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sai-national.org • Winter 2026 13 Cposers By Hollis Thoms In Samuel Adler's autobiography Building Bridges with Music: Stories from a Composer's Life (Pendragon Press 2017), my name appears as one of his Eastman School of Music composition students when working on my doctorate from 1977–1979. I am merely a footnote in his life that now has spanned ninety-seven years since his birth, born in Mannheim, Germany, March 4, 1928. I went back to Eastman in 2018 to celebrate his 90th birthday, and had the opportunity to visit him in 2023 at his home in Perrysburg, Ohio. During that visit, I presented him with the score of my cantata, Isaac, a setting of the Abraham and Isaac story from Genesis 22. It had been premiered on October 7, 2012 by Bach in Baltimore under the direction of T. Herbert Dimmock. The twenty-minute work is scored for three soloists, treble choir, organ, and percussion. It was after I had read Adler's autobiography that I decided to dedicate my score to him, because over the years I became aware of his deep religious faith and dedication to sacred music. While Adler came from the Jewish tradition, and I came from Christian, we had something in common: religion and music were central to our lives. A vignette Adler grew up in Nazi Germany, poignantly relating in his autobiography how he and his father, Hugo Chaim Adler—a well-known Jewish cantor and liturgical composer—saved liturgical music. Much of it would have been destroyed by the Nazis, as they burned and bombed most of the Jewish synagogues. He and his father entered a destroyed synagogue through a secret passage to gather the music scores. The building had been bombed, and a first explosion blew out the entire front wall. A second explosion destroyed the balcony, and blew the organ over the side so that it hung from a cable about fifty feet off the ground. As they gathered the scores in the balcony, they heard SS men talking and laughing below. Adler says the dust made him sneeze, and one of the officers commanded a man to go upstairs and to shoot anyone there on sight. Suddenly, the organ console crashed to the floor below, making it impossible for anyone to go up the stairs. Adler and his father took all the scores and exited the synagogue through the secret passage. Hugo Chaim Adler and Samuel Adler's The Binding Hugo Chaim Adler was a prolific liturgical composer who also wrote some more extended works, one being Akedah (The Binding), based on the Abraham and Isaac story plus other Jewish writings. Samuel Adler recalls that this work was destroyed before it could be premiered, because the Nazis, after reviewing the text, thought it was anti-Nazi. They destroyed the musical material except for one vocal score, which Adler's family was able to keep. The Adler family escaped Nazi Germany and eventually moved to the United States, arriving in New York City on January 24, 1939. Over the next thirty years, Samuel Adler became one of America's preeminent composition teachers and composers. I met him in 1977, when I began work on my doctorate at the Eastman School of Music. In 1968, Adler decided to write his own The Binding, based on some of his father's text. His autobiography notes that the middle part of the oratorio quotes his father's text exactly. Both Abraham and Isaac have encounters with the devil, who seeks to thwart God's will and shake the faith of both Abraham and Isaac. Both reject the temptations of Satan, and Abraham and Isaac walk on together to complete God's sacrificial plan. Samuel Adler's The Binding was commissioned by the boards of Temple Emanu-El, the Dallas Symphony, and the Dallas Chamber Music Society. Comparison of Thoms and Adler settings Thoms My work entitled Isaac is in five sections, covering several chapters of Genesis: The call of Abraham by God; the Covenant between God and Abraham; God visiting Abraham ADLER continued on page 14 MORE COMPOSER DISCOVERIES: Samuel Adler's The Binding (1967) SAI National Arts Associate SAI National Arts Associate Samuel Adler and Hollis Thoms Samuel Adler and Hollis Thoms

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