It’s unnerving, even irritating, when brilliant composers also write brilliant prose. Good grief, don’t they have enough notes with which to express themselves without using words as well? But I must fair-mindedly declare John Adams’s Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life (Faber and Faber, £18.99; Buy the book ) to be as entertaining and provocative a read as any book published on music this year.

Music lovers will find Adams’s account of his struggle to discover his own “voice” riveting, torn, as he is, between the complex atonal style favoured by his Harvard professors and the wild Hendrix and Zappa tracks he heard coming from every student room on the campus. Deciding to quit the cerebral wasteland of 12-tone music, he drives west to immerse himself in the laid-back “minimalist” music and hippy counter-culture of 1970s San Francisco.

But just as fascinating is his take on American politics, particularly in view of the hostile reaction in some quarters to his “terrorist” opera, The Death of Klinghoffer. Not so much an autobiography, more a panoramic assessment of American cultural values by one of its finest creative minds.

Much the same era is chronicled in Philip Norman’s exhilarating biography of John Lennon (HarperCollins, £9.99; Buy the book ). To say it’s comprehensive is like saying that the Sahara is sandy; Norman starts with a portrait of Lennon’s entertainer grandad, and traces the star’s life to that fatal New York shooting. More than that, he evokes an era that seems astonishing now: when four provincial British lads, abetted by not much more than three guitars and a drum kit, changed the way in which the youth of the world thought, behaved and sang.

The Sunday Times 100 best holiday reads

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Two critical collections about music held my attention. The Danger of Music — and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Roth Foundation, £28.95; Buy the book ) brings together pieces by Richard Taruskin, probably the most controversial musicologist of our time. He lashes out against everything from period-instrument “authenticity” (it isn’t, he says) and the academic establishment’s blind worship of Modernism to the anti-Semitism that ran through the European musical world into the 20th century.

His most ferocious fire is reserved for none other than John Adams, particularly over the alleged pro-Palestinian bias in Klinghoffer. Read this alongside Hallelujah Junction and you’ll feel like a UN peacekeeper caught in the middle of a war.

Bayan Northcott’s The Way We Listen Now (Plumbago, £15.99; Buy the book ) is nothing like as incendiary, but that is its strength. Very English, steeped in centuries of music and utterly fair-minded, this veteran composer and critic collects essays written over 20 years. Whether it’s about minimalism or Wagner, he presents perceptive insights in superbly crisp prose.

“Most rock journalism is people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read,” Frank Zappa said. But he hadn’t seen Loops, the sharp new twice-yearly music-writing journal from Faber and Faber and the indie record label Domino. Issue one includes Hari Kunzru’s breezy beatnik rumination on the great blind multi-instrumentalist Moondog, the precocious novelist Richard Milward hymning the druggy pleasures of Spacemen 3 and Anywn Crawford’s examination of female fandom.

Finally, some fiction about musicians from Kazuo Ishiguro, who penned that subtly elegiac masterpiece The Remains of the Day. There’s the same strain of elegant wistfulness, shading into bittersweet melancholy, in Nocturnes, subtitled “five stories of music and nightfall” (Faber and Faber, £16.98; Buy the book ). These are tales of musicians, or musical people, coming to terms (or not) with failure: professional, romantic, physical, artistic. The thrust of each story is left hazy and unresolved — like life itself, especially in the drifting, insecure world that most musicians inhabit.

And the classic read? Although published only a year ago, Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (HarperPerennial, £14.99; Buy the book ) has made a huge impact, especially among readers who might not know much about Schoenberg, Stockhausen, Cage, Boulez and all those other 20th-century giants who still strike fear into many concertgoers’ hearts. Ross’s trick is to make sense of this seemingly incoherent century by joining up the dots between the big musical events and the traumatic social upheavals happening simultaneously.

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