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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 the 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. Here you will find cogent, incisive and often very witty commentaries on people and events ranging from Richard Nixon and Allen Ginsberg to the Beatles, Leonard Bernstein, Duke Ellington, John Cage, Steve Reich and Frank Zappa.

“What a wonderful book! Entertaining, touching, and revealing. Like Berlioz’s memoirs, it gives us a glampse 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

“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 heart it.”
    – John Lithgow

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