HALLELUJAH JUNCTION: COMPOSING AN AMERICAN LIFE John Adams (Faber, £18.99)

I first came across John Adams when I randomly bought a cassette of his Chairman Dances in the 1980s, and have enjoyed his musical inventiveness and watched his career with interest ever since.

A New Englander, Adams’s early musical life was inevitably influenced by his clarinettist father and jazz-singer mother. He was a talented clarinet player himself but did not pursue it, preferring instead to develop his composing.

His book recounts not so much his own private life story, but the contexts and development of his compositions. As such, it is personal to the author. You could not call him a prolific composer, but his music has always been interesting and provocative. He weaves in the narrative a potted history of contemporary American music and reflections on his country’s contribution to the heavyweight classical back catalogue.

His operas have always proved controversial, particularly The Death of Klinghoffer, about a hijacking of Israeli passengers on the Achille Lauro. His account of its development is fascinating, as is the discussion of the political fallout.

He also tells of his early work on minimalist music and early electronic devices, which preceded the computer software-generated music so common now.

Adams is no loner geek, however, as he is active in seeking out inspirational collaborators for his ambitious projects. He is balanced in his assessment of his achievements, readily admitting where he was less successful than he had hoped.

If there is a minor key aspect to the book, it is that it occasionally reads like a collection of concert programme notes and uses terms which might be impenetrable to the casual reader. Taken overall, however, it is a rewarding evocation of a modern composer’s work.