Adolph Weiss

Despite the name, Weiss was 100% American, born to recently-migrated German parents in Baltimore, Maryland in 1891. His father was a professional orchestral player and taught his son to play the bassoon: he was eventually to become bassoonist with both the New York Philharmonic (playing under Gustav Mahler!) and New York Symphony orchestras. He studied music theory with Abraham Lilenthal, Frank Ward and Cornelius Rybner whilst living in New York, before joining the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1916. In 1925, he travelled to Berlin and studied with Schönberg -the first American to do so. Schönberg worked his usual magic on him and Weiss's subsequent compositions all used 12-tone compositional technique. He continued to play bassoon in various American orchestras thereafter, including the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, under Pierre Monteux.

His compositional output is small, but includes three string quartets, a chamber symphony, wind quintet and a violin. Oddly, there is little bassoon music, apart from a concerto for string quartet plus bassoon dating from 1949.

A little bit of autobiography, which happens also to list many of his works, is available on the Wayback Machine.