Featured Book: Hallelujah Junction, continued

Copy at Case Memorial Library
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).