"Inheritances": Adam Tendler's musical testimony of love, grief and memory

The late summer crickets were making music in the meadow of New York's Hudson Valley long before concert pianist Adam Tendler took the stage. [PIANO PLAYING] He was double checking everything because-- Very corny.

--in a few hours-- Whenever you see this, I'm ready to go.

--he'd be performing an 80 minute program that took lifetimes to compose. Yes. Lifetimes, plural. In a way, it felt like each piece was each composer's way of saying, I see you, I can hear where you're coming from. And here's how it resonates with me. And in a way, here's how I can help. [PIANO PLAYING]

He is a soloist and yet still pretty crowded up there on stage. In every coup, there are ghosts, some we might recognize. For Adam, it's his dad, Gary. I found out that he died mid-October. And I had last talked to him on Father's Day, which is June.

That was six years ago. His dad's death was sudden, at least to Adam.

You ready, Adam? Right, dad.

His parents divorced when he was just two years old, but he stayed close with his dad at first. Are you recording? No, I'm just looking at you.

But as Adam got older and his father remarried, their paths crossed less and less. It wasn't like you resented your dad. There was just a distance, almost a mutually agreed upon distance, right? Yeah. It wasn't like a rift so much as a drift. And we both allowed that to happen. We still loved each other but at a distance.

Much to Adam's surprise, on a cold New Year's day in the parking of a Denny's, his stepmother handed him an envelope. Turns out his dad had left him some cash. Wasn't much of an inheritance, but to Adam, it was sacred. This is his inheritance. So putting it toward my credit card, that's so ephemeral. It's just gone or even putting it toward a vacation or something. Nothing felt right.

Mr. Virtuoso.

Music, however, always felt right. [PIANO PLAYING] It gave him purpose. And music became a life raft in an angry sea of bullying. Everyone made fun of my gay voice and all of this and that. And it was pretty relentless. And so I started to really invest in music as a refuge. That refuge was a revelation. Adam had talent, a lot of it. He'd go on to earn a Grammy nomination for his contemporary, sometimes experimental work. If you're a cutting edge composer these days, you want Adam to perform your pieces. But few expected he'd solicit their work so specifically and so personally via an email. I've decided to commission piano pieces from composers whom I care about and whose work I admire. You are one of them. And he said, my dad has passed away. I received this inheritance in the form of $10,000 in an envelope in a Denny's parking lot. And I was immediately like, I'm intrigued. Tell me more.

His inheritance went toward paying 16 acclaimed composers. It's really just very cool to have us all in the same space.

Some of whom joined us at the 92nd Street Y in New York. They and their music became Adam's grief counselors in a way. I was very upfront with them. This is a bit selfish on my part. I need to figure out a way through this grief. Did you know what kind of response you'd get? No, I didn't know if anyone would say yes. Everyone said yes. It was a really rare email to get as a composer, something that was so open and vulnerable and raw.

Multi-instrumentalist Angelica Negroni, as well as Pulitzer Prize finalist Chris Cerrone, were both honored but still a little tentative. I was avoiding writing this piece honestly, and then very unfortunately, my dad passed away right as I was about to start writing it.

Then there was two time Grammy nominee Missy Marzuola. My own father passed away about 11 months ago, and all of a sudden, I had a totally different perspective on the whole project. [PIANO PLAYING]

What Adam ended up getting was a cornucopia of all kinds of emotions. Some were meditative. Others built to anger. [ANGRY PIANO MUSIC] Some are light. [LIGHT PIANO MUSIC] And others, like Grammy nominee Dev Hynes' composition, are mournfully unchanging. It just does-- yeah. And that just keeps going. I wanted to start with this soft repetition of almost like taking in the air. When I think about people I've loved passing, I always think about silence. I always think about the moment after that news. There's a stillness or you hear the air or something. Do you get emotional? Every time. I get emotional every time. I have to let myself become that vulnerable or else it's just a cabaret of grief, which it's not.

Adam Tendler took a strained relationship and turned it into something that actually relates to everyone. His father is in the music but so is mine. Maybe yours. Your friend's. Death is a universal end. And yet, for Adam Tendler, it was also a beginning. I'll be playing these pieces for the rest of my life. You think? Oh, yeah. We don't learn a Beethoven sonata, so that we conquer it. You learn a Beethoven sonata, so you keep it, and you watch it mature, and you watch it evolve. That, to me, is grief. And I can carry grief with me in a way that I actually keep it, and I can cherish it, and I don't want to lose it. I don't want to lose him.