UTSA Presents a Tribute Concert to Composer

Samuel Adler

Wednesday, February 27, 2008, 7:30pm

UTSA Recital Hall, 1604 Campus

Works by Samuel Adler and Three Generations of His Students

Program

All works by Samuel Adler (b. 1928), unless noted

Preludium (1946)

for brass choir, performed by the UTSA Chamber Players, Don Miller, conductor

Evan Lavender, Michael Rodriguez, Robert Handy, trumpets

Cameron Carnes, Mickey Carrigan, horns

Mudia Akpobome, Frank Ogo, Daniel Elliot, trombones

Geraldo Garcia, euphonium

Ralph Alvarado, tuba

Johnny Mendoza, timpani

Four Poems of James Stephens (1950)

1. The Wind

2. Chill of the Eve

3. The Piper

4. And it was Stormy Weather

Linda Poetschke, soprano; Christine Debus, piano

Canto XIII (1994)

Rita Linard, piccolo

Lillian’s Chair (2002)

By David Heuser

Linda Poetschke, soprano; Christine Debus, piano

To one who has been long in city pent (2007)

By Niccolo Athens

Linda Poetschke, soprano; Allyson Dawkins, viola

Feux d’artifice – Tombeau (“Shuttles Explodes: Seven Feared Dead”)

Ballade for Solo Piano (1986)

By Don Freund

Owen Lovell, piano

Music for Eleven (1964)

Rita Linard, flute/piccolo

Megan Martin, flute

David Herbert, oboe

Cathy Jones, clarinet

Carlos Esparza, bass clarinet

Ron Noble, bassoon

Juan Mendoza, Laura Gomez, Rich Larambide, Brad Smith, Tara Fike, percussion

Don Miller, conductor

Samuel Adler was born March 4, 1928, Mannheim, Germany and came to the United States in 1939. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in May 2001. He is the composer of over 400 published works, including 5 operas, 6 symphonies, 12 concerti, 8 string quartets, 4 oratorios and many other orchestral, band, chamber and choral works and songs, which have been performed all over the world. He is the author of three books, Choral Conducting (Holt Reinhart and Winston 1971, second edition Schirmer Books 1985), Sight Singing (W.W. Norton 1979, 1997), and The Study of Orchestration (W.W. Norton 1982, 1989, 2001). He has also contributed numerous articles to major magazines and books published in the U.S. and abroad.

Adler was educated at Boston University and Harvard University, and holds honorary doctorates from Southern Methodist University, Wake Forest University, St. Mary’s Notre-Dame and the St. Louis Conservatory. His major teachers were: in composition, Herbert Fromm, Walter Piston, Randall Thompson, Paul Hindemith and Aaron Copland; in conducting, Serge Koussevitzky.

He is Professor-emeritus at the Eastman School of Music where he taught from 1966 to 1995 and served as chair of the composition department from 1974 until his retirement. Before going to Eastman, Adler served as professor of composition at the University of North Texas (1957-1977), Music Director at Temple Emanu-El in Dallas, Texas (1953-1966), and instructor of Fine Arts at the Hockaday School in Dallas, Texas (1955-1966). From 1954 to 1958 he was music director of the Dallas Lyric Theater and the Dallas Chorale. Since 1997 he has been a member of the composition faculty at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City. Adler has given master classes and workshops at over 300 universities worldwide, and in the summers has taught at major music festivals such as Tanglewood, Aspen, Brevard, Bowdoin, as well as others in France, Germany, Israel, Spain, Austria, Poland, South America and Korea.

Some recent commissions have been from the Cleveland Orchestra (Cello Concerto), the National Symphony (Piano Concerto No. 1), the Dallas Symphony (Lux Perpetua), the Pittsburgh Symphony (Viola Concerto), the Houston Symphony (Horn Concerto), the Barlow Foundation/Atlanta Symphony (Choose Life), the American Brass Quintet, the Wolf Trap Foundation, the Berlin-Bochum Brass Ensemble, the Ying Quartet and the American String Quartet to name only a few. His works have been performed lately by the St. Louis Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Mannheim Nationaltheater Orchestra. Besides these commissions and performances, previous commissions have been received from the National Endowment for the Arts (1975, 1978, 1980 and 1982), the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the Koussevitzky Foundation, the City of Jerusalem, the Welsh Arts Council and many others.

Adler has been awarded many prizes including a 1990 award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Charles Ives Award, the Lillian Fairchild Award, the MTNA Award for Composer of the Year (1988-1989), and a Special Citation by the American Foundation of Music Clubs (2001). In 1983 he won the Deems Taylor Award for his book, The Study of Orchestration. In 1988-1989 he was designated "Phi Beta Kappa Scholar." In 1989 he received the Eastman School’s Eisenhard Award for Distinguished Teaching. In 1991 he was honored being named the Composer of the Year by the American Guild of Organists. Adler was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (1975-1976); he has been a MacDowell Fellow for five years and; during his second trip to Chile, he was elected to the Chilean Academy of Fine Arts (1993) "for his outstanding contribution to the world of music as a composer." In 1999, he was elected to the Akademie der Kuenste in Germany for distinguished service to music. While serving in the United States Army (1950-1952), Adler founded and conducted the Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra and, because of the Orchestra’s great psychological and musical impact on European culture, was awarded the army’s Medal of Honor.

Adler has appeared as conductor with many major symphony orchestra, both in the U.S. and abroad. His compositions are published by Theodore Presser Company, Oxford University Press, G. Schirmer, Carl Fischer, E.C. Schirmer, Peters Edition, Ludwig Music, Southern Music Publishers, Transcontinental Music Publishers. Recordings of his works have been done on RCA, Gasparo, Albany, CRI, Crystal and Vanguard.

This concert also features music by three of Samuel Adler many students, from three different generations: Don Freund, David Heuser (who also studied with Dr. Freund) and current Adler student (and San Antonio native) Niccolo Athens.

Don Freund was born in Pittsburgh in 1947; he studied at Duquesne University and earned his graduate degrees at the Eastman School of Music. His composition teachers were Joseph Willcox Jenkins, Darius Milhaud, Charles Jones, Wayne Barlow, Warren Benson, and Samuel Adler. From 1972 to 1992 he was chairman of the Composition Department at Memphis State University. As founder and coordinator of Memphis State University's Annual New Music Festival, he programmed close to a thousand new American works; he has been conductor or pianist in the performance of some two hundred new pieces, usually in collaboration with the composer. He has been Professor of Composition at the Indiana University School of Music since 1992.

David Heuser attended the Eastman School of Music and then the Indiana University School of Music, where he received his doctorate degree in music composition in 1995. A native of New Jersey, Heuser has resided in San Antonio since 1997. He is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio teaching music composition and theory, and electronic music.

Niccolo Athens is currently a second year BM student at the Juilliard School where he studies composition with Samuel Adler. A San Antonio native, he attended Alamo Heights High School during which time he studied composition privately with Justin Merritt and Timothy Kramer. In the summer of 2006, his ‘Legende Boreale’ was performed five times by the San Antonio Symphony. He is also a recipient of BMI’s Carlos Surinach Prize for young composers. Niccolo is active as a violist

Lillian's Chair

for Lillian Lowenfels

Lillian has just arisen from her chair.
She has gone into her garden to commune with snails
to answer the birds' questions.
She has left her shawl and her cane
and that iron leg brace.
Won't she need her shawl in the garden?
Won't she be feeling the cold?

And she has forgotten her sling
thrown it carelessly aside -
the crumpled black satin
in which she cradled her dead arm
for seventeen years.
In one hand she took her straw basket
in the other her pruning shears:
"That bush needs seeing to," she muttered
and went looking for red clover, queen anne's lace.

What is she doing so long in the garden?
Where has she gone with her red hair?
She just grew tired of sitting and watching.
A vivid light pulled her into the leaves.
Woolen shawl, satin sling, iron brace -
she just walked out on them all.

Left us this empty chair.

-Olga Cabral (1909-1997)

from the book The Darkness in My Pockets published 1976 by Gallimaufry, are reprinted with the kind permission of the estate of Olga Cabral; © 1976 by Olga Cabral.

To One who has been Long in City Pent

The composer writes:

I composed To One who has been Long in City Pent last October, and it is a kind of “musical postcard” home from New York. The setting is in three short parts: slow-fast-slow. A solo viola provides the only accompaniment, making the work much sparser than a typical song with piano. In some ways, this made composition more difficult, but such songs with only a melodic instrument for accompaniment have been written by many composers including Holst and Vaughan Williams. Viola is my primary instrument, so it was a natural choice.

(over for text)

To One who has been Long in City Pent (1817)

To one who has been long in city pent,
    'Tis very sweet to look into the fair
And open face of heaven,--to breathe a prayer
Full in the smile of the blue firmament.
Who is more happy, when, with heart's content,
    Fatigued he sinks down into some pleasant lair
    Of wavy grass, [and reads a debonair
And gentle tale of love and languishment?]
Returning home at evening, with an ear
    Catching the notes of Philomel,--an eye
Watching the sailing cloudlet's bright career,
    He mourns that day so soon has glided by:
E'en like the passage of an angel's tear
    That falls through the clear ether silently.

John Keats (1795-1821)

Feux d’artifice – Tombeau (“Shuttles Explodes: Seven Feared Dead”)

The composer writes:

The title and subtitle may provide all the listener needs to know about this work. The tension between the power and brilliance of the shuttle’s lift-off and explosion and the tragic outcome demanded a musical expression, with solo piano being the ideal medium. The shuttle disaster deeply affects us, not simply because of sorrow for the loss of life, or because of bruised national pride, but because it presents an iridescent metaphor for our

existence. Our awareness of the ultimate dissolution of the universe only creates a context which makes our quests and adventures, despite their inevitable futility, radiant and heroic.

The climax of this piece comes not in the virtuoso fireworks, but in a massive “white-key” chorale which appears suddenly, like death, suggesting the shuttle, gigantic, white, promising another world, poised with its enormous booster rockets on the launch pad on a frosty January morning, imposing and irresistible.

Feux d’artifice-Tombeau was commissioned by and written for Samuel Viviano, a pianist who infuses his performances of new (and old) music with magical brilliance and electrifying emotional intensity. Mr. Viviano premiered the work on July 20, 1986 in Merkin Hall, New York City.