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Samuel Adler and Jürgen Thym, hiking in the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania in 2012
Samuel Adler and Jürgen Thym, hiking in the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania in 2012 © Collection JT

Adopt a Composer — Jürgen Thym and Samuel Adler

Posted by Jürgen Thym 
· 27 April 2022 
Jürgen Thym
Jürgen Thym © Collection JT

One of the most rewarding aspects of my activities as a musicologist has been following the life and works of living composers – be they teachers or former teachers, colleagues or former colleagues, friends and those who became friends.

There is something special about witnessing the genesis of a composition (often beginning with an official commission or a performer asking for a new work), seeing the new work come to fruition, perhaps attending the premiere or a subsequent performance, hearing audience reactions and reading how music critics view and review the new piece. In short, participating in the ups and downs of a creative artist: the adventure of composing, the glories of premieres, and anxieties about how the work will be perceived.

Jürgen Thym, Samuel Adler and the German music critic Frieder Reininghaus at the Jägerstübchen in Hambach (Neustadt an der Weinstrase) in June 2018, relaxing after the festivities celebrating the composer’s 90th birthday in Berlin and Mannheim.
Jürgen Thym, Samuel Adler and the German music critic Frieder Reininghaus at the Jägerstübchen in Hambach (Neustadt an der Weinstrase) in June 2018, relaxing after the festivities celebrating the composer’s 90th birthday in Berlin and Mannheim. © Collection JT

I would urge even mediaevalists or specialists in Baroque music to adopt a living composer or two. Being tuned into a few activities of contemporary composers enriches one’s life, and it may even shed light on the music of the past in unexpected ways.

Samuel Adler is a relatively late adoption for me. Others have claimed him earlier and written about him and his music. But in the last 25 years our connections became more substantial when I became midwife and editor to his autobiography, Building Bridges with Music: Stories from a Composer’s Life (published in 2017 by Pendragon Press, Hillsdale, NY). Preparing the programme booklets for two albums of his music issued by Toccata Classics (TOCC 0624 and TOCC 0642), in a way, is a continuation of that work, and it has been a rewarding experience.

Post Author: Jürgen Thym

Jürgen Thym (born in Bremervörde in 1943), Professor Emeritus of Musicology at the Eastman School of Music (University of Rochester), is an authority on classical music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Educated in Germany (Hochschule für Musik Berlin and Freie Universität Berlin), as well as in the United States (Ph.D., Case Western Reserve University, 1974), he has been teaching at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester since 1973 (part-time since 2003). He has lectured (in the USA and abroad) on German Lieder, music theory, text-music relations, music and politics, and other subject matters. He was the chair of Eastman’s musicology department from 1982 to 2000 and served for more than 30 years on various committees involved with academic or community governance, aiming to improve the workings of academic institutions, professional societies and community organisations.

He has published on the music, mostly Lieder, of Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Wolf, Weill and others (co-authoring some essays with Ann C. Fehn). He edited the anthology 100 Years of Eichendorff Songs (A-R Editions, Middleton, Wisconsin, 1983), co-edited, with Nikos Kokkinis, several volumes in the Arnold Schoenberg Collected Works Edition (Schott Music, Mainz, and Universal Edition, Vienna), was co-translator, with David Beach, of J. P. Kirnberger’s Die Kunst des reinen Satzes in der Musik (‘The Art of Strict Musical Composition’, Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut, and London, 1982), as well as Heinrich Schenker’s Kontrapunkt with John Rothgeb (Schirmer Books, New York, two volumes, 1987), and edited Luca Lombardi: Construction of Freedom and other writings, a translation with Thomas Donnan (Valentin Koerner, Baden-Baden, 2006). Among his more recent accomplishments are Of Poetry and Song: Approaches to the Nineteenth-Century Lied (University of Rochester Press, New York, 2010) and Mendelssohn, the Organ, and the Music of the Past: Constructing Historical Legacies (University of Rochester Press, New York, 2014), as well as articles on memory and song in various journals or conference publications, and essays on Luca Lombardi (including the entry in the German online encyclopedia Komponisten der Gegenwart).

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