I get up before dawn. From our bedroom window I glimpse the lights of the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco Bay. I make a strong cup of coffee and go onto the internet for an hour until my physical body wakes up. Sometimes I ride my bike up into the hills. Breakfast is the Californian ritual of wheat flakes, skimmed milk and fruit. Then I take a look online at The New York Times and sometimes Fox News to see how the other side is behaving. I read papers in Spanish, too, for a different point of view.

Our children, Sam and Emily, just left home, so Deborah and I are suffering empty-nest syndrome. Sam is a composer. Emily’s living in a trailer, teaching art on a Navajo Indian reservation. For company we bought Eloise, a gorgeous german short-haired pointer. She’s 11 weeks old and hasn’t learnt the meaning of “sit”.

We’ve built a beautiful house in Brushy Ridge, three hours north of San Francisco. All the wood for it was harvested right on the property. I love driving my truck and cutting down trees, but Deborah is terrified when I take down the chainsaw because I’m not very good at it. And the fire danger is so high, I need to have my head examined, but now I plan to spend more time there, composing in serious solitude.

My day is basically nine to five with a break for lunch. At the moment I’m composing a new piece for the Los Angeles Philharmonic — I’ll conduct it in London with the London Symphony Orchestra early in 2010. It’s a big deal when someone commissions a new work. I do respond well to the mental and physical pressure of an inflexible deadline, though. Without it I go slack.

Most younger composers these days do it all with computers. But for me life would be awful if I lost my 5B pencils. I still write scores in pencil on old-fashioned paper. I sit on a hard piano bench with a foam cushion, and take frequent yoga breaks. I’ll be on that piano bench for eight hours a day, seven days a week, and if I use any other chair, I get backache.

What I love about composing for the stage is being faced with evoking something — the pomposity of a presidential plane coming down the runway in Peking, the desert in the early-morning hours before a nuclear explosion. Those images force me to come out of myself and go to a new level in my musical imagination. For me the great myths of our time are the atomic bomb and terrorism — things we deal with every day. None of us is totally clear how we feel about them. But I’m a guarded optimist. I don’t think you can be an American and be otherwise. For all its warts and terrible faults, America has a tremendous capacity for joy. I hope that expression and energy is what people see in my music.

The architect Frank Gehry is a close friend. He has a staff of l00. Sometimes I think: “Gee, I wish I could have a staff just to worry about the oboes and violins.” But I’m intensely private. I had a personal assistant once, but having to break off and see somebody was too upsetting. I’d rather work alone. I wrote Nixon in China back in l987, but there’s a production of it on somewhere almost all the time. With 40 or 50 compositions out there, people are always playing my pieces, and I have to consider the needs of conductors, publishers and opera directors. Even if I’m totally absorbed, I answer the phone and check e-mails.

Lunch is a welcome break. We love cooking and we visit the farmers’ market several times a week. We live in a paradise for wonderful produce. When the kids were here, they knew I loved it when they interrupted me. I miss it terribly. I’m happy to meet very young composers who come by to show me what they’ve written.

I rarely go to concerts. Being fairly well known, I have to deal with people, which makes me feel exposed. The other night the New York Philharmonic were in town, and I know many of the players so I went backstage. But when it turns into “Are you going to write the concerto for me?”, conversation becomes a problem. It feels like a terrible burden.

Conducting is my Yin to my Yang of composing. I couldn’t live without the performing half of my personality. Depending on how uptight the orchestra is I might wear a tuxedo or my Italian tails. Those penguin suits are terrible. Sometimes I’ll wear a handmade black silk shirt. In Germany I wore a white tuxedo, thinking it was standard for summer. But the audience thought me overly flamboyant. I’m happiest in jeans, and I resist buying clothes until Deborah says she’s had enough, and twice a year we go into San Francisco to shop.

I shut down at 6pm. Things are still going on in my subconscious, but I need to switch off, open a bottle of wine and cook something delicious. I’m a disgraceful stay-at-home person who’s a terrible dancer and prefers to read.

I’m in the middle of a new translation of Anna Karenina. I haven’t read it for 20 years and I’m amazed how shocking and modern it is. We’re in bed by 11pm. Years ago I kept dream journals, but since I stopped writing them down, I don’t remember my dreams.

John Adams’s autobiography, Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life (Faber & Faber), is out now

Explore Music

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

Editor's choice

• Guns N’Roses: Chinese Democracy
• The 50 Biggest Movies of 2009
• Quantum of Solace