Faber & Faber

Hallelujah Junction: John Adams

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Synopsis:

A book unlike anything ever written by a composer, part-memoir and part-description of the creative process, Hallelujah Junction is an absorbing journey through the musical landscape of the life and times of John Adams, one of today’s most admired and oft-performed composers.

Adams traces his musical lineage back to the era of the swing bands and to his grandfather’s New Hampshire dance hall, where his clarinettist father met his jazz singer mother and eloped to marry and eke out a meagre living during the Great Depression. He evokes his own musical childhood in vivid detail, his New England boyhood with its marching bands and small town orchestras, and he details his cross-continental journey to California, describing his gradual evolution into one of the most important figures in American musical culture - the composer of operas such as 'Nixon in China', 'The Death of Klinghoffer' and 'Doctor Atomic' and a master of large-scale orchestral forms.

Hallelujah Junction is not only a deeply personal memoir, but also a first-hand encounter with the many emblematic themes and personalities that constitute our current musical life – people and events ranging from Richard Nixon and Allen Ginsberg to the Beatles, Leonard Bernstein, Duke Ellington, John Cage, Steve Reich and Frank Zappa.

 

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Listen to an excerpt from 'Nixon in China: Act 1, Scene 3' here. Excerpt courtesy of www.nonesuch-uk.com.

The English National Opera will be staging 'Dr Atomic' from February 25, 2009. For more details visit www.eno.org.

Reviews:

“Absorbing, frank and often amusing.”

- Ivan Hewett in BBC Music Magazine (5 stars)

Tags:

Categorised as:

Music, Stage & Screen

Sub-categories:

Biography & Memoir; Classical Music

Genres & Themes:

Composers; Conductors; Jazz; Opera; Orchestras; The Beatles

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