Review by Choice Review
Composer John Adams long ago eclipsed Erik Satie as the champion of musical titling. The titles of Adams's musical works do not merely evoke or amuse--they mean something. Words matter dearly to Adams, which is appropriate for a major composer of opera. The present title is a superb addition to the relatively sparse crop of composer autobiographies (few composers like to explain themselves). Indeed, it vaults to the top of the heap alongside the memoirs of Hector Berlioz (The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz from 1803 to 1865, Eng. tr., 1932), long recognized as the finest example of such efforts. The early chapters are pure biography, the later ones mostly detailed, useful discussion of important works. The arc connecting one focus to another is as telling and engaging as some of the musical processes inside an early Adams piece like Shaker Loops (1978). Adams includes a few anecdotes but myriad observations on aesthetics, composing, and other musicians. Adams has achieved a singular status, moving from a perch as outsider/minimalist/tonalist to the very center of American musical life. His memoir stands as another stunning entry in his canon of work. Summing Up: Essential. All readers, all levels. B. J. Murray Brevard College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
JOHN ADAMS is the Care Bear of the American avant-garde. We could call him Harmony Bear if the name weren't taken. To think of Adams this way is not merely to bring to mind his playful spirit, his scraggly hair and his fuzzy, round face. As he explains in his charming and illuminating memoir, Adams had a revelation in 1976, when he was a 29-year-old composer struggling to find his creative voice, and it led him to make caring the essence of his art. He was driving a Karmann Ghia convertible along a mountain ridge in Northern California, where he had moved from New England. He was playing a cassette recording of the first act of Wagner's "Götterdämmerung," and he found himself blurting, to himself, "He cares." Adams, until then an acolyte of the John Cage school of conceptual sonic experimentation, was unexpectedly moved by Wagner's high emotionalism. He thought he could feel - or, rather, he felt he could now think about - the capacity of music to connect with its listeners viscerally, as well as intellectually. That flash of obviousness constituted apostasy in the insular, parochial society of the musical vanguard. "What was creating such a deep impression upon me in the music of these German composers was the pure expressivity of their art," Adams explains in "Hallelujah Junction." "What Wagner and Schumann cared about was making the intensity of their emotions palpable to the listener." This book, Adams's first (and, let's hope, not his last), is a cogent account of its author's escape from the world of audience-alienating "process" music absorbed with its own making and his arrival at a place where intellectual adventurism and robust emotion coexist - a pilgrimage from the Land Without Feelings to Hallelujah Junction. There happens to be an actual location called Hallelujah Junction, a highway crossroads near the NevadaCalifornia state line; Adams came upon it - inspiration tends to find him behind the wheel - and he adopted the phrase originally, 10 years ago, as the title of an exhilarating four-hand, two-piano piece that employs, essentially, just two notes. Although the sojourner scheme is a cliché among books by creative artists, politicians and pretty much everyone else, Adams plays it lightly. There is no more self-aggrandizement in this wry, smart and forthright memoir than there is in the venturesome but elegiac music of Adams's maturity. Indeed, "Hallelujah Junction" stands with books by Hector Berlioz and Louis Armstrong among the most readably incisive autobiographies of major musical figures. Adams can write prose, as he has proved with articles, program notes and lectures, some of which form the basis of chapters and sections in his book. (Most of the previously published material has been improved, often by the addition of more vivid detail.) Describing the Volkswagen Beetle he drove from Cambridge to California after finishing his graduate studies at Harvard, Adams writes, "Perhaps sensing it was being flogged into making this one last trip only to die in an alien land, it made a noise like a spoon caught in a Disposal! and sputtered to a halt." He can even be droll. "It has occurred to me," Adams notes in a section on creative collaboration, "that, next to double murder-suicide, it might be the most painful thing two people can do together." Like many of Adams's musical compositions, "Hallelujah Junction" is a collage of disparate elements - demystifying ruminations on the creative process, sharp assessments of his and his peers' work, sweet memories of his precocious childhood in New England, rants against pomposity and indifference in all forms (especially the kind passing for nonconformity), and traditional then-I-wrote sections, all organized with careful attention to balance, contrast and propulsive effect. Adams juxtaposes and paces the components with (what else?) great care to simulate spontaneity. Among the most vigorous sections of this book are Adams's terse critiques of other composers, past and present, in and out of the avant-garde. Copland, he writes, "was adept at playing the role of provocateur, particularly in his gift of melding the leanness and angularity of Stravinsky with the demotic energy and raucous timbres of '20s jazz." Adams deftly lacerates Schoenberg, Stockhausen and Babbitt for what he hears as mechanistic severity and coldness in 12-tone music and serialism. He reveres Ives for his famous iconoclasm and formal inventiveness, while admitting disappointment in the failure of Ives's symphonies to stir him deeply. Adams is particularly fervent and persuasive in his advocacy of lesser-known contemporary composers like Glenn Branca, who has written a symphony for 100 guitars, and Robert Ashley, who, working in a realm between music and speech, creates grand vocal pieces that Adams describes as "meditative, seemingly improvisatory, but in fact carefully constructed" - a description that suits more than a few of his own compositions, especially his concerto for symphony and electric violin, "The Dharma at Big Sur." Much the same, Adams praises Cornelius Cardew, founder of the Scratch Orchestra, because he finds Cardew's music "anti-elite and antihistorical to the max" and "fresh, playful and humanistic." In the awe-struck impressions of the West in "Hallelujah Junction" ("the land ... untamed and mysterious"), as in the evocations of open landscapes in his music, Adams makes clear his fascination with the natural world; and for a composer to admire others whose music sounds very much like his own is only natural. COMMONLY mistaken for a minimalist, Adams has employed the minimalist aesthetic primarily as a point of departure. He recognized fairly early that "minimalism as a governing aesthetic could and would rapidly exhaust itself," as he writes here. "Like Cubism in painting, it was a radically new idea, but its reductive worldview would soon leave its practitioners caught in an expressive cul-de-sac." Adams's importance as a composer is rooted not so much in his having done anything new, but, rather, in his having done very well the things he has done: operas ("Nixon in China" and "The Death of Klinghoffer," both staged by Peter Sellars), symphonic choral works ("On the Transmigration of Souls," an elegy to the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks, which won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2003), piano pieces and a dozen or so other major compositions of various kinds. His music is minimal in the sense that Adams employs as few materials as necessary, rather than as few as possible, though he strives for and tends to achieve a maximalism of effect. With "Hallelujah Junction," Adams has put in prose an argument against the ideology of aesthetic continuum, a case that his music has always articulated eloquently by example. "That particular continuum I found ridiculously exclusive, being founded on a kind of Darwinian view of stylistic evolution," he argues. If a composition "didn't in some way advance the evolution of the language, yielding progress either by a technological innovation or in the increasing complexity of the discourse, it was not even worth discussing." Who cares? John Adams. And, so, now do we. Adams's epiphany occurred in a Karmann Ghia, as he was driving along a mountain ridge in Northern California. David Hajdu is the music critic for The New Republic and a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
In his New England childhood, Adams listened to records, learned clarinet, and even conducted small groups. At Dartmouth, he discovered such modernist composers as Carter, Nancarrow, Copland, Chávez, and Kodály, and substituted in the Boston Symphony in Schoenberg's Moses and Aron. After six years at Harvard, honing his conducting skills and starting to compose, he moved to teach at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where his career blossomed. While John Cage influenced his instrumental music that includes synthesizers and taped passages, Adams is best known for the documentary operas Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, and Doctor Atomic. Not a memoir per se, this book is first and foremost about Adams' major compositions and incidentally concerned with the culture in which they were produced and the people with whom they were developed, including theatrical director Peter Sellars and poet Alice Goodman. It provides enlightening insight into the fertile mind of one of the most important and popular contemporary composers and conductors.--Hirsch, Alan Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly 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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
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 (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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 indispensible background for a more complete appreciation of these works. Occasionally, he lapses into self-righteous--or at least self-indulgent--solipsism, and his explications of music history are dry and seemingly irrelevant. But 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. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
