The plane landed back in Massachusetts a few days before Christmas 1952 and, since the Army had to pay me $25 a day for every day over my regular discharge date, they hurried my papers at the Air Force base. I was on a bus going home to Worcester after only a two-hour delay. No one at home knew exactly when I was coming home. My mother and sister were surprised but extremely happy to welcome me. Since this was a Saturday late morning, my father was at services at the temple. I had not even taken off my coat (and, of course, I was still in uniform), when the phone rang. It was for me: Rabbi Olan from Dallas, Texas. I don't know how he guessed that I was home, but here he was asking me if I would mind coming to Dallas and talking to his music committee. He wanted to introduce a big new music program at the temple there. I was rather surprised by the call, but told him that I had been offered two positions, Brandeis and New Orleans, and wanted to wait for details concerning these. He immediately said that he was not offering me a job, but simply needed me as a consultant to explain to his committee what a first-class music program at a religious organi¬zation would require; since I had had the experience both in Worcester and in Boston, he felt, I was the person to advise his committee. I agreed to come and fly down on Christmas day and meet with them on December 26.

I was so happy to be home, and the few days before Christmas in Worces¬ter with the family and in Boston with the Fromms were wonderful and restful days after the busy time of recording before leaving Germany.

On Christmas Day, I flew to Dallas and was very warmly received by Rabbi Olan and his family and also, the next day, by the music committee of Temple Emanu-El. The meeting was a very long one, as I explained to them that I envi¬sioned music to be a most important element in the religious life of a congrega¬tion. If I were a music director in a large congregation such as they were now envisioning, I would begin a choir system with a series of graduated youth choirs and a large congregational choir.

The December 2010 MacDowell Symposium at Elizabethtown College opened with two papers on the composer's family background. The late Dr. Margery Morgan Lowens—in the last public paper of her distinguished professional career—traced the influence of Mac- Dowell's mother in broadening his worldview beyond the Quaker home where he was born. The second paper was my own essay on the Quaker faith of his father's family and their connections to the Society of Friends. These two papers were in dialogue with each other, showing the complex interaction of the dual influences on MacDowell's personality. Though Dr. Lowens’ declining health prevented her from revising her essay for inclusion in the present volume, the influence of her ideas pervades my discussion of MacDowell's Quaker heritage. Like other biographers, she followed the lead of Marian MacDowell in pointing out that Edward MacDowell was not a religious man and showed no adult interest in the faith of his father, gravitating instead to his mother's friends and interests. In this essay I will not dispute those assessments, but rather, I will look for evidence of how his early years in the 15th Street Quaker Meeting did affect his life and music. I will make the case that Quaker values and practices had a subtle, if unacknowledged, influence on this complex individual and his unique musical style.

Quaker belief and practice

The Society of Friends (or “Quakers,” as they were popularly known) arose in England during the turbulent period of civil wars in the late 1640s. Despite widespread persecution, the sect grew rapidly through the recruitment of disaffected members of other religious groups. In 1682, William Penn founded the colony of Pennsylvania as a “Holy Experiment” in religious tolerance, attracting a significant population of Quakers who spread to surrounding colonies in subsequent years. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, members of the Society of Friends played a significant role in movements for social justice in America, especially in education, women's suffrage, the Abolition movement, and prison reform. The nineteenth century saw several splits over questions of belief and practice, with the Hicksite branch, to which the McDowells belonged, representing the more liberal direction. The 15th Street Meeting House, where the family attended services, is still standing in mid-town Manhattan.

“Stories from a Composer's Life” is the subtitle of Samuel Adler's autobiography. And a storyteller he is. The project of “rescuing” the stories from oral transmission and jotting them down for eventual publication in a book originated in the mid-1980s with Sam sitting at the family table and relating his stories as a tape recorder captured them. (The transcribed tapes served, thirty years later, to trigger his memories and bring the project to a conclusion.) The stories are full of humor and contain touches of irony; they show an awareness of human foibles, including his own, and are told with understanding and tolerance. And occasionally, the stories capture poignant, even traumatic, moments in history from a personal perspective—e.g., Dallas, Texas in November 1963 and New York City in September 2001 (and Adler is nearby in both instances). As a ten-year-old boy he witnessed the atrocities committed during Reichskristallnacht in November 1938 in his native Mannheim. Two months later, the same boy, with a fearful look in his eyes, arrived in New York City on the S.S. Manhattan with the Statue of Liberty in the background heralding the prospects of a new and promising life. And what a life it has become!: a life lived in ever-widening concentric circles; a life focused on building music's empire through teaching, composing, lecturing, and writing; a life devoted to nurturing friendships with musicians and other artists all over the world; and indeed the stories here are intertwined with the protagonist's travels across the United States, Europe, and, in later years, South America and Asia. Adler's life story is an example of how much a society is enriched by welcoming foreigners and giving them a chance at a new beginning.

The stories related in Building Bridges with Music are only a selection from a rich repertory of tales and anecdotes that could have been told as well. Chances are that a meeting with Sam Adler, when he is in the storytelling mood, will result in a whole set of additional tales, to be inserted in the narrative that here is making it into print. The autobiographical stories are followed by several appendixes: two essays central to Adler's activities as a composer and an interview about the teaching of composition as well as a list of his students at North Texas, Eastman, Juilliard, Bowdoin, and, most recently, the Berlin Academy.

While subsequent chapters will dwell in-depth on the role that two non-state groups (religious and diaspora groups) played in the Liberian peace process, this chapter will serve as a precursor by looking at civil society more broadly, especially with regard to its manifestations in African and Liberian society.

Theoretical foundations

That there exist various definitions and interpretations of civil society reflects the diverse opinions of what the concept represents. One analysis maintains that ‘conceptually… “civil society” seems to be diffuse, hard to define, empirically imprecise, and ideologically laden’ (Allen, 1997: 329). Another study defines civil society as ‘a sphere of social interaction between economy and the state, composed above all of the intimate sphere (especially the family), the sphere of associations (especially voluntary associations), social movements, and forms of public communications’ (Cohen and Arato, 1999: ix). It has also been defined as ‘a sphere of social association in society in distinction to the state, involving a network of institutions through which society and groups within it represent themselves in cultural, ideological and political senses’ (Shaw, 2008: unpaginated), and ‘the web of social relations that exist in the space between the state, the market (activities with the aim of extracting profit), and the private life of families and individuals’ (Barnes, 2005: 7). Gellner (1995: 32) has further defined civil society as ‘that set of diverse non-governmental institutions, which is strong enough to counterbalance the state, and, whilst not preventing the state from fulfilling its role of keeper of the peace and arbitrator between major interests, can nevertheless prevent the state from dominating and atomizing the rest of society’.

What is common to these various definitions is the delineation of civil society as separate from the state, its supposed role as a check on the excesses of the state, and its distinction from other aspects of society, such as the business sector. Cohen and Arato (1999), in particular, emphasize the need to distinguish civil society from the political society of parties, political organizations and political publics, as well as economic society, comprising organizations of distribution and production.

Samuel Adler is one of the two or three most impressive men I have ever met, and one of the two or three most decisive in the development of my own career.

From the days of his dramatic escape from Nazi Germany to his adolescence in Worcester, Massachusetts and his student days at Boston University and Harvard; from his founding of the Seventh U.S. Army Symphony Orchestra to his days as a faculty member at North Texas, Eastman, and Juilliard, Sam has led a life filled with adventure and accomplishment. All in the service of music. Ever a prolific composer of fine music, Sam has also been a dedicated teacher whose students all have musical voices of their own: a resourceful administrator who at Eastman helped build an outstanding composition department and attracted top-notch faculties; a pedagogy-inspired author of influential books on sight-singing, choral conducting, and orchestration; winner of many awards and honorary degrees, Sam Adler has led a long life of lasting accomplishment. Typical was a contribution of his to a concert I was performing in the 1980s with Eastman colleagues: violist Martha Strongin Katz, oboist Richard Killmer, and bassoonist David Van Hoesen at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall. When I mentioned by chance on Wednesday that we had had trouble finding a three- minute encore for New York City the following Monday, Sam told me not to worry. The encore, which turned out to be the hit of the evening, was ready on Saturday afternoon! When, in his seventies, Sam was invited to join the faculty of the Juilliard School at a time when his wife Emily was the head of the orchestral program at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, he tirelessly commuted weekly on Delta from Toledo to New York City and back.

In the fall of 1972, when I was a candidate for the directorship of the Eastman School of Music, Sam, whom I had never met before, was the chair of the faculty search committee appointed by University of Rochester Chancellor W. Allen Wallis. After my selection as the new director, Sam became a trusted councilor, wisely advising me on all sorts of delicate political matters concerning the well-being of a school we both loved, which in the meantime has gone on from strength to strength as one of the world's leading institutions of musical instruction.

In 1989, my life changed completely once again. I was in Boston doing some work for the Contemporary Music Project and was expecting Carol to come home at the end of April from Florida. When we talked on the phone, she told me that she would be home a day earlier. I cut my visit to Boston short and met her when she returned. We went out to dinner, and when we returned to the car to go home, she told me that she had decided that we needed to get a divorce immediately. She had been thinking about her life and how it was always overshadowed by mine; at this point she wanted her own life to be her major focus. I could not have been more surprised by her decision, and we talked for a long time, but with no changed result. Her mind was made up, and there was no way to alter it.

We went to a lawyer the next day, but after hearing our reasons for divorce, he said that he could not take a case like that since he did not see a good cause for this split. A friend of ours suggested another lawyer and, after seeing her, she agreed to take the case. We tried for an “amicable” divorce, but I guess that this is an oxymoron. Everyone in our family, including the children, got hurt in the pro-cess. However, we settled as well as we could in accordance with the laws of the State of New York and divided all assets, with Carol keeping the place in Florida and me keeping the house in Rochester. I must admit that I was devastated by the divorce, but never regretted any part of the more than twenty-nine good years Carol and I were together. Our union produced two wonderful girls whom I love more than I can ever put into words. The only thing I could do after these events was steepmyself in work and try to heal.

I must say that I had a great deal of support from my family, Bob Freeman, and many members of the faculty to whom I was close. Even the student body responded to my dilemma by asking me to be the baccalaureate speaker at the 1989 graduation.

Matthew Arnold, in the later part of the nineteenth century, predicted that the twentieth century would see a sudden decline in the influence of organized religion whose function would instead be served by secular literature and art. Of his time, he already wrote: “Even now the Bible is no longer dogma, it is literature.” He was, it seems to me, simply echoing a contemporary of his, Friedrich Nietzsche, who prophesied that in the twentieth century, theology would be superseded by aesthetics.

How correct they seem to have been on the one hand, and how wrong thy have proven on the other. In their wildest imaginations they could not have dreamed what television has brought to the dissemination of religion and what popular culture has done to that religion's message. The religious establishment—and may I add here that the terms “religion” and “church” in this talk are used generically, for I include all denominations of Protestant¬ism, Catholicism, and Judaism—has embraced much of the sound and image of popular culture and has phrased its message pretty much in the vernacular.

Now was this not always so? Did not two of the greatest religious geniuses of the past use popular customs and tunes to gather their multi¬tudes around well-known, unthreatened rituals? I am referring to St. Paul, who combined pagan symbols with Jewish symbolism to create meaningful ceremonies for the new Christianity—witness the combination of bread and body, wine and blood, stemming from the Jewish Kiddush (the prayer over the wine to celebrate a Holy Day) and the Motzi (the prayer of Grace over ev¬ery meal where bread is broken in Thanksgiving), with less anthropomorphic beliefs which were popular and easily comprehended by the Greco-Roman world. Further, I refer to Martin Luther, who selected the best tunes of his day, regardless of origin, to lure the masses into religious fervor after having “tamed” them with stirring meaningful words and appropriate harmonic set¬tings. Well then, it was always so. Why not, therefore, leave the subject and accept what is happening today as a natural phenomenon, simply an evolu¬tionary development of all that has preceded it?.

Let us pause a moment and look at our contemporary scene. Are we utilizing the popular and metamorphosing it into the sacred? I contend with you that here is where our civilization differs.

On February 13, 1890 the virtuoso pianist Teresa Carreño performed the European premiere of MacDowell's First Piano Concerto with the Berlin Philharmonic under Gustav F. Kogel. The news of the event reached MacDowell in Boston a few days later through a letter from Carreño in which she wrote excitedly about their great achievement:

The success of this performance proved to be very significant for both MacDowell and Carreño. It was an affirmative step in MacDowell's international recognition as a composer. At the same time, it was a triumphant new beginning for Carreño, who in midlife was determined to gain a place in Europe among the first-rank pianists. The idea of performing MacDowell's Concerto came from Carreño herself, who proposed the work for the last of her three debut concerts in Berlin. Her manager, Hermann Wolff, did not consider it appropriate to launch Carreño's career in Germany with an unknown work by an American composer. The conductor, afraid of the conservatism of the Berlin public, did not welcome it either. But after the success she had had in her two previous concerts in Berlin, the pianist was able to stand up for her convictions. Her answer to the conductor and the manager was “no MacDowell, no Carreño,” and she got her way and played MacDowell.

The beginning: Americo-Liberian repatriation and rule

In 1822, a group of freed ex-slaves were repatriated to Africa with the help of the American Colonization Society (ACS), a group of influential Americans who were concerned about slavery and the ‘untenable position of “free persons of colour” in the United States after the formation of the USA in 1787’ (Liebenow, 1969: 1). The main rationale behind the US-facilitated departure of the ex-slaves to Africa was not exactly humanitarian but was a solution to an identified problem for America. This point was underlined by Faulkner (1910) who noted that ‘it was partly the desire to better the condition of the free negro, partly no doubt the fear that his presence might be a harmful influence among the blacks held in bondage, which first suggested the idea that he be sent back to Africa where he belonged’ (Faulkner, 1910: 530). Youboty (2004) posits that it was the fear of a slave revolt, similar to the one that had occurred on the French island of Saint Dominique, which led American slave masters to start seeking means through which the Negro population in America could be reduced and led to the repatriation and resettlement idea (Youboty, 2004: 9). It can thus be concluded that the repatriation of freed American slaves to what is Liberia today served a dual purpose of returning people of African descent ‘home’ as well as helping the USA deal with the ‘freed slaves dilemma’.

Having succeeded in securing a grant of US$100,000 from the American Congress for the purchase of land, building homes, the acquisition of farm implements, payment of teachers and other necessities envisaged for the new settler community, an initial but futile attempt was made at securing a settlement for the ex-slaves on an island off the coast of what is known today as Sierra Leone (Liebenow, 1969: 3–4). Success was eventually achieved at gunpoint and also following the exchange of such commodities as muskets, beads, tobacco, mirrors, clothing, food, gunpowder and rum, by the ACS, who negotiated with the indigenous people on behalf of the freed ex-slaves (Liebenow, 1969: 4). This ‘carrot and stick’ method of land acquisition, which entailed commodity exchange as well as coercion, had long been used in other parts of Africa by slave traders when dealing with the Africans involved in the slave trade.

It was a very cold, damp day in New York when we landed. We were met by our cousins Herbert and Thea Lehman and our Uncle and Aunt Leo and Bertha, who had been our benefactors by sending us an affidavit. Uncle Leo loaded all of us, including our luggage, into his huge Cadillac with the children on the laps of the grownups. Aunt Bertha owned a few large apartment houses in the Bronx and was kind enough to furnish the Lehmans, and now us, with a rather large apartment at 180th Street and Third Avenue. I said it was a large apart¬ment and it was for one family, but for six of us it presented problems. Still, we solved them, since we all were overjoyed to have reached our destination. Her¬bert and Thea were already settled in the bedroom; our mother was to sleep on a couch in the dining room; father settled in the living room where there was an¬other couch and a little love seat that was to be my bed. Marianne was assigned the crack in the bed between the two Lehmans. My sleeping quarters were so tiny that I had to learn to sleep in a fetal position during the entire month we spent in New York. The Third Avenue elevated railway was a very close neighbor as well, because it ran exactly one foot away from the window where my love-seat was located. Still, these conditions were luxurious compared to what other refugees from Germany experienced, and we were all grateful to our American relatives for their generosity and the chance to have a free apartment.

After we arrived at our abode, Cousin Thea made tea for everyone and, almost immediately, Aunt Bertha began a serious talk directed toward my fa¬ther. “You know, Hugo,” she said, “You must find a position immediately, for we cannot afford to have the family here for more than a few months. I have made an appointment for you on Monday morning at the Council of Jewish Women, where all professionals must register and where jobs for cantors and rabbis from overseas are procured.” My father was most grateful for this sug¬gestion and promised to be at the Council at the appointed time on Monday.

The careers of Edward MacDowell and Chou Wen-chung, though separated by more than half a century, frequently involved similar issues, among them: crossing national and cultural boundaries, professional involvement with the cities of Boston and later New York, and affiliations with Columbia University that—although they provided valuable opportunities for both composers—ultimately hindered their compositional activity. As we track questions relating to race, ethnicity, national identity, and intercultural dynamics, we can see a number of parallel challenges that both composers confronted, often with quite different results. As faculty of Columbia University, both men shouldered heavy responsibilities for designing and delivering the music curricula. Time commitments demanded by administration led to an appalling reduction of musical works during the years of their administrative activities. Interestingly, MacDowell's and Chou's ideas for planning students’ curricula and for designing departmental structures have important elements in common.

“A time to be born”

Consistent Inaccuracies in Data

The parallel issues in the lives of Edward MacDowell and Chou Wen-chung commence at the times of the respective composers’ births. Chou's birth date, like MacDowell's, has been inconsistently reported during his lifetime. In MacDowell's case, his tombstone originally bore the incorrect birth year of 1861 but has since been corrected to read 1860. Apparently MacDowell himself allowed this piece of misinformation to be accepted as fact.

In my biography of Chou Wen-chung, I note that, “according to reputable music dictionaries, Chou Wen-chung was born on May 16, June 29, and July 29, 1923. In his own curriculum vitae, Chou lists a fourth birth date, July 28, 1923.” The disparities here arise in part from the differences between the calendars used in Chinese and Western cultures. At the time of Chou's birth, the Chinese calendar consisted of twelve lunar months with intercalary months interpolated at regular intervals to balance the difference between the 354-day lunar year and the 365-day solar year. Chou was born in the fifth month of the year of the Boar; here is the source for a birthday in “May,” which, though it certainly is the fifth month of the Western calendar, is clearly not the fifth month of the Chinese calendar.

After the traditional days of mourning (Shiva), I returned to Dallas to resume a full schedule. Besides the regular duties at my three places of employment, I planned for the end-of-the-year music festival. I thought it would be fitting to do two evenings of music: one dedicated to my father's music and the other a performance of Ernest Bloch's Sacred Service. At that time I had befriended the Harrell family. Mack Harrell, the famous Metropolitan Opera baritone, was teaching voice at Southern Methodist University, while his wife Marjory Fulton Harrell was a professor of violin North Texas State University. The Harrells had three children two boys and a girl. The youngest son, Lynn, was studying the cello and was making quite a name for himself. One day Mack called me to ask me to take Lynn as a theory student. Even though he loved to practice the cello, he did not like to do theory exercises, no matter how much I tried. As is well known, he became one of the world's greatest cellists. Whenever I meet him, he tells me how much he regrets not having taken the theory lessons more seriously. In exchange for teaching Lynn, I asked Mack to be the soloist for the Bloch Sacred Service, and he immediately accepted my invitation. The perfor¬mance was one of the highlights of my Dallas days. We did it mostly in Hebrew, except for a few sections that Bloch himself had recorded in English. I sent a recording to Bloch and he wrote me a beautiful letter, saying that this was truly a definitive performance and that Mack's interpretation could not have been better. The celebration of my father's music was equally successful. We did ex¬cerpts from all of his sacred services, especially Music for the Synagogue, which was the piece commissioned by the Central Conference of American Rabbis when we first came to the United States.

Walter Hendl attended the performance of Bloch's Sacred Service and, at the reception afterwards, asked me to consider writing another work for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra for the 1956-57 season. He did not have to ask me twice. I started work that summer on my Second Symphony, with a desire to dedicate it to the memory of my father.