GORDON EPPERSON
posted by James Reel
Retired University of Arizona cello professor Gordon Epperson died Tuesday. I interviewed him for a newspaper article several years ago, and I didn’t know him personally, but he did immediately strike me as a very nice, genial person, and that impression is supported by the testimony of those who knew him. My own cello teacher, Harry Clark, studied with Epperson as a kid; yesterday, Harry praised Epperson as somebody who “could talk about anything, not just cello,” which aptly describes Harry, too. Obviously, Gordon Epperson influenced his students in many ways, not just musically. Early this morning I played Fauré’s Elegy for cello as a little tribute to Gordon Epperson.
He was ably eulogized in both the Star and the Citizen, but I was amused to see this item in the latter’s obit:
Among his proud possessions when he came here was a 1665-vintage Amati cello, a rare Italian instrument. He prized it so highly that when he traveled, he paid full airline fare for a second seat for the instrument.Actually, that’s standard operating procedure for cellists, especially those with valuable instruments. No matter how bomb-proof a cello case may be, it can’t be trusted to protect an Amati or a Strad or some other old Cremonese instrument from baggage handlers and the vagaries of pressure and temperature in a plane’s cargo hold. Even the trunk of a car is hard on a string instrument. Only yesterday, after a 40-minute drive across town, I took my cello out of the fairly toasty trunk of my car to discover that almost all the pegs had popped, presumably because of the change in temperature from my 72-degree house to my 100-degree car (although I never had this problem last summer). Because of the complicated mechanism for attaching the strings to the tailpiece, it took Harry and me nearly half an hour of collaborative effort to get the instrument restrung and retuned. If a little car trip can be this hard on a cello, you don’t have to prize your instrument unusually highly to buy it a plane ticket.
