Composer John Adams spent most of his school years in Concord, and from the early chapters of his new memoir, Hallelujah Junction, it seems like the area stuck with him.

Adams, whose concert pieces and operas have been performed around the globe, moved with his sister and parents to East Concord after his first grade year. He graduated from Concord High in 1965 before heading to Harvard. He played clarinet in local music groups, including a memorable stint in the state mental hospital's auxiliary orchestra.

"These concerts were intense affairs," he writes. "Nurses and guards would lead hundreds of patients in single file into the gymnasium where we in the orchestra sat, ready to play our concert. . . . A constant, low-level din of talk and chaotic movement prevailed throughout the show. Patients shouted and waved."

The book also details the young Adams's brush with political activism (he wrote a letter to the Monitor protesting his teacher's refusal to debate the Kennedy-Nixon race) and his creation of a fictional composer alter ego.

Adams left all that behind long ago, of course. His opera Doctor Atomic played this year at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. His piece commemorating the victims of Sept. 11, On the Transmigration of Souls, won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for music.

So when the chance came to interview Adams about his new book and his history in Concord, the Monitor jumped at the chance.

Monitor: You moved to New Hampshire after your first grade year. What kind of role has the Concord area had in your life?

Adams: I think it had an absolutely profound role. 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 could buy manuscript paper and records. When it was clear that I needed training in music theory and harmony, my parents were able to find a teacher - it was a person on the faculty of St. Paul's School.

Then, of course, the two really important things for me were Nevers Band, and then the amateur orchestra at the New Hampshire State Hospital, where I had my first orchestral composition performed.

Are there memories of Concord that have been reflected 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 - was that Charles Ives's childhood was very, very similar to mine. He learned music from his father, and he played in marching bands.

The first movement of that piece is called "Concord." It's an atmospheric piece that begins like an early-morning scenario, and then you hear a band in the background. Then the band takes over with these colliding marches. So the piece is sort of whimsical portrait of my experiences during summertime in Concord playing with Nevers Band.

There's also a little bit of an in-joke there because one of Charles Ives's most famous pieces is called the Concord Sonata, which is a big piano sonata.

But that's the other Concord. (Concord, Mass.)

That's the other Concord, right. So I wanted to have my own Concord.

Single page