Download Ebook Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life, by John Adams
Well, book Hallelujah Junction: Composing An American Life, By John Adams will certainly make you closer to just what you are prepared. This Hallelujah Junction: Composing An American Life, By John Adams will be consistently good pal whenever. You could not forcedly to always complete over reviewing a book basically time. It will certainly be just when you have spare time and also spending few time to make you feel satisfaction with just what you read. So, you can get the meaning of the message from each sentence in guide.
Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life, by John Adams
Download Ebook Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life, by John Adams
Schedule Hallelujah Junction: Composing An American Life, By John Adams is among the priceless worth that will certainly make you constantly rich. It will not suggest as abundant as the cash give you. When some individuals have lack to deal with the life, people with lots of publications occasionally will certainly be better in doing the life. Why ought to be book Hallelujah Junction: Composing An American Life, By John Adams It is in fact not suggested that publication Hallelujah Junction: Composing An American Life, By John Adams will offer you power to get to everything. The publication is to read and just what we indicated is guide that is checked out. You can additionally see how the e-book entitles Hallelujah Junction: Composing An American Life, By John Adams and also numbers of book collections are offering below.
Keep your method to be right here as well as read this web page finished. You could delight in searching guide Hallelujah Junction: Composing An American Life, By John Adams that you actually describe get. Right here, getting the soft file of the book Hallelujah Junction: Composing An American Life, By John Adams can be done quickly by downloading in the web link resource that we offer right here. Certainly, the Hallelujah Junction: Composing An American Life, By John Adams will be all yours faster. It's no have to await the book Hallelujah Junction: Composing An American Life, By John Adams to obtain some days later on after acquiring. It's no have to go outside under the heats at center day to head to the book establishment.
This is a few of the benefits to take when being the participant and also get guide Hallelujah Junction: Composing An American Life, By John Adams right here. Still ask what's different of the other website? We give the hundreds titles that are created by recommended writers and publishers, around the globe. The link to buy and also download and install Hallelujah Junction: Composing An American Life, By John Adams is likewise quite simple. You could not discover the challenging website that order to do more. So, the means for you to get this Hallelujah Junction: Composing An American Life, By John Adams will be so simple, won't you?
Based on the Hallelujah Junction: Composing An American Life, By John Adams information that we offer, you might not be so baffled to be right here and to be participant. Get now the soft documents of this book Hallelujah Junction: Composing An American Life, By John Adams and wait to be your own. You conserving could lead you to stimulate the ease of you in reading this book Hallelujah Junction: Composing An American Life, By John Adams Even this is types of soft documents. You could actually make better chance to obtain this Hallelujah Junction: Composing An American Life, By John Adams as the recommended book to check out.
John Adams is one of the most respected and loved of contemporary composers, and "he has won his eminence fair and square: he has aimed high, he has addressed life as it is lived now, and he has found a language that makes sense to a wide audience" (Alex Ross, The New Yorker). Now, in Hallelujah Junction, he incisively relates his life story, from his childhood to his early studies in classical composition amid the musical and social ferment of the 1960s, from his landmark minimalist innovations to his controversial "docu-operas." Adams offers a no-holds-barred portrait of the rich musical scene of 1970s California, and of his contemporaries and colleagues, including John Cage, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. He describes the process of writing, rehearsing, and performing his renowned works, as well as both the pleasures and the challenges of writing serious music in a country and a time largely preoccupied with pop culture.
Hallelujah Junction is a thoughtful and original memoir that will appeal to both longtime Adams fans and newcomers to contemporary music. Not since Leonard Bernstein's Findings has an eminent composer so candidly and accessibly explored his life and work. This searching self-portrait offers not only a glimpse into the work and world of one of our leading artists, but also an intimate look at one of the most exciting chapters in contemporary culture.
- Sales Rank: #428915 in Books
- Brand: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Published on: 2008-09-30
- Released on: 2008-09-30
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .94" w x 6.00" l, 1.30 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 352 pages
- Great product!
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 Booklist
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. --Alan Hirsch
Most helpful customer reviews
22 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
Superb in Every Way
By gtra1n
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.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Composer as Storyteller
By Dr. Debra Jan Bibel
John Adams' background, rise, and development to perhaps the foremost American classical composer alive is well examined in this autobiography. A fan of his compositions from the outset and having seen many of their performances sometimes with Adams conducting, I find additional resonance with his rich and lively descriptions of nearby locales, characters, musics, and events, since I, just two years his senior, had lived under similar and often the same musical and socio-cultural influences in the Bay Area. Adams' takes on John Cage, early electronica, and Miminalism's Steve Reich and Philip Glass are keen, full of peer insights. Adams acknowledges that he discovered his voice, his own unique compositional style, at age 30 after a long series of avant-garde experimentation. His influences besides classical composers, including Wagner and Ives, were psychedelic rock (e.g., Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrex, Janis Joplin, and the Grateful Dead) as well as jazz greats (e.g., Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, Eric Dolphy, and John Coltrane). Adams is a Boomer composer who lived the alternative and experimental musical life. In 1981, his choral symphony "Harmonium" premiered at the inaugural of Davis Symphony Hall of the San Francisco Symphony. It launched him, providing an international reputation and a major record label, Nonesuch. (Later, his "Dharma at Big Sur" celebrated the opening of Disney Hall, home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.) His second punch was "Grand Pianola Music", whose conceptual source was an LSD memory of his attending a Rudolf Serkin concert of Beethoven's Emperor Concerto; the keyboard of Serkin's Steinway seemed to be continually expanding.
The early years of Adams' upbringing, training, surviving with odd jobs, and becoming established were the most interesting for me, as it illustrates the social forces and dispositions that make the person. The later and current years are the increasing successes of an international musical leader, and the parade of orchestras, conducting, travels, and assorted musical stars are as we expect, although much of the details of creating a composition and performance are particularly worthy. I found his perspectives on music, musicians, and the actual work and struggle of composing always edifying. Reading the autobiographies and biographies of composers have a historical and analytical purpose, but this nontechnical book is contemporary in every way, making it attractive to the general reader, not just the musicologist or classical music fan. Adams is only in his early 60s and far from retirement. There will probably be a future updated account of life long after we revel in his forthcoming compositions.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
A compelling panorama on the development of 20th century classical music, and more
By Philippe Vandenbroeck
John Adams, America’s best known living composer, is far from universally loved. His work is variedly labeled as dreary Minimalism, facile postmodernism, reactionary neoromanticism, politically correct eclecticism, and more. Personally I have been listening to his work for many years, with deepening admiration. For whatever it is worth I believe that compositions such as Harmonielehre, The Death of Klinghoffer, El Nino and The Dharma at Big Sur will eventually be accepted as a solid part of the canon of serious Western music.
In his autobiography Halleluja Junction the composer cogently and vivaciously retraces the path from his early musical experiences to creative maturity. The early chapters recount his New England youth and composition studies at Harvard University. In 1971 Adams moved to the West Coast and settled down in the Bay Area where he still lives. As a composer Adams started to find his own voice in the late 1970s. He considers his piano piece Phrygian Gates (1977) to be his first mature piece. Harmonium (1980), his first large scale work for large orchestra and chorus, was another important milestone.
I found the transitional part of his autobiography, roughly covering the two decades from 1965 to 1985, the most insightful. Here is an aspiring composer who has absorbed and tries to forge his own voice from a fantastically wide range of influences - the canon of 18th and 19th century European art music, the vernacular of jazz and American popular song, post-war serialism and Cagean aleatorics, minimalism, counterculture pop music, the emergence of electronically generated sounds. His early infatuation with the musical avant-garde, however, proves to be stillborn. In 1976 Adams had a revelation whilst driving his old Karmann Ghia convertible along a ridge in the Sierra foothills. His tape recorder was playing music from Act I of Götterdämmerung. Wagner’s chromatic but still tonal harmonies produced „an expressive world of constantly changing, forever ambiguous, disturbingly human yearning”. Adams realizes that he could not relinquish the power of tonal harmony if he wanted to build expressive, large scale musical structures. There and then he understood that a personal harmonic language would have to be the core of his compositional genome. All this went against the grain of the atonal avant-garde the budding composer initially felt attracted to.
Adams felt, however, he was entitled to embrace this legacy: „The harmonic language developed by Schumann and Wagner did not die out with the advent of Modernism. It simply moved across the Atlantic, where it was appropriated by composers, many of them African Americans and émigré Jews” who created the tradition that he grew up with. The harmonic essence of composers like Gershwin, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Ellington was not all that different from the chromaticism of the late Romantic composers. But in that process of migration the morbid self-awareness of turn-of-the-century European composers was transformed into a characteristically New World, jubilant lyricism. This „fresh optimism, busy and brash and thoroughly at ease with itself” is in my opinion still the tinta, the color or atmosphere that pervades John Adams’ mature oeuvre.
From 1985 onwards the flow of commissions provided Adams with a constant supply of artistic challenges. The storyline of Halleluja Junction then turns into a blow by blow account of how he tackled his major compositions. Here it is interesting to see how his fundamental optimism intersects with the grave conflicts and dilemmas of our time. Particularly in his stage works - Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, Doctor Atomic - Adams confronts the ambiguities surrounding his American identity. These are counterbalanced by a series of works - El Nino, A Flowering Tree, The Gospel According to the Other Mary - that confirm his belief in the generative and healing potential of particularly the female element in our society.
Adams is an exceptionally reflective and articulate artist. There is much more in this book to nurture the reader’s understanding of his artistic position and a richly layered compositional process matured over decades.
I found this book rewarding in many respects. It offers a compelling autobiographical narrative, a variegated and often jocular panorama on the development of 20th century ‚classical’ music, and a fascinating insight into the workings of a creative mind. However, a solid grasp of 19th and 20th classical music and at least some exposure to Adams’ own work is necessary to fully enjoy this book.
Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life, by John Adams PDF
Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life, by John Adams EPub
Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life, by John Adams Doc
Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life, by John Adams iBooks
Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life, by John Adams rtf
Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life, by John Adams Mobipocket
Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life, by John Adams Kindle
No comments:
Post a Comment