Samuel Adler

Samuel Adler is a Contemporary American conductor and composer of over 400 published works in all genres. Also a devoted educator, he taught at both the Juilliard School of Music and the Eastman School of Music and is the author of three important instructional texts. He was born in Mannheim, Germany in 1928 to musical parents. His mother was an amateur pianist and his father was a cantor at a synagogue and a composer. The outbreak of World War II in 1939 drove Adler and his family out of Germany to Massachusetts, where he began violin lessons with Albert Levy. He started studying composition with Herbert Fromm in 1941, and in the mid-'40s he enrolled at Boston University, where his composition professor was Hugo Norden. After his graduation in 1948, he studied composition with Paul Hindemith, Aaron Copland, and others at Harvard University, and he earned his MA in 1950. A short while later, he was drafted into the U.S. Army, as a corporal in the second armored division, stationed in Germany. As an act of post-war diplomacy, he formed the Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra in Stuttgart, which he conducted over 75 performances. The orchestra was a success, and Adler was awarded the Army Medal of Honor for his efforts with the ensemble. After he returned to the U.S. in 1953, he moved to Dallas, Texas, where he was appointed music director of Temple Emanu-El, the Dallas Lyric Theater, and the Dallas Chorale. He also taught at the University of North Texas, and the Hockaday School of Fine Arts. In 1966 he relocated to Rochester, New York with his wife and two daughters, and began teaching at the Eastman School of Music. He also served as the chair of the composition department beginning in 1974. He authored three widely used pedagogical texts, Choral Conducting (1971), Sight Singing (1979), and The Study of Orchestration (1982), which won the Deems Taylor Award in 1983. After his mother passed away in 1982, he composed his Symphony No. 2, which was inspired by the melody from a lullaby that she used to sing to him as a boy. He composed his Piano Concerto No. 1 in the following year for a former student, Bradford Gowen. The concerto was premiered in 1985 by Gowen with the National Symphony Orchestra and conductor Myung-Whun Chung. Other highlights of the '80s include a Guggenheim fellowship in 1984 and an award from the Music Teachers’ National Association as the composer of the year in 1986. He composed several concerti in the '90s such as Shir Hamaalot, concerto for woodwind quintet, and the Guitar Concerto, which he also arranged for band. In 1995 he became a professor emeritus at Eastman, and in 1997 he began teaching composition at the Juilliard School of Music. He continued teaching and composing through the 2000s and was honored with many awards, including the Charles Ives Award, The ASCAP Aaron Copland Award, and his 2008 induction into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame. In 2017, Adler retired from his position at Juilliard and published his autobiography, Building Bridges with Music: Stories from a Composer's Life. The 2018 release One Lives but Once: A 90th Birthday Celebration contains works from throughout his entire career, many of which are premiere recordings. His choral music was featured in 2022 on the album To Speak to Our Time: Choral Works by Samuel Adler, performed by Richard Pugsley and Gloriæ Dei Cantores.
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