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Mr. Adams writes in Chapter 4, "Regal Apparel": "I was hired not only to teach but to direct the [San Francisco Conservatory of Music]'s New Music Ensemble. … My first concert set the tone for what would be nearly ten years of bizarre menus I would serve up in museums, gallery spaces, and park arboreta around the city: Cage, Schoenberg, Ashley, and Messe de Nostre Dame by the fourteenth-century French composer Guillaume de Machaut. For the Machaut, a piece whose strangeness had caught my attention and stirred my imagination, I composed a 'trope' of electronic taped music, with ring-modulated bell sounds, traffic noise, and footsteps meant to provide a continuum to the live singing of the mass (which I conducted from the state). The San Francisco Chronicle critic who covered the concert compared my twentieth-century surround-sound accompaniment to Machaut's mass to 'someone scrawling graffiti on the walls of the Chartres Cathedral.' It was the first of many delicious opportunities for bon mots that my years of alternative programming would afford local music critics. …" (pp. 70-71).

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Mr. Adams writes in Chapter 3, "Free Radicals": "In the spring of 1969, during my final undergraduate year, I labored mightily on my first full-length piece, The Electric Wake. The origins of the title to this piece are lost in the backwaters of my memory. I suspect that it owes something to the influence of beat poetry and the legions of psychedelic bands that sported non sequitur names like the Strawberry Alarm Clock, the Electric Flag, and Cream. The Electric Wake was a 'wake' because the music was a setting of poetry about a psychedelic nymphet/goddess named Talley who consumes herself in a burning drug-induced ecstasy somewhere in a London park. The poetry was the work of a classmate, a premed student. … Of its content all that I can recall is that most of the poems were apostrophes declaimed in an elevated tone of Byronic rapture. I set them for 'electric' (that is, amplified) soprano and an ensemble of 'electric' strings, keyboards, harp, and percussion. The main influences were Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta and Messiaen's Chronochromie." (pp. 49-50)

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"I thought that LSD did open what Huxley (and Jim Morrison) called the 'doors' and give a hint of the universe as it might be if only I could shed my habitual way of being in the world. Of course the next step was a choice between more drugs and more trips or taking the slow, laborious road of mental and spiritual discipline offered by religion, specifically Tibetan or Zen Buddhism. … The last of my trips was pure Monty Python. … I wandered into a rehearsal of Beethoven's Choral Fantasy and watched the great Austrian pianist Rudolf Serkin play a gleaming black Steinway that stretched out in front [of] him from nine feet to twelve feet, and then to twenty feet and so on, à la R. Crumb, until it became the world's longest stretch limousine. That image may have been what gave birth years later to my piece Grand Pianola Music. By the following year, 1971, I more or less gave up all psychedelic encounters, including marijuana. They seemed tied to a time and place, and I felt that getting to the truly important spiritual and mental 'there' would require a more serious and arduous journey." (p. 46)

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"By the end of the first season the Bach Society Orchestra had become dangerously high profile among campus activities, and the inevitable journalistic comeuppance was awaiting me. This came in the form of a review in The Harvard Crimson that marched me to the scaffold for my overreaching programming: '… The program Adams chose for the group demanded a far higher level of musical competence than one can reasonably expect of any undergraduate organization. …' The Crimson critic's complaints were doubtless accurate, but they missed the palpable enthusiasm and unbuttoned pleasure that both the orchestra members and their conductor and possibly even the audience were experiencing. The Beethoven symphony [No. 2]'s exuberant aggressiveness shocked and delighted me. Listening to recordings or even a live performance could never have prepared me for the surge of energy that I felt from the podium. With its blindingly bright D major clanging against the plaster walls of Paine Hall, it introduced me firsthand to the sheer radicalism and manic drive of Beethoven's early music." (pp. 38-40)

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Mr. Adams writes in Chapter 2, "From Help! to 'Let It Be'": "In the fall of 1967 we came forth with a show called 'Bach and the Beatles.' … Later in the same academic year, I undertook a far greater plan, six performances, also in the Leverett House dining hall, of Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro. The stage director was a senior, majoring in English and well known already for his acting abilities: John Lithgow. I shudder to think how the young singers in the cast responded to my musical direction. I knew nothing about opera or about theatrical producing, nor did I have a clue about the extremely delicate instrument that is a classical singer's voice. From my vantage point in front of the orchestra, the singers never seemed loud enough, and I urged them on with heroic gesticulations as if they were a brass band. Pulling it all together took more than two months. Between auditions, scaring up an orchestra, supervising musical and staging rehearsals, and even managing the publicity I nearly lost track of my other academic responsibilities." (p. 36)

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"Even more critical in my development were the summers playing in Nevers's 2nd Regiment Band. This band dated back to the Civil War and continues to exist today as a semiprofessional ensemble that gives weekly concerts in the various city parks of the Concord area and marches during all the appropriate summer holidays, from Memorial Day to Labor Day. I played in the clarinet section along with my father. Again, although playing in a group mostly comprised of adults, I quickly advanced to the position of principal clarinet, which in a band is akin to concertmaster. For me the musicianship training was excellent, as each concert usually featured some transcription of a nineteenth-century opera overture. The lead clarinet parts were in most cases simply transposed versions of the original violin parts and at times could be ferociously difficult. I ate up the Oberon overture, Leonore No. 3, and Poet and Peasant while the baritone horns and mellophones and bass drum struggled to stay on the beat. Every concert began and ended with a march. Although Sousa was the favorite, I learned dozens of others. …" (p. 18)

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Mr. Adams writes in Chapter 1, "Winnipesaukee Gardens": "The orchestra, my first orchestra, performed under the august name of the New Hampshire State Hospital Auxiliary Orchestra. It was a community ensemble sponsored by the main mental hospital in the state. The performers were local amateurs — businessmen, schoolteachers, a car mechanic, our family doctor (on trombone), several lawyers, and others — who enjoyed a weekly confrontation with the instruments they had learned in their youth. The repertoire was 'light classics.' The first rehearsal I ever played included the Schubert 'Unfinished' Symphony and Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite. But we also played show tunes and Sousa marches. Occasionally a patient would be allowed to join the orchestra with predictably unpredictable results. Concerts were given three or four times a season for the assembled patients. These concerts were intense affairs. 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. …" (p. 17)