... and talking about Zappa ... I've just raced through this - John Adams' auto(music)biography. I had it beside me at lunchtime on Friday and I'm sure it was mistaken for some born-again tract. A title like that plus Adams' fresh-faced grin - well, you could be fooled into thinking I'd seen The Light.

It's quite illuminating about Adams' compositional methods and reading (a nice anecdote of him asking Ginsberg for Burroughs' address). Adams is pretty tough on Boulez (accusations of arid prescriptivism) and cautiously complimentary about FZ (one might even risk 'condescending' at times ...). I'm less convinced of my Adams-Zappa association the more of I hear of his music - but who cares? Each has his own musical world and I'm not taking sides.

"We composers often are at a loss to explain how we made something ... I suspect that most composers work in a stste of semi-trance, a creative state that is precariously balanced between conscious, logical decision-making and the unknowable instinctual workings of the freely associating brain. I have a deep respect for my own subconscious apparatus, for the part of me that is unknowable ...

... A compositional idea may come from any source. The composer's mind is like flypaper, ready at any moment to attract and trap an idea, a single sound or a complex of sounds. It may be the rhythms of a group of people chattering in a restaurant, or the Doppler effect of a passing train, or three notes from someone else's song, be it Mahler's or Otis Redding's. Or an inspiration might arise from half-consciously diddling with some piece of technology. We need to foster and jealously protect the 'what if' mode of creative play, taking delight in moving sounds around just for the pleasure of seeing and hearing what might happen. The point is to maintain a childlike openness, not to foreclose on a possibility because it does not immediately fit your preconceived notions of what the piece you wish to compose ought to sound like." (pp 192-3)

These paragraphs alone are worth the price of admission.