The first music by Samuel Adler that I ever heard was two movements of his Third String Quartet, played in Kilbourn Hall at Eastman in the fall of 1966. The occasion was an all-school convocation to introduce faculty members new to the school that year. To a junior-year piano student who composed but was very put off by most of the contemporary music he had heard, this quartet came as a revelation of something that I could not explain but to which I responded with huge excitement. Right here was new music, barely two years old, that for some reason I could follow. Its emotional communication came straight through to me. This experience was the first of two exciting surprises; the second was learning that this composer was going to be my teacher. My lessons (Thursdays at 8:00 a.m.) were wonderful, treasured times. My interest in Adler’s music, especially his piano music, began quite naturally at that time and has continued to this day.

Because he is such a prolific composer, I imagine Adler is the only person who has heard every composition he has written. His notes surely run by now into the millions! I offer my thoughts in this book, therefore, not as an expert on his music but as one who over time has studied his piano compositions deeply.

Samuel Adler’s music is thoroughly modern without being beholden to any of the many fashions and “isms” that have come into use over the last several decades. Adler has said of his work: “I have been labeled a composer of the ‘radical center,’ and I rather like that classification. I am a happy eclectic who has never been anxious to pursue novelty or the avant-garde, but who tried to be open to all stylistic trends.” His piano music invites the player to project a wide spectrum of emotions and their gradations. It is by turns joyous, frenetic, simple, direct, intellectually complex, lightweight, deeply moving, intense, contemplative, energetic, wild, beautiful, kaleidoscopic, and serene. Musicians who experience a wide variety of his works will recognize that they arise from one irreducible spiritual element: that of affirmation.

Early Intermediate

Intermediate

Early Advanced

Early Advanced/Advanced

Advanced

Extremely Advanced

Practical Observations on the Piano Music

How pianistic is this music, how “well-written for the piano”? This is an important question, since it is commonly the first one asked by someone considering learning an unfamiliar piece by a contemporary composer. In Adler’s piano music, there are no physical challenges that cannot be conquered through traditional practice techniques intelligently applied. In the very few cases when you need to play inside the piano or nontraditionally on the keys (in Canto VIII, the Duo Sonata, once in the Sonatina, and occasionally in Gradus), the instructions in the score are clear and the notated symbols are ones that have become standard.

Adler’s approach to the piano is generally more oriented toward touch than to sound. The things we pianists think of as being tactile concerns—clarity, precisely defined articulations, getting to the right place at the right time, and, above all, rhythm, the most physical element of music—are trademarks of Adler’s compositional language. We experience them on the keyboard as tactile events. The layout of his music under the hand shares more with the incisive attacks of Bartok and Copland, the contrapuntal demands of Hindemith, the marcato finger-work of Rodion Shchedrin, and the clarity of George Perle than it does with Romantic piano idioms that never quite disappeared but have continued to be used, sometimes masterfully, by such composers as Barber, the lyrical Prokofieff, Akira Miyoshi, and Judith Zaimont.

A potential learning hurdle, though not a technical problem, is that of visual and tactile location. The less familiar you are with a composer’s language, the longer it may take to grasp the notes and their groupings, and the harder it will be to keep track of locations on the page and on the keyboard. The initial stage of learning almost any contemporary piece that is new to you will necessarily take longer than with a piece in a familiar style, but you can look forward to the big payoff that will come when you are memorizing. This stage will go unexpectedly quickly because of the extreme care you were forced to take in the beginning. Another visual-physical consideration in Adler’s music is that since he tends to place notes on the staves according to where the musical idea is located (as in an open score, for instance), you can expect to find places where taking some notes with the hand opposite to the one they are notated for will loosen you physically and increase your security.

The premise of this chapter is that an examination of the Cuban son provides important insights into Cuban history and society, into Caribbean race relations, and ongoing processes of cultural fusion involving Afro-descendant and Euro-descendant practices, among others. The chapter focuses primarily on early son history, its antecedent forms, the African-influenced aesthetic sense that gave rise to it, and the popularization of the music and dance in the early twentieth century. Later it briefly considers changes to son music in the 1930s and beyond.

This chapter introduces the drum, song and dance tradition gwoka, from Guadeloupe, tracing its evolution and development through an analysis of gwoka’s most celebrated musicians. By presenting gwoka as a model for unravelling Guadeloupe’s complicated colonial past, the chapter indicates the critical contributions intangible cultural objects like gwoka can make alongside written sources as tools for research.

This chapter investigates the evolution of rap music in Guadeloupe at the end of the 1990s. Based on ethnographic data and grounded in both postcolonial and decolonial theories, the chapter explores the relationship between Guadeloupe and American hip-hop, as well as the role local French Caribbean cultural politics served in enabling new constructions of belonging to take root in Guadeloupe hip-hop.

This chapter investigates the merengue as a tool for unpacking the complicated questions about race and representation in the Dominican Republic. Warning against viewing merengue through essentialist frames, it invites readers to formulate a more heterogenous approach to studying merengue, Dominican identity, and experiences of Blackness.

This chapter analyses the heterogeneous, contradictory and shifting social meanings that salsa music has articulated since its inception in the late 1960s. Shifting from the Nuyorican-grounded urban masculinity and anticolonial politics in its early years to the current globalised and neoliberal spaces of dance studios, this chapter explores how the sounds of salsa, as popular music, become sites for power struggles over cultural, racial, ethnic and gender identities.

This chapter outlines musical orality and musical literacy in the modes of transmission of musical traditions, knowledge and skills within the double island nation Trinidad and Tobago. It begins with a brief outline of some wider music educational tendencies which can in turn provide a lens through which to view music educational policy and practice in Trinidad and Tobago. This is followed by a discussion of some of the central music-making practices found there, their historical foundations, current performance, and respective accompanying manifestations of musical orality and musical literacy in their transmission.

This chapter explores the politics of world music through an analysis of konpa and zouk. The first section provides overviews of both genres, carefully emphasising their creole beginnings. The second section focuses on how globalisation and ‘world music’ marketing have individually and collectively impacted on the two genres over the years.

This chapter shifts the discussion of globalisation onto Jamaica’s reggae and dub musics, introducing readers to an international network of sound system cultures that, by borrowing upon Jamaica’s history of musical innovation and Rasta ideology, helped to create subgenres based around more localised notions of inclusivity. Through this analysis, the chapter provides a chronological deconstruction of globalisation, introducing some of the ideological and musical features of Jamaican reggae and dub that became pulled into the commercialised ‘global pop’ margins through these sub-genres.

The Introduction provides an overview of the Caribbean, its Indigenous peoples, particular colonial and slave histories, as well as migrant and immigrant pasts, all presented as reasons regarding why each island/country is culturally and musically distinct. Understanding Caribbean history is essential to understanding the musics of the islands. This introduction provides that broad summary of Caribbean history, emphasising its binding relationship with the music of the islands – a necessary task for understanding and appreciating forthcoming chapters of the book.

This chapter demonstrates how decolonisation serves as a crucial point of reference in this book. Each chapter has unpacked ‘the colonial encounter’ – that sustained collision of ‘new’ and ‘old’ worlds, from the mass movements of people (many taken into the Caribbean against their will) to imperialism’s continued economic, political and social conquests – through music analysis, thereby addressing the visibility of issues confronting the colonising methods and scope of music scholarship of previous scholarship on the Caribbean and Caribbean music.