[00:00:00]
MARK SLOBIN: In the cantorial world, the relationship between those two is something that interests me because…

[00:00:11]
SAMUEL ADLER: I just thought of something which is very interesting. You know, most of the people who wrote for the synagogue in the past were cantors.

[00:00:24]
MARK SLOBIN: Right.

[00:00:25]
SAMUEL ADLER: In the same way as most composers of the eighteenth and ninteenth century…seventeenth, even, before, starting with Machaut, were actual practitioners in the church or wherever they were doing. I mean, they were actual musicians doing their thing. The trouble with the cantors was that they were not trained well. Machaut and Palestrina were trained well. And this has perpetuated this kind of amateurish music so that those of us who are not cantors are at a disadvantage in one way. We are too well-educated to write music that is amateurish enough for the new cantor to sing. Now, I want to take away the word “new,” because the new cantor is a very well trained cantor and they will be able to do it. Whether they will do it or not is a question, because they are under such pressure to do the music that sounds quote, “like hazzanut,” unquote.

[00:01:26]
SAMUEL ADLER: And this is a problem because as we are composers who just want to write something that’s meaningful to us and hopefully to the congregation, we don’t write the old hazzanut which, as you know and as you, I hope, are proving throughout this whole thing, is not as much traditional as it is trying to imitate those people that lived around them. I mean, there’s that famous story about, you know, the cantor goes to an Italian opera and says, “My God, that would be wonderful to sound like Model Ani Lefanecha And so the happy things are patented after–patterned–after Italian opera or German marches, while the unhappy things are the Russian sad songs and so on and so forth. And that became tradition. And now that non-practicing people that are not cantors are writing music for the synagogue, there is a kind of dichotomy developing. And I’m afraid that we have to face that.

[00:02:26]
MARK SLOBIN: So this is, well, I mean, part of that’s a couple of generations old already.

[00:02:30]
SAMUEL ADLER: It is. But it hasn’t changed much in, for instance, in the Conservative movement. I mean, these cantors, for the most part, even the young ones, think that this upbeat kind of stuff is one thing and the crying is another. Those are the two modes that they have and the two modalities that they have. It’s either Freilach you know, or it’s crying. There is no music as such. It’s a traditional kind of way of doing things. And even though I have great respect for it, because it is a tradition, it happens not to be my tradition. And I can’t go along with it.

[00:03:14]
MARK SLOBIN: Well, I suppose in that sense it’s easier for the Reform since–

[00:03:17]
SAMUEL ADLER: Oh, it is very much easier.

[00:03:20]
MARK SLOBIN: They just simply have no tradition of composing music.

[00:03:21]
SAMUEL ADLER: Exactly. But you see, the problem is that even in the Reform, there is a tendency to imitate the other in order to be called Hazzanim, you see. In the Reform movement, it’s always, well, I’ll tell you a story. When we first came to this country, the tradition, unfortunately, American Jews, being influenced so greatly by Eastern European Judaism, know very little about the German synagogue. And the German synagogue was a very formidable thing. I mean, musically especially, I mean, my–in the synagogue that I grew up in, there was a hundred-voice mixed chorus and a huge organ, bigger than in any church in Mannheim. There were five cantors employed and five rabbis. And this was a tremendous organization. The synagogue seated about 2800, and it was at least half-full every Shabbat morning, at least.

[00:04:23]
SAMUEL ADLER: If not, about 1800 people every…And it was a big production, you know, and the parochet, the curtain on the–on the bema, was changed with the seasons. I mean it was the same as in the Lutheran Church. They wore the same kind of garb, etc. This kind of pomp really affected me with an ay [ sic]when I was young. When we first came, my father got a job in Worcester, nine months after we landed. As a matter of fact, he got the job from–on the seventh day of Pesach, he had to go there and daven, and they liked him, and so they took him. It was a Reform congregation. So we got there in August. And two weeks after we got there, it was Tisha B’Av. And my father had always done the Tisha B’Av service. I mean, that was…I mean, and the Reform Jews in those days didn’t even know what Tisha B’Av was. So we went to the big Shul on Providence Street.

[00:05:25]
SAMUEL ADLER: And we came in, and this is typical of what the division was in those days. There was a shammas who was appropriately called Shaya. And he pounded the bema as soon as my father and I walked in, and said, “Sha, shtil. The Hazzan from the goyim.” Well, my father in those days had no sense of humor. He developed it in America. But in those days, it was typically German, very serious. I mean, this was “You don’t say that in shul. You don’t talk in shul. You don’t…,” you know. Well, he was–angry is not the word for it. I mean, he was really put down. What was worse was we waited, there was a midnight service. We waited. Nothing happened. It was 12:30. And Shaya came over to my father. He says, “Hazzan, you read Hebrew?” Well, I want to tell you, that was the last straw. He said, “Why?” He didn’t speak very much English, but he understood that much. He said, “Our Hazzan is sick. Can you do the service?” My father sat down on the ground and did the service like they will never forget. He walked out of that shul, never to set foot in it again. He was that mad, you know? But I mean, the division in those days. Today, of course, it’s not. I’m happy to say that there is a crossover between the Hazzanim of Reform and Conservative.

[00:07:00]
SAMUEL ADLER: And I think the younger people are being trained so well musically that perhaps they’ll say, “Okay, let’s not only imitate. Let’s bring in new things. Let’s, you know, worry about the musical worth of a piece. Let’s worry about how we interpret a prayer.” You know, not every prayer is sad. I mean, Friday night doesn’t have a sad prayer in it. The Ahava Rabbah mode on Friday night shouldn’t be used. They all are crying all over the place, even with the Lekha Dodi, you know. And the musician who writes, the composer writes for the synagogue, who is not a hazzan and who perhaps knows the tradition of hazzanut, but doesn’t want to perpetuate these old fashioned myths about what is to be said about a certain prayer and write something new. Or sometimes looks at a Sephardic tradition which doesn’t cry…

[00:07:53]
MARK SLOBIN: Right.

[00:07:54]
SAMUEL ADLER: …Is inspired by these things. I remember doing, when I wrote B’sha’arei T’filla, the service with orchestra, for Shaarei Tefila, which is the New York congregation, they had their 100th anniversary, I wrote it for them. I fell in love with a wonderful set of–not Hassidic–of Sephardic tunes, and used them in that service. And of course people were shocked and thought that was not Jewish. I mean, the way they think Rossi is Catholic, you know. I feel that we have been out of the ghetto long enough now that we shouldn’t always yearn to go back. Happily–even though I’m a Holocaust survivor, I never grew up in a ghetto. And that has an effect on me. You know, I don’t really feel that there is…I mean, I think there’s a lot to sing and praise about and not so much to be sad about.

[00:08:53]
MARK SLOBIN: So you mean by ghetto, you mean that sadness?

[00:08:55]
SAMUEL ADLER: No. The kind of enclosed bad music which grew up, after all the shtetl, to me, is not the cultural greatness that is being ascribed to it by, let’s say, somebody like Howe [sic], you know, who feels that that’s the great tradition. That was the most sterile form of sterile…

[00:09:14]
MARK SLOBIN: [Inaudible] doing that kind of music. And I mean, this is the great myth about Eastern Europe is that it was made up of people in shtetls.

[00:09:19]
SAMUEL ADLER: No they weren’t.

[00:09:20]
MARK SLOBIN: In Odessa…[crosstalk]

[00:09:22]
SAMUEL ADLER: Oh, that was a great–great home, listen.

[00:09:24]
MARK SLOBIN: They were doing things with big choirs…

[00:09:26]
SAMUEL ADLER: My father had a record of the lady hazzan from Odessa, who sang a Kaddish, which is in his service, Nachalath Israel, he transcribed it. It’s absolutely fantastic. But of course, it is very much like Russian opera.

[00:09:42]
MARK SLOBIN: Yeah.

[00:09:43]
SAMUEL ADLER: I mean, they took–How did they know? They couldn’t go into the conservatories or if they could, it was spotty. Some of them did. Of course, some of them had to convert in order to go. But the thing is, the myth of the shtetl has pervaded everything, I’m sorry to say. I mean, Kharkov, you know, was a great Jewish community or Kiev or Moscow and so on. And Leningrad, of course, Warsaw.

[00:10:09]
MARK SLOBIN: Budapest.

[00:10:09]
SAMUEL ADLER: Sure. And Prague. I mean, my God, these were not shtetl. But we, because of “Fiddler on the Roof” and that kind of stuff, we yearn for this kind of crap.

[00:10:20]
MARK SLOBIN: I guess the manifestation of that and one of the things I’m curious about is this turn around to the admiration of the Hasidim.

[00:10:28]
SAMUEL ADLER: Well, that’s it exactly, exactly.

[00:10:30]
MARK SLOBIN: Whereas Sholem Aleichem, you know, and everybody else…

[00:10:33]
SAMUEL ADLER: Made fun of it, made fun of them.

[00:10:35]
MARK SLOBIN: Now, the feeling is that these are the authentic Jews.

[00:10:37]
SAMUEL ADLER: That’s right.

[00:10:38]
MARK SLOBIN: Because they’re the ones who keep looking like the old Jews or whatever.

[00:10:41]
SAMUEL ADLER: That’s right. And the Misnagdim really were the people who perpetuated the greatness of Judaism, not [inaudible].

[00:10:47]
MARK SLOBIN: And, musically, this is rather an extraordinary thing.

[00:10:49]
SAMUEL ADLER: Well, because it’s folk, and we are–now this whole ethnicity bit. I don’t think the Jews are the only ones suffering from that. I think the Italians and the Germans and the French, they’re all going behind them [sic]–and especially the Hispanic culture. I mean, everybody would think that Mexico is the Spanish culture. You know, when the culture of Spain is the great culture and nobody knows that. You know, it’s a very…I think it’s a kind of searching for roots. And those are obviously different roots. And so therefore, they grab on to them. I think the Hasidim and the whole Hasidic culture is one of the lowest things that we can latch onto. I mean, not that there aren’t some great things, but I mean, certainly our great writers didn’t come from the Hasidim.

[00:11:37]
MARK SLOBIN: Well, the musical side, I suppose, which works in a way, is the notion that music has a kind of primal quality. It has an ecstatic body, which you certainly don’t get from listening to other kinds of synagogue music.

[00:11:50]
SAMUEL ADLER: That’s right. That’s right. Well, some you do. I mean, there, you know, I mean, I would say that there was an ecstasy in the Lewandowski type of music that Sulzer and Lewandowski were writing. And in the Mendelssohnian type music that they were writing. I mean, there is– he wrote some really great fugal things which when sung by a hundred voices and if people are really in the mood, they’ll get something from it. It’s like Bach. I mean, after all–and Rossi. I think this was a kind of searching or reaching for ecstasy. You don’t have to dance around and sing the same thing. It doesn’t have to be hallucinatory. That’s what it Hasidism is, after all. It’s like taking drugs. I mean, Hasidism is a kind of a holy roller type of religion [sic].

[00:12:44]
MARK SLOBIN: [inaudible], mystical.

[00:12:44]
SAMUEL ADLER: Right. And I mean, Buber got this kind of mystical thing. But his writings are certainly not Hasidic, you know.

[00:12:52]
MARK SLOBIN: So musically, this notion, I want to get back to where we started, the notion of the composer as opposed to the practitioner, that this juncture is…

[00:13:00]
SAMUEL ADLER: Yeah.

[00:13:01]
MARK SLOBIN: That starts where? With the…

[00:13:03]
SAMUEL ADLER: I would say it starts with people who were choir directors like Lewandowski. He was not a cantor. And so therefore I would say Lewandowski, I don’t know if Leo Low was a cantor, was he?

[00:13:17]
MARK SLOBIN: Not really.

[00:13:18]
SAMUEL ADLER: No. And people like that, there were some choir directors, let’s put them this way, who tried very hard to do something else. Now, in Germany, they were more successful because they had mixed choirs and things like that. They could write extended choral things. In Eastern Europe, less so because they had to adhere to certain said things, even in the big synagogues, apparently. Now, I don’t know what the music in, well in Leningrad, I mean, in St. Petersburg, there was this whole set of people with some Minsky and Arno Nadel and those people.

[00:13:48]
MARK SLOBIN: Now there’s your other branch.

[00:13:49]
SAMUEL ADLER: That’s right.

[00:13:51]
MARK SLOBIN: People who are simply composers who have moved into an ethnic stream of composition.

[00:13:55]
SAMUEL ADLER: Right. But that is the socialist kind. I mean, that’s the people who are leaving the synagogue. I’m not talking about the socialist in a political sense. They are the people who are ethnically Jewish but not synagogal.

[00:14:10]
MARK SLOBIN: Right.

[00:14:10]
SAMUEL ADLER: Although Arno Nadel, who is a good friend of my father’s…And I have some wonderful correspondence with them. They always spoke of, you know, changing the synagogue into a–as something that is really profound musically, you know, that they want to write their best music. It’s interesting…

[00:14:33]
MARK SLOBIN: But they didn’t, those people.

[00:14:34]
SAMUEL ADLER: Well, they weren’t able to. They weren’t great composers. I mean, Milner and some Minsky, they were just not…

[00:14:40]
MARK SLOBIN: Why is it that nobody who was a good composer wanted to write for the synagogue?

[00:14:42]
SAMUEL ADLER: However…Well, because, you see, the problem is if they were good composers, they were turned off by the synagogue. I mean, Mahler was a very anti-Semitic person by the way. There’s a terrifying letter when he went to Lembach, he wrote back to his very anti-Semitic wife, something that she relished, and that was he looked at the Hasidic community and he said, “These people are so grotesque looking and so on. And the only thing I regret is some of them may be my relatives.” You know, I mean, this kind of thing, it’s worse than Wagner, you know, that kind of….

[00:15:23]
MARK SLOBIN: …Assimiliated.

[00:15:23]
SAMUEL ADLER: That’s right. Now, Mendelssohn never did that because, of course, he grew up in a German community of Jews that were so integrated into the society.

[00:15:32]
MARK SLOBIN: Sure, in a different situation.

[00:15:32]
SAMUEL ADLER: Right. And, now Kafka never did it because he also was in…I mean, Prague, after all, was the greatest assimilated…

[00:15:40]
MARK SLOBIN: [inaudible crosstalk].

[00:15:44]
SAMUEL ADLER: But I mean, as far as composers were concerned, it was just not possible to go into a conservatory and study music and then come out and go into a Jewish situation, which would have been ridiculous because the Jews wouldn’t pay you and didn’t care about it, except in Germany. And there, from the Hitler time on, and even in the twenties, after the First World War, you had a movement of people who were interested. And then, of course, what is completely forgotten, and I wish somebody would write about it, is the whole Kulturbund idea, where when the Jews were thrown out of the theaters and [out] of the dance groups and out of the operas, they made their own. My first operatic experience, I remember when I was six, seven, eight years old, there was a Jewish opera, but they weren’t doing Jewish operas. They were doing Tosca and Madame Butterfly. And the conductor was Steinberg. William Steinberg, you know.

[00:16:40]
MARK SLOBIN: Yeah. That’s sort of off the track but…

[00:16:42]
SAMUEL ADLER: The things like Hanukkah, King David. And all the time we had a full orchestra, a big choir. I have a picture when they did my father’s oratorio “Licht und Volk” in 1929. I mean, 400 voices, large orchestra. I mean, even before the Hitler time.

[00:17:03]
MARK SLOBIN: Yeah.

[00:17:03]
SAMUEL ADLER: You know, this was a cultural expression of the Jews. And it was for that that people like Herbert Fromm and people wrote…the younger set. And of course, unfortunately, that they were–they had to leave. Actually, it’s fortunately. Because people like Dessau, you know, and Hanns Eisler, they all wrote for those. I mean, we don’t know them anymore. But for instance, I just read those essays by Hense [sic]. And he thought that he thinks that Dessau is a composer whose time will come. He thinks he’s the greatest German composer. You know, Hindemith and Dessau, those were the composers.

[00:17:42]
MARK SLOBIN: But Dessau wrote Jewish music too?

[00:17:44]
SAMUEL ADLER: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I mean, he did that when–after Hitler. But then, of course, he became communist, he always was.

[00:17:53]
MARK SLOBIN: Oh, but he had a Jewish phase, I mean?

[00:17:55]
SAMUEL ADLER: Oh, yes. I have a wonderful arrangement of Al Tzefat Yam Kanecha [sic]. Beautiful setting by Dessau. And Eisler wrote, you know…They were also, they were nationalist Jews, let’s put it that way. Not religious Jews. And actually, you know, this development would be the same as non-Jews, because today when people are trained, they can choose whether they want to go and write synagogue music or secular music, just like Vincent Persichetti can write a mass or can write a symphony. And I also have that choice. And I choose–some of my compatriots don’t choose to write for the synagogue, for instance, Aaron Copland. He always–we talked about it and he said, “Well, you know Sam, the synagogue turned me off musically because they didn’t want to hear anything.” But the interesting part is the earliest works of his that have just been published are “Four Psalm Motets,” which is very–which he wrote under the guidance of Boulanger, who, of course, wanted him to be religious. You know, she turned everybody into Catholics, but she couldn’t quite– he would look funny as a Catholic.

[00:19:09]
MARK SLOBIN: Yeah. Guys like that, you see, who could have chosen…

[00:19:12]
SAMUEL ADLER: But why should he?

[00:19:15]
MARK SLOBIN: [Crosstalk].

[00:19:15]
SAMUEL ADLER: No, it wasn’t. No. And the atmosphere, the Jewish atmosphere in America was not conducive. The Reform wanted this kind of sterile music.

[00:19:25]
MARK SLOBIN: Binder and…

[00:19:25]
SAMUEL ADLER: Well, Binder was one of the better ones.

[00:19:27]
MARK SLOBIN: They had their own generation.

[00:19:28]
SAMUEL ADLER: Right. Helfman, Binder, and Freed. Freed is an excellent composer, I think. And as a matter of fact, you know, the strange thing is, I did a workshop for the HUC this year, and I did Fromm, Schlit, and Freed. Now, there were the first major three composers who could have gone into the secular field, and did to some extent. Fromm was an opera conductor and in his youth really wanted to go into a secular field. Freed certainly did. As a matter of fact, the reason Freed went into the synagogue was Nadia Boulanger. She made him go. She said, “Listen, you’re an organist. Why don’t you play in the temple?” And he–that’s what he…what stuck in his mind. And he did. And of course, Schlit won the Mozart Prize, the biggest prize in Europe. He could have gone into non-Jewish music and he did. He wrote all kinds of pieces before he went into the synagogue. But these are the first composers of the older generation who went into the synagogue by choice.

[00:20:28]
MARK SLOBIN: [Affirmative]

[00:20:29]
SAMUEL ADLER: And I think ever since then, I mean, I find that there is a great interest in my Jewish students in going and doing some synagogue music. Except they always say, “In my synagogue, they wouldn’t do this music,” you see.

[00:20:42]
MARK SLOBIN: Yeah.

[00:20:42]
SAMUEL ADLER: And that’s what’s stopping it. Now these–most of these cantors will talk big, but when somebody writes something that’s not Nusach, what do they mean? You know, what does that mean? “Nusach.” They are Nusach, you know. Why don’t you send them to me and I’ll teach them Nusach? Oi, that’s all we need, you know. Then the kid will be with his hands tied.

[00:21:03]
MARK SLOBIN: Right.

[00:21:04]
SAMUEL ADLER: I mean, Lewandowski didn’t go to Baer and look up the Nusach, you know? I mean, you can do that. You can also use music, you know, melodies of the past. But as a creative person, you want to express your religious things like Haydn. Did he look up the Nusach when he wrote a Gregorian Mass? He didn’t write a Gregorian, he wrote a mass in his style. And we all love it, you know. And I think Jews–free Jews today ought to get used to that.

[00:21:36]
MARK SLOBIN: Do you think this Nusach thing is an East European sort of…?

[00:21:39]
SAMUEL ADLER: No, no, no. I think it was true in Germany, too.

[00:21:43]
MARK SLOBIN: [Crosstalk] I mean, did he have this notion of Nusach? In composing Nusach?

[00:21:45]
SAMUEL ADLER: Not quite. No, but he was very fond of German Nusach. I mean, he believed in it and used certain phrases in his compositions that came straight out of Nusach, yes. But he didn’t think one had to compose only in Nusach.

[00:21:59]
MARK SLOBIN: Turns of phrase. This Nusach seems to be such a vague concept.

[00:22:03]
SAMUEL ADLER: And I think that’s all it is.

[00:22:04]
MARK SLOBIN: Yeah, I’ve been trying to pin people down to get a sense of what people mean by it.

[00:22:07]
SAMUEL ADLER: Well, for instance, going into major. That’s Nusach. At a certain point, they went into major.

[00:22:13]
MARK SLOBIN: Well, that…

[00:22:15]
SAMUEL ADLER: But that’s tradition, you know. Or freygish or whatever they call it.

[00:22:19]
MARK SLOBIN: They talk about including [inaudible] at the end of Nusach.

[00:22:21]
SAMUEL ADLER: Yeah, that’s right.

[00:22:23]
MARK SLOBIN: In other words, there’s a kind of a field, a forcefield around a certain Friday evening.

[00:22:29]
SAMUEL ADLER: That’s right. Adonai Malakh Steiger.

[00:22:33]
MARK SLOBIN: You’re supposed to come back, touch the ground, touch base.

[00:22:33]
SAMUEL ADLER: That’s right. Well, I mean, that’s perfectly all right. I mean, that has its roots in troping in the Catholic Church. I mean, there is a tradition of that. And I–Mark, don’t misunderstand me. I’m not against it. I’m just against it when it is the only thing that will go. I mean, for instance, I have written a whole set of Friday night responses that are based around the Adonai Malakh Steiger. Well, I mean, that was very nice for me as a take off point, but then it just lasts for the first few notes and then it’s free.

[00:23:09]
MARK SLOBIN: But that’s what they do when they sing.

[00:23:11]
SAMUEL ADLER: But they don’t realize it.

[00:23:13]
MARK SLOBIN: Well, they do. I mean, they talk again about coming back to it. They say they’re perfectly free to…

[00:23:16]
SAMUEL ADLER: Well, I do too. I come back to it. Or like on the High Holidays and [sings]. Well, fine. I mean, let’s do that. But, I mean, the music in-between is just not what they would expect. And that’s why they don’t like it.

[00:23:30]
MARK SLOBIN: Well, but by their principles, they shouldn’t object. I mean their principles–

[00:23:34]
SAMUEL ADLER: I agree with you, but I mean–

[00:23:35]
MARK SLOBIN: That you are free to do whatever you want as long as you come back.

[00:23:38]
SAMUEL ADLER: Certainly. Well, I mean, I’m all for it, except that they don’t improvise by themselves. They improvise the way Koussevitzky did it or the way Kwartin did it. So that–but and they don’t realize that when somebody is writing a piece, he’s doing it freely, you know. I mean, when I write a piece, even if I start someplace, then it’s my own thing.

[00:24:01]
MARK SLOBIN: But so, just want to clarify one thing. For your father, the Nusach was more a question of certain turns of phrase.

[00:24:07]
SAMUEL ADLER: That’s right.

[00:24:07]
MARK SLOBIN: Rather than…

[00:24:08]
SAMUEL ADLER: Like ending phrases.

[00:24:09]
MARK SLOBIN: Okay, ending phrases.

[00:24:11]
SAMUEL ADLER: Es nachtaw and things like…

[00:24:12]
MARK SLOBIN: But it could be anywhere else.

[00:24:14]
SAMUEL ADLER: Oh, yes. Yes.

[00:24:18]
MARK SLOBIN: It’s the character. I’m trying to figure out, you know, well I mentioned that German side because I’ve only heard some [inaudible] Eastern Europeans. Where do you think Nusach…?

[00:24:27]
SAMUEL ADLER: Well, of course, in Germany, don’t forget, the piece was always composed because there was an organ accompaniment. There was very little improvization except in prayers where the choir was not. For instance, they said the Amidah, just like he improvised, except for the Kedushah and certain other places. But it was much more formal and less repetitious. There were no repetitions of words anymore. I mean, that was out. You couldn’t spend half an hour on the word “et,” which means nothing. You know, I mean, you have to be very careful not to do that. If he repeated a word more than twice, you know, and quickly. I mean, there was real–you had to say it. You couldn’t get away with, you know. And he was used to Eastern-European Nusach because he was a choir boy in Koussevitzky’s choir when he was in Hamburg. Well he grew up in Hamburg. And of Koussevitzky, you know, came from Poland to Hamburg. And he was a cantor at the Hungarian shul there for a long time, or for some time, I don’t know how long. But my father actually sang there, and he always remembers that the opera singers used to go for Minhag just to hear him say Ashrei yoshvei vetecha. He remembers that. And then they left. He said that phrase, and then they left. But he–and he was very fond of Hazzanut. Except he felt that if a composer limited himself to that or did too much with it, it took away all of the originality from it. And he was so–when he came to America, and he wrote most of his music in America, he was a super patriot, you know, as immigrants become.

[00:26:14]
MARK SLOBIN: [Affirmative]

[00:26:14]
SAMUEL ADLER: He couldn’t see that we should cry. You know, he had–I inherited that feeling from him. “We’re saved. And here we are. We have to proclaim God.” And he was a very religious man in that way. Not ritualistically, but terribly… I mean, he suffered greatly toward the end, the last nine years, when he was 51 years old, he had his left leg removed and half of the hip. So he sat in this prostheses all the time. I mean, he had a terrible time the last nine years, but he wrote every day. And he, you know, it was–and the kids, he would teach bar mitzvah boys by the hundreds. And they all remembered because they got their sex education and their religious education, everything from him. You know, he would come to a passage and he would tell them about the passage. He’d get them all excited about the biblical–I mean, that’s a real hazzan. One that really can do that. He was a great teacher and a great scholar. He taught many rabbis the Talmud, you know. The rabbis from all of the area used to come and study Talmud and Gomorrah and Mishna with him. And he was a great pianist. He, before the age of 16, I am sure, between 10 and 16, I played every sonata that was ever written for violin and piano because every day we played for 2 hours. I mean, starting way back. And it was great. It was a great education. I really grew up in a musical home.

[00:27:44]
MARK SLOBIN: And…Well, so you were predetermined in a way.

[00:27:49]
SAMUEL ADLER: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I couldn’t get out of it. Well, and he did it right. For instance, I started to compose and he said, “I don’t want to see anything. You don’t know anything about it. You’ve got to study harmony.” So he sent me when I was 10, I mean, when we got here, he sent me to Boston to study with Herbert Fromm. And we did harmony and counterpoint and ear training and and so on and so forth. So by the time I got to college, it was really ridiculous to go. Today I overheard a story which is really very strange. I mean, when we were sitting there at lunch, Morty Shames, who was a classmate of mine at Boston University, told Rabbi Karp about, you know, my experience at BU. That was just–it was a scandal. They threw me out three times because I was so bored, I did all these bad things, you know?

[00:28:41]
MARK SLOBIN: Oh yeah, sure, sure.

[00:28:41]
SAMUEL ADLER: So, but it was because of my father. He really, he said, “Look, you can only be a musician if you know it all.” And so. And he himself, you know, he was mostly self-taught. But he studied two years with Toch who was–who lived on the same floor we did in Germany. And so he couldn’t afford to pay Toch, but he copied for Toch, you see. And so, he gave him free lessons.

[00:29:10]
MARK SLOBIN: I see, I see.

[00:29:10]
SAMUEL ADLER: And the relationship lasted all his life. And when Toch and I were at the MacDowell Colony together once, and I got all the stories from when I was…I hadn’t been…I was 1 or 2 years old when this was going on.

[00:29:23]
MARK SLOBIN: Yeah. Yeah. How did your father then decide to go into the [inaudible].

[00:29:30]
SAMUEL ADLER: Well, of course, he was a cantor.

[00:29:31]
MARK SLOBIN: But I mean, how did he get into that?

[00:29:33]
SAMUEL ADLER: His father was a cantor and he went to seminary. And, you know, in Germany, they had to also be teachers. They had to go to teacher seminary and cantorial seminary at the same time.

[00:29:45]
MARK SLOBIN: Why was that?

[00:29:45]
SAMUEL ADLER: When they got one degree– because they had to teach religion in the public schools.

[00:29:51]
MARK SLOBIN: I see.

[00:29:51]
SAMUEL ADLER: Just like the priests and, you know, and the rabbis also.

[00:29:54]
MARK SLOBIN: But the cantors were thought of as being like rabbis? I’m trying to get that straight.

[00:29:58]
SAMUEL ADLER: Yes. It was a…you had to have, it was a government position. Because the government paid your salary. That’s the only reason my mother married my father, you see. My mother came from a very–from a wealthy background. My grandfather was in the dry goods business. And they… When my father, as a young cantor, he was at that time 27, came to Mannheim as third cantor. So he worked his way up. But he came as third cantor. And when he saw my mother, he immediately started to go to her house. And my grandfather did not permit it because a daughter of a wealthy merchant doesn’t marry a hazzan. So then came, fortunately for them, the inflation and, you know, all the merchants lost their money. They lost everything. But the state employees always got paid. And so the relatives came and said, “You know, Leopold,” to my grandfather, “you ought to let Selma marry.” So that’s why they got married. So, you know, they had a–it was still greatly under the father’s aegis that people got married. And so they married and then they had a very hard time at first because, you see, he was not like other people. He didn’t go to the cafe and sit all Sunday afternoon. He was writing music, even in those days. It started really his interest was fired by Erich Werner. They knew each other during the First World War, and they corresponded with one another. And they wanted to reform the German synagogue musically. They wanted to get rid of all the bad notes and all the bad harmony.

[00:31:46]
SAMUEL ADLER: And so my father, the first thing he did when he came to Mannheim, which was only his second job–excuse me, third job. What he did was, he started fooling around with the harmony of Yaphet and those composers. Well, I mean, that was sacred. So the first year, he was told he’s going to be fired because they don’t like this new harmony and so on. And because he was going with my mother, my grandfather had some influence, so they kept him. But for the first four years, it was very rocky because of this. He couldn’t leave his dirty fingers off those pieces. You know, he had to change this and change that. And then he wrote his own music. Then he just said, “okay, forget that.” And then he started writing his own things. At first, very small pieces, but then more and more he went into larger works. But it was so traditional, that whole business in the German synagogue, that you had a book that was written out for that congregation. They use the same music every Shabbat. Not the same, for a different Shabbat they would have different music, you know, because it was the Shabbas near Purim or the… And I mean, it was so, it was just like the Lutheran Church. There was a church calendar, the synagogue calendar, and that was organized. And I don’t know if…I think I should tell you that story.

[00:33:11]
SAMUEL ADLER: After Kristallnacht, you know, November 9th, 10th of ’38, all the synagogues were destroyed. And the big Mannheim synagogue, there were four in Mannheim, the big Mannheim synagogue was made out of stone and marble. And they couldn’t burn it because it wouldn’t burn. So they brought in troops to blow out the East wall. We had 122 Sefer Torah’s. Imagine. 122. And when we had Hakafot around the temple on Simchat Torah everyone was taken out and was just…I still remember that. And then they blew down the organ, and the organ just hung there, you know? My father got out of the concentration camp. They released all the Jews, you know, three days after Roosevelt broke relations with Germany. And in order to get relations back, they had to release the 35,000 Jews that they put into concentration camp on that day. So he got out.

[00:34:13]
SAMUEL ADLER: He came back home, he said to my mother, “Now that we’re going to America, I’ve got to save the music.” And there were nine volumes, one for each holiday. “I’m going to get…” She said, “You’re crazy. They’ve got SS in the synagogue guarded so that nobody, you know, gets in and nobody gets hurt.” Because it was just blown to bits. He said, “I know a way to get in. I’ll take the boy.” That’s me. She said, “No, no, absolutely.” Well, he always got his way. So we went underneath–there was a underneath passage, went up to the choir loft, gathered all the nine books that we could still find. It was just an absolute mess up there. But we found nine intact. We were just about to leave. They were changing guard. Well, of course they would come upstairs and they’d look. As they were coming in, they marched in, you know, and then changed guard. It was real military kind of thing. The organ fell down on them, and we got out. Saved our lives. Isn’t that something?

[00:35:19]
MARK SLOBIN: That’s an act of God.

[00:35:20]
SAMUEL ADLER: Yeah. And we brought the books over, and I gave them to the library to Shalom Altman’s library.

[00:35:27]
MARK SLOBIN: Oh really?

[00:35:27]
SAMUEL ADLER: Yes.

[00:35:28]
MARK SLOBIN: Oh, that’s wonderful.

[00:35:29]
SAMUEL ADLER: Yeah.

[00:35:29]
MARK SLOBIN: That’s a great story, my God.

[00:35:32]
SAMUEL ADLER: Yeah. I mean, it’s just incredible…

[00:35:35]
MARK SLOBIN: Now did those things vary from synagogue to synagogue?

[00:35:38]
SAMUEL ADLER: [Crosstalk] Oh, yes, yes they did. No, from the large cities. Well, I mean they were all Lewandowski and Sulzer and Japhet and Kirschner.

[00:35:47]
MARK SLOBIN: But the order and the selection…

[00:35:48]
SAMUEL ADLER: Different. They had different selections. [Crosstalk] …would select, yeah.

[00:35:52]
MARK SLOBIN: Or each shul within the community?

[00:35:54]
SAMUEL ADLER: Each shul within–Well, of course there was one Reform and one…the Orthodox was different from the Reform. I mean, and then there was Eastern European.

[00:36:04]
MARK SLOBIN: Yeah.

[00:36:05]
SAMUEL ADLER: So yeah.

[00:36:07]
MARK SLOBIN: They would have different music. But each kind town would have its own Minhag?

[00:36:08]
SAMUEL ADLER: Selection of things. The Minhag was different, yes. However, for instance, they would coordinate. The Nusach was the same, even between the Reform and the Orthodox, they all used the same Nusach. For instance, reading of the Torah was the same, reading of the Haftara was the same. Reading of the Megillah was the same. But for instance, they had–they used to have…There was no such thing as making noise during the Megillah. So what they did was, the four temples–no the three, because the other one was Eastern European that took no part in this. They had a race. Who could say it fastest? But every word had to be said–sung, correctly, you know. So the shammas would be there with stopwatch and so on. And there was an honor system. And I mean, this is the kind of thing that… for the Megillah on Purim.

[00:37:06]
MARK SLOBIN: And why did they do it?

[00:37:07]
SAMUEL ADLER: Because you said it so fast, you couldn’t hear the name of Haman, you see, that’s why.

[00:37:11]
MARK SLOBIN: Oh okay.

[00:37:13]
SAMUEL ADLER: But still, you had to use the right Nusach.

[00:37:15]
MARK SLOBIN: Yeah.

[00:37:16]
SAMUEL ADLER: And all the way through. Trope, not Nusach, but trope all the way through.

[00:37:19]
MARK SLOBIN: But that varied so much from North to South Germany, didn’t it?

[00:37:22]
SAMUEL ADLER: Yeah, there were, but just very little, very little. Because my father was North German trained and was in Southern Germany. But he did, his last work was called Pirkei Shabbat. And it is based on South German Zemirot melodies. Now we did that even in Reform households in Germany, during the Hitler era especially, everybody sang Zemirot on Friday nights. So it was very different. And, you know, Irving Howe in his book completely forgets about anything except, you know, the shtetl kind of culture. And I think, I’m sorry to say, that is the mentality of most people. Now, this movement here, many of the leading cantors are former German cantors. Kurt Silvermann and those people.

[00:38:13]
MARK SLOBIN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:38:14]
SAMUEL ADLER: And yet I don’t know what kind of Nusach they use here, now. It’s really interesting. They kind of are–they have to be a little more Eastern European.

[00:38:23]
MARK SLOBIN: Yeah. I think part of what is American, you know, whenever people tell me, I say, “What’s American?” And they say, “It’s combining German and East European.”

[00:38:30]
SAMUEL ADLER: Yeah, but mostly East European.

[00:38:34]
MARK SLOBIN: Part of what that means. So you get that combination.

[00:38:34]
SAMUEL ADLER: Yeah. Because many of the Eastern European cantors, of course, were so, vocally so good that they actually wanted to be opera singers. And now that did not happen as much in Germany. There was a real distinction. Now, there were many Jewish opera singers.

[00:38:51]
MARK SLOBIN: Well, that’s why, partly. Because the emancipation of [inaudible].

[00:38:54]
SAMUEL ADLER: Right. Right, exactly. My father, I mean, my mother and father were, you know, went to the opera three times a week, as long as I can remember in Germany. Every–until they couldn’t go anymore. And then they went to the Jewish opera, and they played the same repertoire, you know.

[00:39:11]
MARK SLOBIN: Although, you know, that sort of thing happened in East Europe too. I’ve been reading Zavel Kwartin’s memoires, and there’s this whole struggle when he’s, you know, he’s deciding whether he ought to go into the opera or whether he ought to [inaudible].

[00:39:21]
SAMUEL ADLER: Sure. Sure.

[00:39:22]
MARK SLOBIN: And talking to the Jewish singers about it. Talking to those guys who had already made it in the opera and asking them.

[00:39:30]
SAMUEL ADLER: Mm. Well, you see, I think we know too little about the emancipated Jews in Poland and in Russia.

[00:39:39]
MARK SLOBIN: Russia?

[00:39:39]
SAMUEL ADLER: Oh, especially. I mean, listen, there are some distinguished people. I mean, Leopold Auer was– But they were always kicked out because, or at least ostracized by the Jews. And that’s what’s too bad about it.

[00:39:56]
MARK SLOBIN: Yeah.

[00:39:56]
SAMUEL ADLER: Now, in Germany, it was so assimilated that there was a danger of the whole thing assimilating. And yet there was something about being Jewish. I mean, you know, it was a different kind of thing, even before Hitler I’m talking about. They were never really allowed to assimilate all together, no matter how much money they had or how assimilated they were. And they always became twice as German as the Germans. Now my, for instance, one part of my family, the Rothschild part comes from a little town in Bavaria, and they can trace their ancestry back to that little town for 700 years. I mean, it’s incredible. There were only Jews and Catholics in that town, which is very interesting.

[00:40:42]
MARK SLOBIN: Now when you first started going into composition, it was the same, I mean, you’re old enough, so I’m thinking in academics, for example, the academics I know ask, historians, “Why did you ever go into Jewish studies?” “Why did you do Black studies?” You know, all these Jewish historians who did…

[00:41:01]
SAMUEL ADLER: Black studies. Of course.

[00:41:02]
MARK SLOBIN: The study of the history of slavery. They say, “Well, when we came through graduate school, it was understood you could never work on Jewish stuff, you know, that’s not… Now when you started composing, I would imagine, it would have not been the thing to…[crosstalk].

[00:41:15]
SAMUEL ADLER: Well, don’t forget. Well, yes, you’re absolutely right. But there are two factors. First place, I was my father’s organist and therefore wrote–I wrote music for my own bar mitzvah, you know, and in that way, I got into that. Now, on the other hand, when I was in graduate school and so on, I hid it a little bit, except that I always worked my way through school by being a choir director in a synagogue. During my years at Harvard, I was at Kehillath Israel. I was Michael Hamoman’s [sic] choir director and got into a lot of trouble. I’ll tell you a story. We once did a V’shamru by Dunayevsky. And I mean, I must say, Dunayevsky’s harmonies leaves something to be desired. Well, I just couldn’t stand the harmony. It was so tried and so awful. So I rewrote it. The melody, I left completely intact, and I completely rewrote it. Decent setting for a chorus. I had very good choir, a cappella, and cantor. We had an old Russian bass. His name was Sammy Gilfanboyam [sic]. And, you know, he came from the old country. And we worked on it. And after the rehearsal, just the rehearsal was just over. He said, “Before we go. I want to say something. Sammy, I like you,” he said, “But you know. Here is the greatest Russian composer that ever lived. Dunayevsky. And you think you can correct his harmony? This is the greatest harmony that was ever written. Do you realize that? The greatest composer.” I said, “You know, Sam, I think the greatest Russian composer is, Tchaikovsky, or Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, somebody.” “Eh who are those goyim?” You see? I mean, that was the attitude.

[00:43:14]
MARK SLOBIN: [Laughs] His attitude.

[00:43:16]
SAMUEL ADLER: And you see, and I tried, it was kind of a similar situation as my father had. And then the other thing that of course kept me with half a foot, at least, in the synagogue was that when I got out of the service, I was supposed to go to Brandeis. Irving Fine wanted me to come to Brandeis to take Lenny Bernstein’s place, who was going to New York at that time. This was 1950–the end of ’52, beginning of ’53. And my father’s rabbi, Rabbi Levi Oland [sic], went to Dallas a few years before. And he was a great music lover. I mean, I’m talking about real music. Bach, Beethoven, so on. And he said, “I’ve got to have music here in Dallas.” So he told my father, when I come home, he at least wants me to come down and tell him how to build a music program. I went down there. Meanwhile, Irving Fine called my mother and she told him I had already taken the job in Dallas. So, I mean, they placed me in that. It worked out for the best. But I was furious. And so my first real job, excuse me, was as music director at Temple Emanuel in Dallas. I had no academic thing there for the first three years. And after three years, I’m happy to say my–it all turned into very good fortune because the first year I was there, I won the Dallas Symphony Prize. I wrote my first symphony. And then I, you know, down there I was one of the very few composers. So every orchestra asked me to write pieces and so on.

[00:44:52]
SAMUEL ADLER: So in 1958, no, ’57, four years after I got there, the head of the composition department at North Texas State left and went into industry. So the dean, a new dean came there, he called me and offered me a full professorship to go there. So I was never anything but a full professor. I entered the Academy as a full professor!

[00:45:22]
SAMUEL ADLER: [Tape cuts]…started in the synagogue. And I’ve always been interested because I feel that I need a spiritual outlet in my music. And therefore, just as my colleagues would write a mass, I would write portions of the service because that is as natural to me. And I feel that every composer has always done that since the beginning of time. We have secular outlets, we have sacred outlets, and I happen to be Jewish, so therefore…I mean, I think today people like Jacob Druckman, a very well known composer in secular music also has written a service and has done…you know, I think today it’s easy to be both.

[00:46:08]
MARK SLOBIN: Yeah. I find that very curious, that sort of upsurge of identity among composers.

[00:46:13]
SAMUEL ADLER: Well, I feel that, you know, composition is an act of spirituality. I mean, I think every composer has had to have some kind of spiritual outlet. I mean, look at the Russian composers, just as in here was Tchaikovsky, whose mainstay was opera and ballet. I mean, after all, that’s his greatest music. And yet his church music is extraordinary. I mean, it’s just beautiful. And contrapuntal and really because he was a great contrapuntalist. He loved Bach more than anybody else. Also wrote a counterpoint book, which I didn’t–wasn’t aware of, which is really interesting. And they all wrote when they wanted to say something spiritually. And I don’t think there was anybody except maybe Johann Strauss or somebody like that who never ventured into there. Even Offenbach. I mean, people like that in their quiet moments, wrote some synagogue music.

[00:47:14]
MARK SLOBIN: And Rossini.

[00:47:14]
SAMUEL ADLER: Well, great music. And Verdi, I mean, after all.

[00:47:18]
MARK SLOBIN: And even Duke Ellington. It’s interesting because I was talking to somebody, I remember when Ellington died, I was sitting around in our graduate–we had a number of really good jazz musicians in the graduate program. They were saying nobody could take his place. And I said, “What do you mean?” They said, “Well, there’s nobody around who goes across the whole span to be the king–he was the king they said–to be the king, you have to have had…have done sacred music as well.

[00:47:43]
SAMUEL ADLER: Dave Brubeck has, you know.

[00:47:46]
MARK SLOBIN: Of course he’s not black.

[00:47:46]
SAMUEL ADLER: No.

[00:47:47]
MARK SLOBIN: I mean, they’re saying in their community…

[00:47:49]
SAMUEL ADLER: That’s true, that’s true.

[00:47:50]
MARK SLOBIN: Same credential.

[00:47:51]
SAMUEL ADLER: Absolutely.

[00:47:52]
MARK SLOBIN: To be the…

[00:47:53]
SAMUEL ADLER: The king.

[00:47:54]
MARK SLOBIN: The king. And there was nobody else around who had all those credentials.

[00:47:58]
SAMUEL ADLER: I don’t think he did it very well. [Crosstalk] But I mean, it’s okay. No, that’s right. Yeah. But I’m talking about some of those guys really don’t do it very well. And I mean, it’s…You see, I don’t think that mixes very well, the popular with the sacred. I just feel that–and that’s what, we can come back to Hasidic music because that is the problem. And we just heard this. You didn’t hear the children’s program. You see, the thing is, every song is the same. It’s all with a rock beat. Yeah. And that’s easy to do with Hasidic things because they lend themselves… But now the trouble is with Israel. Israel is, for the most part, an a-spiritual state with all its mishegoss and Orthodoxy. There is one–one Orthodox composer. Hodeir. Andre…

[00:48:54]
MARK SLOBIN: Hajdu.

[00:48:55]
SAMUEL ADLER: Hajdu.

[00:48:55]
MARK SLOBIN: Yeah.

[00:48:55]
SAMUEL ADLER: He’s the one guy. And he really believes. And he writes some very good stuff. The rest of them write only for American consumption because there is nothing else. So therefore their experience is second hand. I mean, they write sacred music in a good way, but not for the synagogue.

[00:49:15]
MARK SLOBIN: Yeah.

[00:49:15]
SAMUEL ADLER: You see. I mean, they write very left-handedly for the American synagogue, and of course they– and the ones that want to be popular write the same as they would write for Israeli rock. So that’s a problem.

[00:49:30]
MARK SLOBIN: It’s all very curious the constant…Of course it’s very Jewish, I mean, this constant evolution of styles and rapid assimilation from one area of music to another. I mean, I could never have predicted, I don’t think anybody could have ten years ago, that the dominant music you hear in New York on the radio stations would be this Hasidic rap [sic]. Nobody would have predicted. I mean, that’s Hasidic, but Orthodox, right?

[00:49:53]
SAMUEL ADLER: Yeah.

[00:49:54]
MARK SLOBIN: That whole phenomenon is extraordinary and unpredictable that there would be a crossover of that particular variety is…

[00:50:05]
SAMUEL ADLER: It’s very curious, and it’s so–it’s really awful music. I mean, it really is poor music. I just…I’m…I wonder why Jews who flock to the symphony, you know, at the same time tolerate this kind of thing when it comes to their ethnicity. That really always shocks me and disturbs me. Here, I mean, you could not run. In the major cities of our country, major and small cities of our country, you look at the symphony boards, you look at it, and they’re all Jewish. I mean, you couldn’t…I was just in Youngstown, Ohio. Without the Jews, there’d be nobody in the audience, you know. And yet, when it comes to their own services, they have no pride. It doesn’t matter what the music is, you know, as long it doesn’t bother them, as long as it doesn’t bug them, as long as it’s nice and pretty and whatever, as long as it doesn’t disturb them. Just like the service. I mean, God forbid there should be something said that would disturb them. Except we just talked about it, and it’s very sad. You could always have Jews come to say Kaddish. You know, I mean, you do something with the Holocaust and everybody flocks because it’s all so sad and all so terrible. But you do something upbeat and something spiritual, something great, “oh, no, that’s not Jewish.”

[00:51:33]
MARK SLOBIN: I know. It drives them crazy.

[00:51:34]
SAMUEL ADLER: It’s very sad. Very sad. And I think it’s turning off our youth. My two daughters had a very poor experience. If they hadn’t had Judaism in their home, they would have left it because their experience in Sunday school or religious school was terrible because it was either the Holocaust or Israel.

[00:51:53]
MARK SLOBIN: Yeah.

[00:51:53]
SAMUEL ADLER: Those two things. Never anything…Me, I have to have some spirituality in life. And I have one daughter, the one that goes to Holyoke, who is a very spiritual child. She needs to–She just wrote a really bright, brilliant thing in their newspaper. They have this five college newspaper called Shofar.

[00:52:13]
MARK SLOBIN: Oh yeah.

[00:52:13]
SAMUEL ADLER: She wrote a thing on prayer. I was surprised how very…How should I say, demanding it was of her.

[00:52:22]
MARK SLOBIN: Doesn’t she feel slightly out of place in Holyoke?

[00:52:24]
SAMUEL ADLER: She does, but she is the president of the Holyoke Jewish Student Union. And so she’s very active and she’s in the Interfaith Council and she’s a big macher there. So she doesn’t feel out of place. They have a Seder, and I ran the Seder for them. And so it’s…I mean, she’s trying very hard. And since she’s been there, she also is a very good singer. And so she sings in the Abbey Singers. And so they’ve done, for the first time, they’ve done a Jewish service and they did a Hanukkah Cantata. And I mean, unusual.

[00:52:55]
MARK SLOBIN: Well, they’re getting Jewish Studies there and that kind of thing.

[00:52:58]
SAMUEL ADLER: Exactly. They’re having a chair now. Yeah. And she was on the search committee, you know, and so they have 85 Jewish girls. That’s pretty good.

[00:53:11]
MARK SLOBIN: So where do you see this heading? Do you think it’s just going to stay this way? I mean, it’ll be a kind of limited acceptance for cetain kinds of composers.

[00:53:16]
SAMUEL ADLER: Yeah, I don’t think…I think a lot of composers, younger composers, people as Michael Isaacson, people like that, who are also into the popular field and the Debbie Friedmans of our time. Those will be the composers that will have much more success than those who, you know, who want very seriously to reform the whole field. I don’t think it’s going to happen. I don’t look very hopefully into the future for, how should we call it, synagogue music of a higher nature. I think it’s all going to be like that. And because I’m afraid the synagogue is not the important place it has always been in the…I think, and that doesn’t keep me from writing for it. My things are done by college choirs, you know? I mean, I’ve written, I was commissioned to write a piece Henei Yom Hadin, four excerpts from the High Holiday literature. Now, these are very difficult pieces, but I think they’re my favorite pieces I’ve ever written for the synagogue. I have heard them done by, you know, 200 or 300-voice college choirs. And people, I mean, non-Jews were shaken by them. Jews, took them, were shaken by them, but because they “were not Jewish,” you know? That’s how they put it. And yet they all say, “Well, they’re effective, but I don’t think they could ever, you know, get into the synagogue.” And I said, “I agree with you.” I mean.

[00:55:01]
MARK SLOBIN: It’s true.

[00:55:02]
SAMUEL ADLER: Well, in the first place, we don’t have the choral resources in the synagogue. I mean, the Reform synagogues, they’re cutting back and back on things because of the attendance, because, you know, things are not as good as they used to be. When I left Dallas, I had 100 voices in my choir, eight paid singers, the rest from the congregation. It was–I would put it against any church choir in this country. I mean, we did, during the time I was there, eight Handel Oratorios with the Dallas Symphony. I mean, things like Jephtha and Deborah and Saul and Samson and Solomon, which are never done. Now, this year they were done because of the Handel year. But I mean, it was a great experience. We did Bach cantatas. We did…you know, as anthems. You know, the 23rd Psalm instead of a sermon, because the rabbi thought, you know, do it. We did Jephte of Carissimi as a service, etc. We did the Milhaud service. Milhaud came to Dallas. He came Friday night to the temple. We had a full house. We could seat over 2000 people in the sanctuary. We could seat a 300-voice chorus and a complete orchestra. So we had a college choir with my choir with the Dallas Symphony. We did the service as a service. He sent me a card on the anniversary of that every year until he died. He was so moved by it. He had never heard it that way.

[00:56:28]
MARK SLOBIN: Yeah.

[00:56:29]
SAMUEL ADLER: So, I mean, you can do it, and you can overwhelm a congregation, because when we did all these things, the people came and when we sometimes did the “Hallelujah” of Lewandowski or something like that, they’d say “Hey, Sam, didn’t you have any rehearsal this week? You had to pull out an old…” I mean, if we didn’t do something new and startling, they wouldn’t want it. So, you see, you can educate somebody [sic], but I’m afraid it’s not happening. And especially not today. Because I think really the interest in the synagogue today is at a very low point. And the rabbis sometimes blame music for it. It has nothing to do with music. It has to do with our lack of concern for spiritual matters. Now, the young kids through this youth movement, and I don’t have much good to say about the music in it, but that also doesn’t matter. I mean, after all, it’s a camp situation. Let them sing camp songs. I’m all for it. I’m all for Debbie Friedman, in the–by the way, they sang Debbie Friedman thing today, which is the Pachelbel Canon. I mean, it’s very clever that she used that, but I mean, to put her name to it, I really think is…Just because she took it for Ki Leolam Hasdo, I mean, really. It was extraordinary. And I’m happy to say all the cantors turned around said, “You know, that’s the Pachelbel Canon.” Yeah.

[00:57:56]
MARK SLOBIN: That’s funny.

[00:57:56]
SAMUEL ADLER: But that’s all right. Bach adopted a lot of things. He wasn’t as obvious about it. But I really don’t–I don’t feel that there’s going to be a great call for creativity. Now, people are going to create for the synagogue. I have young students who are writing synagogue music all the time, but not for performance in the synagogue. They just have made peace with the fact that their mother would never want to hear that in a synagogue. Not even their mother.

[00:58:25]
MARK SLOBIN: Look, that’s what happened to church music.

[00:58:26]
SAMUEL ADLER: Of course.

[00:58:27]
MARK SLOBIN: It became concert music.

[00:58:28]
SAMUEL ADLER: Well, sure. And it’s what’s happening in the church itself today. I mean, church music is as badly off as synagogue music, even worse. Because there are not even the good composers are writing for it anymore outside. At least some of our good composers are writing for the synagogue, even though it’s not being done. I mean, don’t forget. On the scene today, everyone that’s a known Jewish composer has written for the synagogue except for Copland. I mean, from Bernstein to David Diamond to Druckman, Amram, Starer. I mean, everybody that is known as a Jewish composer, I can…Steve Reich.

[00:59:09]
MARK SLOBIN: Yeah. That was an amazing run.

[00:59:10]
SAMUEL ADLER: Let me tell you something. When Steve Reich was at Cornell as an undergraduate, everything he wrote was an excerpt from a service. The first thing he wrote was “Vaanachnu” etc. He came from a very Orthodox background. And I think Tehillim is one of his best pieces. I really think so. And I feel that since it’s not a shame to be Jewish nor to write anything in Hebrew today, the kids are going to continue. Some of my most diligent and most gifted students happen to be Jewish, and they all have written, at some time or another, a piece. And of course, much of it is due to someone like Sam Rosenbaum. Because, though he can’t use it all the time in his service, he commissions it, he encourages it, and you know, in your study, I think there are people like that that need to be identified because he has commissioned more and encouraged more than anybody else that I can think of. Putterman is another one.

[01:00:18]
MARK SLOBIN: Mm, yeah Putterman.

[01:00:20]
SAMUEL ADLER: Of course, it’s a once a year thing, but still. Even though it’s once a year thing, it’s important to do it. Now we, Sam and I, do a series of Havdalah concerts in which we feature these things and we get tremendous attendance. I mean, they come from all over the city. Non-Jews come. We have crowds, 500, 600 people at 5:00 on Saturday afternoon and they love it. And we make Havdalah first so that it’s a kosher thing, you know, that we can play instruments and then we play and we do–we have done just about you name it, we’ve done it, you know. And even though he can’t do it in his service, at least he wants to expose people to that experience, and they love it. And that isn’t done enough. The Jewish music festivals. And then most cantors don’t have any taste, and so they commission, you know, [inaudible,] somebody who is in the community who doesn’t know a damn thing about it. And as long as it’s easy and sounds like 19th century music, it’s fine. But when something sounds like 20th century music, oi, watch out. And there are people like…Kotel? What is it? You know, down in Peabody, who writes very far out music, Jewish thing. He teaches composition at Peabody, Kotel. And there are people like Feinstein in Denver. He’s a bassoonist there who writes Jewish things. A lot of people. But they’re not recognized in Jewish circles because, you know, that’s not Jewish music.

[01:01:52]
MARK SLOBIN: Yeah.

[01:01:53]
SAMUEL ADLER: That’s just music. I think if we could get away from nomenclatures of calling something “Jewish music.” That gives it an odious name, you know.

[01:02:06]
MARK SLOBIN: It must be [inaudible].

[01:02:07]
SAMUEL ADLER: I mean, you see, I think Bloch was very much against that. As a matter of fact, he separated and segregated himself from the Jewish community a great deal. We have time. You know, because of that. I mean, he didn’t want the onus on him. And, you know, he felt he had nothing to do with his community here. He wrote as a Jew, but not Jewish music. And of course, today his is the most Jewish of prototype. I mean, you hear Milhaud, I mean the Milhaud service, and people say, “wasn’t Jewish.” Well, it’s provence, you know, provencal.

[01:02:42]
MARK SLOBIN: [inaudible] isn’t Jewish either.

[01:02:43]
SAMUEL ADLER: No, of course not. But I mean it’s…because it has the augmented second you know that to them is Jewish. And you know one of the bad things that happens is, of course, that cantors wanting to get an emotional experience for their congregants look up to people like Tucker and Peerce and Merrill who took the most vulgar of the things and made them into the sacred. And I’ll never forgive them for that. I mean, after all, their voices were fantastic, but they took what was basic and really, you know, played it up to the hilt. I mean, I knew Peerce very well. I knew Tucker well. I knew Peerce much better. And, you know he could have done–I mean, he asked me to write a piece for him. I wrote a big piece for him, and he never sang it because, “Sam, I want some hazzanus in there.” I said, “What are you talking about? You’re a singer. I wrote a piece for a singer.” And then we did it. It actually is called The Falling of Angels. It’s a text that Sam Rosenbaum wrote. And, you know, it had a line that wasn’t 12 tone or anything that was too contemporary. But he didn’t want to do it because if he– so I said, “Well, you sing Berg [sic] or you sing some…” “Yeah, but that’s not Jewish.”

[01:04:19]
MARK SLOBIN: Yeah.

[01:04:20]
SAMUEL ADLER: Jewish had to be bad, you know. Anything good he wouldn’t do. And then when he heard it, actually, he was very moved by it. And he brought me a beautiful letter and he said, “You know, I should have done that, but now I’m too old.” That was the next excuse. Now…

[01:04:37]
MARK SLOBIN: Well because they were popular singers.

[01:04:38]
SAMUEL ADLER: Well, yeah. And they also, they went in for things like Sholom Secunda and–

[01:04:42]
MARK SLOBIN: That’s what I mean. They used popular music as their vehicle because that’s what the audience…

[01:04:45]
SAMUEL ADLER: And that’s what they wanted. And that was the closest thing to Italian opera.

[01:04:52]
MARK SLOBIN: Yeah.

[01:04:53]
SAMUEL ADLER: So. I think we’re in a stage where, if the composer wants to write for the synagogue, he just has to do it on his own and say, “Look, this is my thing. I want to do it. I love it. The synagogue is where I am spiritually. And therefore, I will write and I don’t care whether it’s done or not.”

[01:05:16]
MARK SLOBIN: Yeah, well, that’s yeah…Seems to be the way to go.

[01:05:21]
SAMUEL ADLER: By the way, there are some pieces by Paul Dessau just coming to think back, in that Schirmer Anthology that came out on contemporary Jewish music that has pieces by, you know, all kinds of people, even Roy Harris and non-Jews who were asked by Putterman to write.

[01:05:39]
MARK SLOBIN: Oh Putterman, Yeah. That would have been–it’s too bad. I would have liked to have interviewed him. I mean, what he was doing, what he was up to, what he thought of…

[01:05:47]
SAMUEL ADLER: Well, of course, I don’t know if I should say on tape, but I will say it just to say it, I mean, you don’t have to quote it, but it was a kind of an ego trip for Putterman, you know. And, but he could never get people like Copland to write.

[01:06:00]
MARK SLOBIN: That’s the problem [inaudible]

[01:06:00]
SAMUEL ADLER: That was his big…Yeah. He did get some good things, but not…I mean, the major efforts of the composers was not directed towards him. But it was an ego trip for him, which is fine. I mean, whatever motivates.

[01:06:21]
MARK SLOBIN: He had a certain history though of this. I mean isn’t… Did they have a history before him of commissioning and…?

[01:06:26]
SAMUEL ADLER: No not he. There was at Temple Emanuel and especially…

[01:06:31]
MARK SLOBIN: But not at Park Avenue?

[01:06:31]
SAMUEL ADLER: No. But at, for instance, the great commissions, the two Milhaud and Bloch were commissioned by the Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco. Cantor Rinder, whom I knew slightly, I mean, I was out there once, and he…Of course, that was the German because they had the Wahlberg’s and all this, you know, they thought they should…San Francisco is a very Germanic town, you know. They kicked out Jordá because he was not a German conductor and got, you know, Krips. I mean, that’s how terrible they are, and run by German Jews.

[01:07:06]
MARK SLOBIN: Western Jews are different anyways.

[01:07:09]
SAMUEL ADLER: Oh sure. They ride cowboys.

[01:07:10]
MARK SLOBIN: [Laughs] I would like to get a hold of some of your pieces. I mean, I don’t you know, I don’t readily have available a lot of…

[01:07:21]
SAMUEL ADLER: Well, why don’t you tell Judy to just give you, uh…You know, they published everything for the synagogue, except some of those more difficult pieces that Schirmer has, you see. Schirmer has…I’ll send you a list of works. Okay? And then you can just…

[01:07:39]
MARK SLOBIN: If you have tapes around that would be nice.

[01:07:40]
SAMUEL ADLER: I have a lot. Well, I have tapes of those High Holiday pieces, for instance.

[01:07:44]
MARK SLOBIN: Yeah that would be nice.

[01:07:44]
SAMUEL ADLER: And I have a tape of a concert performance. I mean, actually, concert, no. It is a performance of Shaarei Tefilah with orchestra, but as a service. Which worked very well. It isn’t a very good recording, but I just did it with the New Orleans Philharmonic. That was a good recording, but I didn’t get it. They won’t give me a tape. Some of the orchestras are that way.

[01:08:13]
MARK SLOBIN: Yeah. I’d like to hear some of these things.

[01:08:17]
SAMUEL ADLER: I wish I had better recordings of some of my father’s things. There are not many good recordings because in those days, we couldn’t record readily. It was only after 1955, 1960, that we really recorded everything. And that’s too bad because we don’t even have a recording of my father singing. There was one and I think my sister had it. Or still, if she has it. But there is a lot of his music available and that you could just play through. I mean, it’s not that difficult. Some of it is going out of print, I’m sorry to say. I really don’t think these things should go out of print. But there’s nothing you can do.

[01:09:00]
MARK SLOBIN: Now, this is a country that lets, you know, Melville go out of print.

[01:09:06]
SAMUEL ADLER: However, sometimes it works for the best. I wrote a choral conducting book in 1971, and it went out of print in ’83, and I asked for it back and rewrote it. One third new and Schirmer books just put it out, and it’s much better to have a second edition and have it done better and more effective and so on.

[01:09:33]
MARK SLOBIN: If you can do it, it’s nice.

[01:09:33]
SAMUEL ADLER: Well, this sold very well.

[01:09:36]
MARK SLOBIN: Yeah.

[01:09:36]
SAMUEL ADLER: It’s a very useful book. And we’re doing a new edition of the orchestration book already, so, that’s very good.

[01:09:45]
MARK SLOBIN: Oh really?

[01:09:46]
SAMUEL ADLER: Well, they made a big mistake. They photographed the [tape cuts]

TRANSCRIPTION END

This audio interview is part of the “History of the American Cantorate” project, which was designed and executed by Mark Slobin in 1984-86 under a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded to the Cantors Assembly, a professional society.

The recording of this interview is provided through a partnership with the American Cantorate Project.

Additional interviews in this collection are available on the Center’s Aviary account.