Featured Book: Hallelujah Junction, continued

Copy at Case Memorial Library
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)