarinetist in rural New England to his countercultural coming-of-age as a Harvard undergraduate in the 1960s to his embrace of the musical life and vibrant scene of the Bay Area. Adams writes candidly of his compositions and those of his contemporaries in language accessible to the lay reader. Adams—through his engaging orchestral works, such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning On the Transmigration of Souls and his several landmark "docu-operas" like Nixon in China and Doctor Atomic (opening at the New York Metropolitan Opera this October)—has emerged as one of the most admired of all living composers. His book proceeds chronologically, but Adams frequently pauses to reflect on the nature of composing and the state of contemporary music. As one of the most inclusive of contemporary composers—his palette covers pop, jazz, and myriad global idioms—he shares his unique perspective on the multiple traditions that inform his musical language. Adams writes articulately about his life and works and the larger social context from which they emerge. Highly recommended for all collections.—Larry Lipkis, Moravian Coll., Bethlehem, PA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Review by Anne Midgette "Composed" means "written," but it also means "restrained." John Adams's new memoir is both. Coming from the man who leapt to fame with the wackily exuberant docu-opera "Nixon in China," Hallelujah Junction is striking for its dogged earnestness. There are not many books for the intelligent lay reader that give a good perspective on contemporary music; Adams, in the wake of Alex Ross's success with The Rest Is Noise, has set out to write one. He places his own development within the context of his musical epoch, against a backdrop of pedantic little lectures on recent sociopolitical history. Often stilted in tone, he draws on the rhetoric of Great-Man biographies ("my school chums" sounds odd from a laid-back resident of California). This is not a confessional or intimate memoir. The composer's family and selected friends (such as Peter Sellars, his operatic collaborator) make cameo appearances, but the book is primarily a Portrait of the Artist: an image of the development of greatness. Not that it isn't, overall, engaging. Like Adams's music, it contains a lot of information, some weak, much good, packed together in contrasting blocks of events, and with plenty of bang for the buck. He offers a wealth of interesting nuggets: a thoughtful section about the process of composing; a concise exegesis on Western tuning and the way that contemporary composers use pitch. One of the book's selling points is that it tells the story of America's most recent musical history, which to many people, I fear, still seems opaque and bewildering. Adams presents, in small unthreatening doses, vignettes of the arc he traversed from academic rigor through electronic experimentation and minimalism to his current path as -- in his own view, at least -- the only concert composer who has successfully merged all these elements into a continuation of the Western concert tradition. The reliability of his account is of course affected by his own subjectivity, particularly when it comes to minimalism. The term is commonly used to denote the repeating, even hypnotic musical patterns in the early works of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, who reject the label. Adams, however, uses it without qualification; and he tries so hard to distance himself from it that he does not give a clear picture of what a watershed this movement was. Within a few pages of describing his initial excitement at minimalism, the young composer is already poking holes in it, recognizing "that Minimalism as a governing aesthetic could and would rapidly exhaust itself," and dismissing Philip Glass, in particular, in a couple of pages. He neglects to mention, until later in the book, that he was long regarded as a minimalist himself. Adams is certainly the center of his own universe. The picture that emerges in Hallelujah Junction makes him seem self-aggrandizing (he likens himself to Picasso and Wagner) and thin-skinned, devoting a lot of space to refuting criticisms of his premieres. (I was surprised to find that a line from a review of mine in the New York Times of his latest opera, "A Flowering Tree," inspired a couple of pages of defense, particularly since it described Sellars's production rather than Adams's music.) But Adams unbends in his descriptions of the actual music; his writing gets a little more technical and a lot more compelling. By the end of the book, the work -- "The Death of Klinghoffer," "El Niño," "Doctor Atomic" -- has become the story. And this is as it should be. Adams may be trying to ensure his place in history, but ultimately he is a composer, not a writer. And the book's real interest, for him and for its readers, could be summed up by an alternate title: How I Did It.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Superb in Every Way
So as not to diminish my thoughts on this book, I should first mention that I am a great lover of Adams' music, and as a composer always interested in what other composers have to write about themselves. That being said, this is a wonderful book in every way. Adams is a graceful and charming writer, and the book runs on several parallel and intertwined courses that are mutually supportive, like elegant counterpoint. He recounts his personal and professional life, and along the way examines himself, his art and the music of other colleagues. His critical evaluation of his own work and that of others is exceptionally clear, well-considered and wise, and his thoughts on what it takes to be a composer, what he feels is the right path, and his own experiences of the difficulties of living as a serious, creative artist in America are sober and courageous. I find myself constantly re-reading passages simply for the pleasure of the insight of his thoughts and his ability to express them.

This is a book for all readers, not just specialists or fans. It's an exceptional autobiography of any kind, of any figure in contemporary American life, and for anyone interested in classical music in general, and the current iterations, this book demands to be read. This will be as essential a part of the literature of music as Adams' own work is an essential part of the history of music itself.

Hallelujah Junction
This item was a gift for my son. As far as I know he liked the book. I am always pleased with Amazon's service.

Hallelujah Junction
A wonderful insight into the life of America's greatest living composer. The book is a joy to read and a must for any fan of this wonderful composer.