John Adams will be at the Art Institute of Chicago this evening to participate in the Chicago Humanities Festival, a multidisciplinary event taking place in venues across the city this month and last. The composer, author of the memoir Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life, and, now, blogger extraordinaire (at Hell Mouth) will give the President's Lecture fittingly titled Where Music and Literature Collide, with a focus on novels by Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust, on how some writers of fiction describe the act of listening to music. The event will be held at the Art Institute's Rubloff Auditorium tonight at 6 PM, free to students and educators. For more information, visit chicagohumanities.org.

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Adams will head next to Washington, DC, where he will be fêted as a recipient of the 2009 NEA Opera Honors Award this weekend. The award—which celebrates the art of opera in the United States and the artists whose work in the field has had a significant impact—will be presented in a ceremony at the Harman Center for the Arts in Washington on Saturday night. The evening's other honorees are stage director and librettist Frank Corsaro, mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne, former San Francisco Opera general director Lotfi Mansouri, and conductor Julius Rudel.

Saturday's event will be hosted by Brian Stokes Mitchell and soprano Shirley Verrett with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg calling the proceeds to order and NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman offering welcoming remarks. John Adams will be presented the award by Deborah Borda, the president and CEO of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where Adams is currently the creative chair. West Coast, Left Coast, the festival he curated for the Philharmonic, opens the following weekend at LA's Walt Disney Hall with Eureka!, a special Opening Event featuring Kronos Quartet, Terry Riley, Matmos, and Mike Einziger.

For more information on this weekend's award ceremony, visit arts.gov.