Weekend Column: The Day the Music Died

By Yakov Epstein

In 2018, my wife and I moved from our five-bedroom home in New Jersey to a two-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor of a building named the Master Apartments, at 310 Riverside Drive at 103rd Street, on the Upper West Side.

We were looking forward to the many pleasures of which we knew we would partake. We knew because for many years we had owned a pied-à-terre there, which we and our kids frequented most weekends and, unlike many of our Manhattan friends who “escaped the city” to their vacation homes in the summer, we looked forward to the joys of summer in the city.

We also knew the history of the Master Apartments, which was originally built to house a museum and other cultural institutions, as well as studios for artists and musicians. When it was completed in 1929, The New York Times called it, “A formidable venture in combining living space and culture.” One of the arts-supportive amenities of the Master Apartments was a number of apartments on the third floor that could be used by musicians as practice rooms.

We never dreamed that we would be the lucky recipients of a perpetual nightly piano recital at dinnertime. Most evenings, starting at precisely 6 p.m., we would be treated to an hour-long program of beautiful, wonderfully performed piano music. We were not sure where the pianist lived or who she or he was, but when we asked the resident manager of the Master, he informed us that Adolovni Acosta, a professional concert pianist lived in a third-floor apartment directly beneath ours. He knew she was from Manila, but did not know much else about her. He helped us figure out that we were able to hear her musical performances ascending from her keyboard to the ceiling and then coming up from under our floorboards.

Curious, I unleashed the Google machine and found an extensive Wikipedia article about Ms. Acosta., informing me that “at age 11, she won a radio competition in Manila, and at age 12, she was a winner in the Lucia Francisco Music Circle Piano Scholarship Competition.” She then received a scholarship to attend the University of the Philippines, where she earned a Bachelor of Music in Piano degree, as well as a Master of Music degree.

In 1968, she was awarded a World Music Program scholarship at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. The following year she was accepted at The Juilliard School of Music where she studied with several eminent teachers of piano and earned a Master of Science in Piano degree. After graduation, she performed at all the major concert venues in New York and in similar venues worldwide. She also taught Master classes and made many recordings of her work.

So this was our free ticket to a nightly performance. We were able to identify some of the pieces she played, but we did not know the names or composers of many of the others. Curious to find out, we left a note for her with the concierge at the Master Apartments. Sadly, we never got a response.

During the pandemic, Ms. Acosta was away for many months and returned sporadically for brief periods of time. In the last several months, I have noticed a change in the quality of her performance and commented to my wife that her playing was not what it had been previously, and I wondered if she had become ill.  Then, last week we received an email sent by the resident manager to all residents of the Master Apartments. It read:

“Good afternoon, Unfortunately, Adolovni Acosta, a resident of apartment 313 passed away yesterday. I called the police to get to her apartment. This was a lady you might recall staying at the lobby. She was a piano teacher at Columbia and in the Philippines.”

The day Adolovni Acosta died was “the day the music died” for us.