DESCRIPTION:
Claus Adam (November 5, 1917 July 4, 1983) was an influential American cellist and cello teacher as well as a composer. He served as the second cellist of the Juilliard String Quartet, replacing Arthur Winograd in 1955. Joel Krosnick, a former student of his, replaced him as cellist of the quartet in 1974. He devoted the last decade of his life primarily to musical composition, and several of his works--including a cello concerto and a string trio--are published by G. Schirmer.

Adam lived in Indonesia until he was six. His father, Tassilo Adam, was an ethnologist there. He then went to Europe and studied in Salzburg. In 1929 he went to the USA. moved to New York in 1929, where he later studied cello with Emanuel Feuermann, conducting with Leon Barzin, and eventually composition with Stefan Wolpe. In 1948 he formed the New Music Quartet and then joined the Juilliard String Quartet, which he left after twenty years to devote his attention to composition. Adam was also active as a teacher and held positions at the Juilliard School and Mannes College.

Claus Adams recollections of study with Wolpe:

I studied with Wolpe for the first time in the summer of '42, and in '43 I came back to New York and was drafted into the Army. I was back in New York within two weeks, because I got into an Air Force show by Moss Hart called Winged Victory. I was very lucky, because then I was in New York for six months, and during those six months I studied a great deal with Wolpe. We began right from the very beginning. I said I only knew some harmony and a little counterpoint but had never learned systematically. I asked Stefan to start me off completely from scratch. And he did with basic harmony. I remember very well the relationship of fifths within the basic key. I would also have to do keyboard harmony with him. He would ask me to go from, let's say, D minor to F-sharp major; then he would show me how many extra steps you can take in order to solidify the new key. You can sometimes do it in three steps, and sometimes in forty steps, if you know how, which is what Bruckner and Mahler did over a long period of time. He knew this system very well. Then I said, look, I've never really had thorough counterpoint, so we went through Palestrina counterpoint right from scratch. We used the Jeppesen book.

At a certain point he said, "That's enough of that. If you want to go on and on and on with that and understand it to its fullest, you can become a professor of counterpoint, but let's go on to Bach--to free counterpoint and to linear and harmonic counterpoint." That was a revelation. I remember one session when he looked for a fugue, and said, "Well, that's a very usual kind of fugue, and that's sort of standard, and, ah, here's one. Now that's an exception." And then he would show me why it was an exception, and the ingenious devices of a man like Bach. Stefan was never interested in the ordinary, the obvious, he always was interested in why did the composer turn to that or another idea, and what was the germ, and how did it develop in his mind. He would even project. He'd say, "Well, he could have gone in this direction." He would make some sketches and say, "Now that's another possibility." And this is where he was the greatest teacher, because he opened up your process of thinking how to develop what possibilities you had. That was the great thing.