Title: String Quartet No. 10
Commission: 2013
Completed: 2014
Instrumentation: string quartet
Premiere Location: Brunswick, ME
Premiere Ensemble: Cassatt Quartet
Notes:

Samuel Adler was born March 4, 1928, in Mannheim, Germany and came to the United States in 1939. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in May 2001, and then inducted into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame in October 2008. In 2018 he was award the Bundesverdienstkreuz (first class), the highest civilian award given by the German government.

He is the composer of over 400 published works, including 5 operas, 6 symphonies, 17 concerti, 8 string quartets, 5 oratorios and many other orchestral, band, chamber and choral works and songs, which have been performed all over the world. He is the author of four books, Choral Conducting (Holt Reinhart and Winston 1971, second edition Schirmer Books 1985), Sight Singing (W.W. Norton 1979, 1997), and The Study of Orchestration (W.W. Norton 1982, 1989, 2001), and the autobiographical Building Bridges With Music (Pendragon Press 2017). He has also contributed numerous articles to major magazines and books published in the U.S. and abroad.

Adler was educated at Boston University and Harvard University, and holds honorary doctorates from Southern Methodist University, Wake Forest University, St. Mary’s Notre-Dame, the St. Louis Conservatory and the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. His major teachers were: in composition, Herbert Fromm, Walter Piston, Randall Thompson, Paul Hindemith and Aaron Copland; in conducting, Serge Koussevitzky.

He is Professor-emeritus at the Eastman School of Music where he taught from 1966 to 1995 and served as chair of the composition department from 1974 until his retirement. Before going to Eastman, Adler served as professor of composition at the University of North Texas (1957–1977), Music Director at Temple Emanu-El in Dallas, Texas (1953–1966), and instructor of Fine Arts at the Hockaday School in Dallas, Texas (1955–1966). From 1954 to 1958 he was music director of the Dallas Lyric Theater and the Dallas Chorale. From 1997 to 2017 he was a member of the composition faculty at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City where he was awarded the 2009–10 William Schuman Scholars Chair. Adler has given master classes and workshops at over 300 universities worldwide, and in the summers has taught at major music festivals such as Tanglewood, Aspen, Brevard, Bowdoin, as well as others in France, Germany, Israel, Spain, Austria, Poland, South America and Korea.

Adler has received commissions from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the Koussevitzky Foundation, the Barlow Foundation, the City of Jerusalem, the Welsh Arts Council and many others.