Hallelujah Junction

"Adams is a pungent guide to his many literary and musical influences, and he displays humor and wisdom in responding to the pounding that his 'politically correct' works, particularly The Death of Klinghoffer, have taken."—Kevin Berger, San Francisco magazine

 

"John Adams makes a superb contribution to the tradition of composer-as-writer. Adams, renowned for marrying the pulsating minimalism of Steve Reich and Philip Glass to the expansive, big-boned symphonic sound of Bruckner and Sibelius, recounts his struggle to find his musical voice with surprising honesty. He tallies his failures (which include a homemade synthesizer dubbed 'the Studebaker') and chronicles fighting his way to make pathbreaking works such as the monumental Harmonielehre for orchestra and the operas Nixon in China and Doctor Atomic."—Christopher Delaurenti, The Stranger

 

"What a wonderful book! Entertaining, touching and revealing. Like Berlioz’s memoirs, it gives us a glimpse into the life and times of a great composer. Not to be missed."—Emanuel Ax

 

"John Adams's memoir is elegant, hilarious, humble, sophisticated, touching, and enormously enlightening about a whole era. It is a remarkable demystification of what it means to be a composer. Adams is a philosopher/craftsman, attempting to reflect and render the truth as he observes and feels it, in all its complexity and its simplicity. His book is a testimony that is equally emotional and intellectual, refreshing and comprehensible to anyone who has ever built or created something with care and attention, whether it be a piece of music, a table, a business, or a family."—Derek Bermel

 

"Hallelujah Junction is one of the best and most important composer autobiographies next to those of Berlioz and Wagner. A fascinating picture of John Adams the man unfolds with the same directness, precision, and passion as his music. What impresses me most is the sense of absolute honesty in the narrative: a quality exceedingly rare in composers' writings about themselves and their work."—Esa-Pekka Salonen, Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic

 

"John Adams's memoir is exuberant, opinionated, and vastly informative. Like a renegade tour guide, he takes us on several trips at once. In recounting his own story, he shows us the inner workings of his own creative process and simultaneously illuminates the recent history of music-making. His learned, witty, self-mocking voice is both subjective and objective, telling us all about him and all about the music around us. Amazingly, you can almost hear it."—John Lithgow

 

"Colorful memoir of both success and failure by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Adams. As a boy in 1950s New Hampshire, the author played the clarinet and dreamed of becoming a great composer. He didn't realize until it was too late that he would have been better off learning the piano: 'I have had to live with only the most rudimentary, self-taught mode of hunt-and-peck [but] I suspect my lifelong frustrations with the piano go hand in hand with the birth of many of my best musical ideas.' The book is at its richest when the author recollects his encounters with other composers, especially during his formative years at Harvard during the '60s. He's not necessarily critical of his musical peers and heroes, but rather portrays himself as a fellow traveler in search of his own unique voice. Adams's professed love for popular music and his extreme reservations about the rigidity of the compositional methods associated with serialism that were dominant in the '60s reveal the complexity of a musical era too often stereotyped as monolithically academic. Equally insightful are self-critical passages in which the author details his discovery of personal limitations and sections that delineate his ambivalence toward some transitory compositional fashions and styles, particularly in San Francisco during the '70s and '80s. Adams lucidly and honestly records his reactions to the public reception of his operas Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer and the recent Doctor Atomic, providing indispensable background for a more complete appreciation of these works . . . readers will enjoy the candor and completeness of the book, which serves as a gateway to an accomplished body of work. Like the author's music: carefully considered, deliberate and often exciting, gathering together many disparate elements of American life."—Kirkus Reviews