Edward Aldwell, 68; fused piano theory, performance

Edward Aldwell was both a theoretician who analyzed music and a pianist who performed it with high distinction.

``Teaching piano and classroom teaching of theory represent different ways of looking at music, but they are more the same than people think," he told T he Globe in a 1998 interview. ``My experience in theory makes it possible to explain in a more clear way what is happening in the music; too much piano teaching is about the surface dimensions of performance without exploring the reasons why you are doing anything."

Mr. Aldwell was a distinguished teacher of piano and music theory and analysis at the Mannes College of Music in New York and the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. With Carl Schachter he was the co author of ``Harmony and Voice Leading," a widely used textbook that has been translated into Chinese and many European languages.

Mr. Aldwell died last Sunday in the Westchester Medical Center in New York as the result of injuries suffered in an accident May 7. He was 68. While staying at his week end retreat in Kerhonkson , N.Y., he had borrowed a neighbor's all-terrain vehicle to look for his dog, and the ATV overturned.

As a pianist Aldwell made an unremarked New York debut during a newspaper strike in 1963. Nearly 20 years later at the age of 44 he tried again, playing an all-Bach recital in 1982 in New York's Merkin Hall that attracted considerable attention because of his way of making the actions and interactions of the music so audible. Later, his regular Bach recitals in New York and Philadelphia became ritual events that attracted a devoted and discerning public.

He also began to record, making acclaimed CDs of Bach's ``Well-Tempered Clavier" (Nonesuch), French Suites (Haenssler Classics), the ``Goldberg" Variations, the French Ouverture, and ``The Art of Fugue" (Biddulph), as well as a disc of Hindemith's ``Ludus T onalis" along with works of Faure (Pro Piano).

His New England appearances were infrequent but significant -- a master class at New England Conservatory, a recital at the Rockport Chamber Music Festival in 1998 and another at Brandeis University in 2002.

Mr. Aldwell was born Jan. 30, 1938 into an Army family in Portland, Ore., but grew up in Sonora, Texas. His first exposure to Bach, he liked to recall, came when an issue of Consumer Reports Magazine recommended the new recording of the ``Well-Tempered Clavier" by harpsichordist Wanda Landowska. Acquiring those LPs launched him on a voyage of discovery that continued the rest of his life.

He attended the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music and did graduate work at New York's Juilliard School, where he studied with the noted piano guru Adele Marcus. He also began studying theory with his future co-author, Carl Schachter.

Harvard pianist and musicologist Robert Levin , who coordinated Haenssler's Bach keyboard project a few years ago, generously said at the time that he had chosen Aldwell to record the French Suites because ``he plays Bach better than anyone else before the public."

In an interview this week Schachter elaborated. ``He had deep insight into musical structure and a wonderful ear; he had a very rare way of piercing through a tangle of problematic issues and finding the central point that illuminates everything else," he said.

On the concert platform, Mr. Aldwell was awkward, bashful, and boyish yet also immensely authoritative. His playing of Bach was notable for emotional intensity, clarity of detail, vigor and flexibility of rhythm, imagination, variety of articulation, and an unrivalled ability to give each voice in a fugue or contrapuntal passage its own weight and character.

He didn't want to be typecast as a Bach specialist, however, and his explorations of music by later composers were equally distinctive. He was particularly fond of the Chopin Mazurkas.

In conversation Mr. Aldwell was courtly, and a listener could still hear the accents and rhythms of Sonora, Texas in his speech. He was in the audience at a concert at the Dorothy Taubman International Piano Festival at Williamstown a few years ago for a recital by one of his prize-winning pupils, Mei-Ting Sun, whom he had taught since his early childhood. It was characteristic of Mr. Aldwell that he would take the occasion to remark on how much the experience of working with such an enormous and precocious talent had taught him.

In an interview with The Globe in 1998, Mr. Aldwell spoke about taking time to record the rest of Bach's major keyboard works.

``I'm a little bit slow," he admitted. ``I want to feel I have a point of view on the pieces, a kind of conviction, rather than offering something generic . . . there's enough of that around."

Mr. Aldwell leaves his wife, Jean Ann of New York City, a daughter, Elisabeth, and two grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia on a date to be announced.