This is an extended version of the Monitor's interview with composer John Adams. It has been edited and condensed slightly.

Monitor: What brings you to writing a book right now?

Adams: It started six or seven years ago. There was a person who's a musicologist who was at work writing a fairly extended biographical study of me and my music. And I had spent a lot of time doing interviews with him going back into my childhood. When he came to write the book, he just had some problems, and it was clear he wasn't going to be able to finish it.

At the same time, I had been reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez's wonderful autobiography, which I think in English is called Living to Tell the Tale. What I loved about the Marquez was its humor and its sincerity and his actual humble origins. The book described a childhood rich with a lot of interesting people and stories in a very rural setting. Over the course of the book you see the development of a mature artist. I thought, "Well, I like to write, and I spent all this time with working with this guy, I might as well give it a shot myself."

This is perhaps kind of simplistic, but how is writing like or not like composing a piece of music?

That's actually a very good question. In certain ways it's similar because when you're writing a chapter you want it to have some sort of formal coherence. I use my ear a lot when I'm writing. I will re-read something, and I notice my musical sense of judgment comes into play in getting the feel of a sentence or the balance of the beauty of a verbal phrase.

Talking about that rural setting: You moved to New Hampshire after your first-grade year. What kind of role has the Concord area had in your life?

I think it had an absolutely profound role. I hope I made that clear in the book. My parents were not poor, but they certainly were of very modest means, but an education in the arts and literature and music in particular was something that meant a great deal to them. It may well have been because neither was able to go to college because of the Depression.

Concord was wonderfully situated because it was a modest-sized city, enough so that it had things to offer me. It had a music store where I was could buy manuscript paper and records. When it was clear that I needed training in music theory and harmony, they were able to find a teacher -- actually, it was a person on a faculty of St. Paul's School.

Then, of course, the two really important things for me were Nevers Band, which I think is still in existence --

It is.

-- and then the amateur orchestra at the New Hampshire state hospital, where I had my first orchestral composition performed.

One thing I don't mention in the book -- maybe I do mention -- my mother was actually a proofreader at the Monitor.

Are the reflections of Concord that have come out in your music?

I wrote a piece about five years ago with the fictional title My Father Knew Charles Ives. Charles Ives is often referred to as the first great American composer. He was a Yankee, he was born in rural Connecticut. The reason I wrote the piece with that whimsical title -- my father didn't actually know him, but he could have known him -- was that Charles Ives's childhood was very, very similar to mine.

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