Symphonic Prelude

With fifty years of compositions and decades of teaching to his credit, Samuel Adler is a member of the senior class of American composers. He met with Bostonia to talk about his less celebrated, but no less colorful, junior years.

by Michael B. Shavelson

Samuel Adler is ready to come clean. Sitting in his monastic faculty studio at the Juilliard School of Music, the composer, conductor, and music teacher leans close. “I have to tell you something,” he says. “I will confess. I was expelled from Boston University. Three times.”

	Corporal Samuel Adler conducts the U.S. Seventh Army Orchestra in Kassel, Germany, 1952. Photograph by Stern, Seventh Army Photo

Dressed in brown tweed, the seventy-five-year-old Adler (CFA’48) doesn’t look like a troublemaker. He is one of the country’s most prolific composers, with more than 400 published works in every musical mode and a handful of new commissions in draft. He studied with Piston and Hindemith at Harvard, Copland and Koussevitzky at Tanglewood. He has a wallful of honorary doctorates. He taught composition for thirty years at the Eastman School of Music and chaired its composition department, and wrote the leading textbook on orchestration. His liturgical music is frequently played at synagogue and church services around the world. So how on earth did he get kicked out of BU?

“BU has a very good music school today,” says Adler. “It prepares students exceptionally well. When I first got to Boston University in 1946, it didn’t. In those days we had a music faculty that was less than good. That changed while I was there because the G.I.s were coming back in droves and they were serious. We started to get a serious theory faculty.”

On the other hand, he is still exuberant about his nonmusic classes. “I had a wonderful humanities education,” he says. “Since I didn’t have to take the preparatory music courses, I was able to take philosophy, French, English, and my favorite, history. There were some great teachers, such as Dr. Mervyn Bailey in German. Even though German was my mother tongue, I left Germany when I was ten, so I had the vocabulary of a ten-year old.”

Adler says some of his music classes were fantastic (a word he enjoys), particularly those with Lucia Saylor Hersey and Robert King (CFA’36), who was a master of brass music and a music publisher. But Adler butted horns with some members of the faculty.

Making Music and Trouble

“Jacobus Langendoen, a cellist with the Boston Symphony, was a wonderful musician,” says Adler. “But even though he wasn’t really interested in conducting, he conducted the BU orchestra. And James Houghton, the choral conductor, was interested only in doing one big work every semester -- the Messiah or Elijah. All very well, but it was boring.”

Adler and many of his classmates worried that they weren’t getting any serious orchestral experience, so they organized the Intercollegiate Symphony Orchestra with players from the New England Conservatory, Tufts, and MIT. “We played only music by living composers,” says Adler. The conductor of this training orchestra was Richard Burgin, the BSO concertmaster and associate conductor. “We rehearsed every Monday for four hours. He let two of us conduct, one from the conservatory and me, and we would do one work like Don Juan all night long. It was a great experience.”

A little too great for the school’s administration. The Intercollegiate was making the official BU orchestra ring hollow. “After four months of success after success, the dean, Kenneth Kelley, called me in,” says Adler. “‘Sam, if you don’t give up this orchestra I’m going to expel you.’” Adler argued that the BU musicians were all still playing in the BU orchestra as well (Adler was assistant concertmaster), but the dean said he would not tolerate the competition. Adler said he wanted to continue the Intercollegiate. “OK,” said Kelley, “then don’t come back to school.”

All the players of the regular BU orchestra boycotted the next rehearsal. “If Sam gets expelled, we’re all staying away from the orchestra,” they told Kelley. “We have always been loyal; he has always been loyal; what’s the story?” Adler was reinstated after three days. The following year Arthur Fiedler replaced Langendoen as the conductor of the BU orchestra -- probably to Langendoen’s relief.

Adler next established a small choral group to concentrate on little-performed early music and contemporary works. “Another call from the dean. ‘Sam I told you last time I don’t want you to do this sort of thing.’ Same thing happened.”

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