With these pieces Adler joins the number of composers through the years who have delighted in finding note equivalents of letters in the alphabet to “spell” through notes. That impulse goes back at least to J. S. Bach, whose musical signature, B(B♭)-A-C-H(B), was employed by him and by many later composers—Liszt’s Fantasy and Fugue on BACH being an imposing example.

The ultimate sender of secret messages through his music, Robert Schumann, created a beautiful spelling of the name Abegg in the eponymous variations, op. 1. More complex musical spellings occur in Schumann’s Carnaval, op. 9, where the notes S(E♭)-C-H(B)-A, the four letters in Schumann’s name that have note equivalents, are heard throughout in various permutations.

What to do when the name to be spelled outruns the letters of our musical alphabet? Ravel solved this when he composed his Minuet sur le nom d’Haydn (Minuet on the Name of Haydn) to honor the centennial of Haydn’s death in 1809. Y and N having no note equivalents, Ravel simply used D and G to stand in for the “unspellable” letters and created an elegant motive heard many times and even in inversion throughout this magical minuet.

The dedicatees of Adler’s four Birthday Cards are celebrated through pitch cells derived from their first names by using a “numbered alphabet” in which C=A, C♯=B, and so on up the chromatic scale until twenty-six notes have been employed. The composer provides the cell pitches and spellings at the head of each piece. That is how we know that when “Milton” begins on a low C octave it is because C=M!

Does knowing that compositional device influence the performer’s interpretation of the music? My answer to that is … maybe. It is more likely when a name motive has a distinctive and recognizable melodic profile, as in “Ned” and “David,” this leads the player to want to feature it as it and its modifications weave through the piece.