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.