There are times, I amazed who contacts me for what. Recently, Recitals Australia contacted me to use a photograph of Hallelujah Junction in a classical music program. Below is composer John Adams interesting tale about how this piece came to be.
Hallelujah Junction (1996) is a small truck stop on Highway 395 in the High Sierras on the California-Nevada border near where I have a small cabin. For years I would pass through in my car, wondering what piece of music might have a title like “Hallelujah Junction.” It was a case of a good title needing a piece, so I obliged by composing this work for two pianos.
Two pianos is a combination that’s long intrigued me, and the pairing plays important roles in both “Common Tones in Simple Time” and “Grand Pianola Music.” What attracts me is the possibility of having similar or even identical material played
at a very slight delay, thereby creating a kind of planned resonance, as if the sonorities were being processed by a delay circuit. The brilliant attacks and rich ten-fingered chords of the grand pianos suggest endless possibilities for constructing an ecstatic, clangorous continuum, the effect of which could not be achieved
with any other sonorous instrument.
The final moments of Hallelujah Junction revel in the full onomatopoeic possibilities of the title. We get the full four-syllables—the “Hallelujah”—as well as the “junction” of the by-now crazed pianists, both of them very likely in extremis of full-tilt boogie.
— John Adams