Adams at his best when he's busy

Composer also finds time to pen vivid memoir

John Adams will conduct a performance of ''The Wound Dresser'' tomorrow. (Margaretta mitchell)

It's a particularly rich time for John Adams. For years he has been one of America's busiest and most original composers, forging large-scale works from a combination of minimalist techniques and a varied instrumental palette. His latest work, "Doctor Atomic," about the development of the atomic bomb, recently opened at the Metropolitan Opera, and another opera, "A Flowering Tree," has just come out on CD.

Adams also has just published a memoir, "Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life," describing the journey that took him from disillusioned avant-gardist to perhaps America's preeminent composer. There are insights into his own works as well as observations about musicians ranging from Charles Ives to Frank Zappa.

Adams is in town to visit Harvard, his alma mater. Tomorrow he'll conduct a performance of "The Wound Dresser," his ghostly setting of a Civil War poem by Walt Whitman. A subsequent panel discussion will include Adams and Harvard president (and Civil War scholar) Drew Faust.

The Globe caught up by phone with Adams at his home in Berkeley, Calif.

Q. What led you to write "Hallelujah Junction"?

A. I had been working with a musicologist who was planning to write an extended biographical study. We had done months of interviews and I'd gone way back to my childhood. It turned out he couldn't write it. And by that point I was so intrigued by going back into my mind. . . . Too few composers have actually written at all, never mind well.

Q. This sort of puts you in the company of Berlioz and Wagner.

A. Right - modest company. (laughter)

Q. Did you have a sense that yours was a uniquely American journey?

A. That's why I titled the book as I did. While I do consider my work as part of the tradition of great European symphonic music . . . my education and cultural pedigree was a uniquely American thing. Which involved coming to grips with popular culture and how we take jazz and rock and all the elements of American life and make them a part of our creative voice.

Q. In the book you describe a scene that you call a "revelation." You were driving through the Sierras listening to a tape of music from Wagner's "Götterdammerung." You found yourself saying, "He cares."

A. I didn't intend that to be the Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment in my book. . . . In retrospect, that definitely was a critical moment for me because, as I write in the previous chapter, I was having a lot of fun doing avant-garde music. Then I was going home at night and noticing that the music that was really giving me spiritual sustenance was music of great sincerity. That didn't mean just Wagner or Beethoven; it also meant Duke Ellington and Bob Dylan. And that's what I was missing in the abstract avant-garde.

Q. What was that revelation about?

A. I think it was about two things. One: It was about feeling. But it was also about harmony in general. And to this day I really feel that a composer doesn't have a real voice unless that composer has a unique sense of harmony.

Q. The piece that's at the center of your visit to Harvard is "The Wound Dresser." Where does it fall in the unfolding of your career?

A. Part of the reason we're doing that piece is that I'm doing the event with Drew Faust. I met her a year ago last May, when she gave me the Harvard Arts Medal. She's written this amazing book called "This Republic of Suffering." It's a book about how unprepared the country was for the enormous amount of death that occurred as a result of the Civil War. It's very melancholy but there's also something very deep and almost elegiac about it.

Q. That's pretty much how I would describe "The Wound Dresser."

A. I think of it as an atypical piece, [though] there are moments of similar elegiac tone in some of my earlier pieces. . . . I was very drawn to Whitman and to that particular idea that he was a caregiver, in the time before we had a word to describe what he did. What Whitman describes is very graphic - a bloody pail, sponges that are covered with blood and these horrible grievous wounds that are covered with gangrene. . . . So I took this very brutal but ultimately very tender and erotic statement by Whitman and I set it to music for baritone and orchestra.

Q. You're best known for operas that take on events of recent historical vintage that feel direct and immediate to us - "Nixon in China," "The Death of Klinghoffer," "Doctor Atomic." When you were developing as a composer, did you have a sense that you wanted to do that?

A. I'm frequently asked that question - sometimes in less polite terms. My first response is, if I was a novelist or a filmmaker, no one would ask this question. We're so used, particularly in film, to the subject matter [being] about our contemporary experience. And likewise in fiction. But for some reason, when it comes to opera, it raises eyebrows. And then we have to find some silly term like "CNN opera" or "docu-opera," both of which I think are not only demeaning but miss the point of what I'm doing. What I'm trying to do is take scenes - particularly what I call mythic archetypes of our experience as Americans - and use them as the core imagery and the core emotional constellation for my operas. And I think the fact that they've been successful is in part due to the fact that audiences really do connect with them.