Remembering John Kenneth Adams (1934-2018)
John Kenneth Adams
In 2018, the American Matthay Association was saddened to learn of the death of one our most prominent members, JOHN KENNETH ADAMS, who died peacefully at his home near Hopkins, South Carolina, on April 29. John had been a member of the AMA since the late 1960s, and he performed and lectured at many of the Matthay Festivals over the years. Born in Arkansas, he studied as a youngster at the Birmingham College of Music, and after moving to Missouri, he continued his training with Mary Newitt Dawson (a student of Frank Mannheimer) at the University of Kansas City. He also attended sessions in Aspen where he worked with Carl Friedberg and the Latvian-born Joanna Graudan, a Schnabel student. In the early 1950s, he entered the Yale School of Music as a Victor Wilson Scholar, receiving both his Bachelor's and Master's degrees under Bruce Simonds. While at Yale, he twice won the Concerto Competition and received the Lockwood Prize for best piano recital. A Fulbright Scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music followed, where he studied with Hilda Dederich, one of Matthay's most devoted pupils, and in 1960 he attended the Casals Festival in Zermatt as an accompanist. From 1961 until 1971 he studied extensively with Matthay's pupil Frank Mannheimer in Duluth, Minnesota. When he returned from London, he taught for two years at the University of Texas, and in 1964 he came to the University of South Carolina, where he served as a professor of piano and piano literature, eventually earning the rank of Distinguished Professor Emeritus.
Universally acknowledged as an outstanding teacher, John also maintained an active performance career throughout his life. In the 1970s he toured frequently for the United States Information Service in South America, Spain, Italy, and Central America. He made an extensive tour for Gioventu Musicale throughout Italy in 1976, and in 1978 he made his New York debut with an all-French program in Carnegie Recital Hall. His concerts in South Carolina spanned four decades and eventually numbered in the hundreds, and in 1985-6 he performed all of Debussy's piano music in a series of five recitals at USC. He was also well known for his many radio broadcasts for South Carolina Educational Public Radio and for a series of "Piano Portraits" devoted to specific composers presented across the state. He also had student winners in many prestigious competitions, including the Dimitri Mitropoulos Scholarship Foundation, the Rotary International Fellowships, and the MTNA Young Artist Competition. In 2016 he was honored as an MTNA Fellow in San Antonio, and he is shown in the photos below with his former pupils and long-time AMA members Nancy Elton and Wendy Freeland.
A Chance, and Life-Altering, Conversation from my Student Days
A Remembrance by
Stephen Siek,
Former AMA President
I first met John in the late 1960s when I was an undergraduate at the University of Maryland. He had just played an evening recital at a Matthay Festival, and that week we were offered an unusually rich roster, for it was also the first time I had heard David Renner, Aiko Onishi, and Anne Koscielny. I was absolutely enthralled, and I noted in their bios that a common denominator uniting them all was a Matthay pupil called Frank Mannheimer, a name I had heard a few times, but I knew virtually nothing about him. In fact, I wasn’t even sure that this man I had heard of for so long was even still alive. I was also becoming a bit more wordly by that point, noting that much of the piano world was dismissive of Matthay—in fact I knew teachers and students who thought his influence was even harmful, especially since (so they believed) he over-emphasized relaxation to the point of making brilliance impossible (everybody wanted to be “brilliant” then—much like today!). I quickly learned that Frank Mannheimer was still very much alive, and that his teachings were far from "harmful"—in fact, I had just heard four artists in close succession whose playing, both artistically and technically, exceeded that of most of the professional pianists I had then heard. And despite their tonal power, none of these artists was ever “brilliant” merely for the sake of being brilliant.
Just by chance, one afternoon I was seated next to John in the Maryland recital hall, awaiting the start of a presentation, and I told him again how much I had enjoyed his program. I then had the temerity to ask about the name Frank Mannheimer, and my jaw nearly dropped when he told me that earlier that week he had arrived directly from Duluth, where he had coached his entire recital with Mr. Mannheimer. Then without skipping a beat, he added in a matter-of-fact, non-ostentatious way, “I think he’s the finest teacher in America.” A few more years passed before I was finally able to reach Duluth, but I’ve often wondered whether I would have even conceived of making the journey—which changed my life dramatically—had I never had that conversation with John.
In the summer I met him, I remember someone asking John where he had studied, and his answer was simply, “My background is entirely Matthay.” And so it was. John studied for years with some of the finest First-Generation artists that Matthay produced, and he was unflinching in his dedication to their teachings, even when such ideas had clearly become unfashionable in many quarters. The term “artistic integrity” is often used today (perhaps not always deservedly), but it was always clear to me that John’s artistry had a rare integrity. At times we spoke about the pressures then being placed on pianists to become more aggressive competition players, often to the detriment of their own musicality, and I’ll always remember his advice—for its simplicity as well as its profundity: “Never put yourself in a position where one day you’ll have to apologize to yourself, or to your students.”
By that measure alone, the debt I owe him is incalculable, but there are so many others as well. For example, shortly after the Matthay biography was published, John, of his own accord, placed a review on Amazon, and I was immensely heartened to see how much he had really “gotten” the book, for though we had never discussed it, he gleaned exactly the message I most wanted to communicate. He honored me by praising it as “a defining work about Tobias Matthay, a valuable addition to any piano library,” and I knew that he saw everything in the book that I had wanted a discriminating reader to see, and I also knew that scarcely anyone had John’s qualifications to make such a judgment.
John Adams was an irreplaceable link to the best of Matthay’s proponents, and he promoted their ideals tirelessly in both his playing and his teaching. I miss him very much.