SCRAMBLED SCHEDULE

posted by James Reel

    I woke up in the middle of the night with a blog post in mind inspired by my half day back at the helm of the Tucson Weekly; it was a rant about losing the useful distinctions of language that make English so rich and versatile, but now all I can remember is a complaint about how people misuse “backyard” and “backseat” as nouns (even in a beautifully written Pulitzer-winning novel like The Known World by Edward P. Jones), whereas their one-word forms should be employed only adjectivally. No doubt you would have found it thrilling.
    Instead, I’ll focus my attention on a couple of interviews I need to chase down in preparation for magazine articles. Late this morning I’m supposed to call the cellist of the Kodály Quartet and talk about the group’s recently completed Schubert cycle, which I alluded to in an earlier post. During the few minutes I was home yesterday afternoon, I got a call from the quartet’s host on the east coast hoping that we could do the interview later in the evening, but things didn’t work out (my fault; I dallied too long dining with friends). I’ve already spoken to the cellist, György Éder, once this morning, so there shouldn’t be any snags with the next call. Tomorrow, I’ll need to rendez-vous somehow with violinist Terje Tønnesen while he’s in town with his Camerata Nordica for a concert presented by the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music. To do that, I presume I’ll be making a long-distance call to a Norwegian cell phone in the hands of a person sitting no more than three miles from me. All this after I got ambushed on Saturday by Murray Horwitz, calling me unexpectedly to do an interview we’d never quite scheduled in advance of his performance of An Evening with Sholom Aleichem for Invisible Theatre.
    Conducting interviews on the fly like this makes me extremely uncomfortable. My schedule is loose enough to accommodate them, sometimes, but tight enough that doing so is not entirely convenient. Besides, I’m the sort of methodical person who likes to know exactly what’s going to happen when. That love of precision serves me well in the often unforgiving world of radio; I know down to the second when something is supposed to occur. This Tchaikovsky symphony I’m playing now, for example, will end at 9:59:20. You can set your clock to it.