A HOME FOR OLD RECORD MAGAZINES?

posted by James Reel

    A listener sent me the following note:

I've got nearly all the back issues of Fanfare with the exception of a few issues in the first year or two. None of my heirs will want them. I'm pretty much out of the CD acquisition mode. (I should be getting rid of them rather than buying them.)  So I've decided to sell my Fanfare collection. Since shipping costs somewhat diminish the value do you have any suggestions of anyone in the Tucson or Phoenix areas who might be interested? I've also got a considerable collection of Gramophones from the 60s through the 90s I need to dispose of.   I know ads in the back of Fanfare often list collections and I'll turn there if I fail to find a buyer nearby.

STRETCH

posted by James Reel

    In the latest Tucson Weekly, I offer an update on a former UA cello professor:

    Cellist Nancy Green has performed all over the world, her recordings have gotten exceptionally positive reviews, her extroverted style is often compared to that of Jacqueline du Pré, and she had a secure job on the UA music faculty.
    But a year ago, she gave up the academic life and stopped traveling around. Right now, if you want to hear her live, you can find her every Wednesday night playing for a yoga class.
    This is not one of those stories about how the mighty have fallen. Green is very carefully guiding her career in exactly the direction she wants.
    "I took a leap into the abyss," she says of her decision to leave the UA a year ago. "With my son graduating from high school, I've had a feeling of crossing the finish line--all these years of single parenting took a lot out of me. I wanted to live a life that was more grounded. I wanted to do more playing, but I don't want to do a lot of jetting around."

LABELS AND PIGEONHOLES

posted by James Reel

    By coincidence, two bloggers in the past couple of days have addressed the issue of categorizing composers past and present. Kyle Gann, a composer himself associated with the Downtown set (a group easier to describe by what it is not than by the many things it is), considers his position in relation to the genre-crossing Hollywood director William Wyler. On the other side of the continent, Timothy Mangan uses examples from the past two centuries to dismiss the notion that labels are limiting: “As if any label were so limiting that it didn't encompass many styles. As if any label were so limiting that applying it would keep (a classical) artist from pursuing his latest Gershwin project. Labels don't work that way.”

BLOGGING FRANKLY

posted by James Reel

    Opera singer turned opera marketer Rich Russell has left the blogosphere, citing “a bit of a conflict of interest and the inability to speak freely or usefully.” He hasn’t posted regularly since becoming Sarasota Opera’s marketing director last fall; I assumed he was devoting most of his time to learning the ropes and settling in and contending with all those other new-job clichés. I have no idea whether he was being reticent of his own accord or his boss warned him that blogging could be hazardous to his continuing employment, but I’m more concerned about the possibility of self-censorship. Rich Russell has every right to express his opinions on his own blog, and he could have told lots of juicy backstage stories and made plenty of interesting observations about the production and marketing of opera in contemporary America, all without embarrassing his employer. As long as he didn’t do anything stupid and defamatory—which is apparently beyond the ability of a lot of work bloggers in tech fields—he shouldn’t have had to worry about compromising his company or offending the boss. (Not that this was necessarily his problem; I’m using Rich’s example as a springboard for discussion of a more general concern.)
    My position is rather different from his. This blog is hosted on the KUAT server and is part of KUAT-FM’s Web presence, and I contribute to it on company time. Opinions are most decidedly my own, but given the quasi-official nature of the blog, I’m sure readers suspect I’m some sort of mouthpiece for KUAT. True, the few times I mention station policies they tend to be practices I agree with, and if I fiercely object to some new directive I might hold my tongue. Then again, I might not. It would be idiotic for me to write that my co-workers smell bad and my boss is a vicious moron, because that’s the sort of thing that would rightly get the plug pulled on the blog, and perhaps even my employment. (Calling the boss a moron on a company Web site would be equivalent to insubordination, and would be a lot like coming into the office at 9 a.m., writing “This place sucks” on company letterhead, and mailing copies to all the company’s clients.) On the other hand, if I were to write that all my co-workers are experts and the boss is the most brilliant manager in his field, readers would probably regard this as an act of sycophancy, no matter how sincere I might be. So my practice has been to remark only sparingly on KUAT specifics. Still, I do feel free to comment, often critically, on trends in public radio (the worst of which, thankfully, are not followed here), and on any number of other cultural subjects. It shouldn’t be a matter of all or nothing, and I’m sorry Rich Russell felt it necessary to retire from blogging.

TRANSGRESSIONS

posted by James Reel

    So I’m sitting here playing a recording of the Symphonic Scherzo by Arnold Bax, and the Infamous Bax Quote comes to mind: "You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk dancing." I wanted to check the precise wording, so I Googled “incest and folk dancing.” Many of the hits Google returned attributed the quote not to Bax but to Sir Thomas Beecham, and one even credited Oscar Wilde with the remark. Well, it certainly sounds like something Beecham or Wilde would have said, and that makes it far too easy to credit them with the quip without looking it up. (I suspect Beecham never actually uttered many of the witticisms for which he is known; they merely accreted to his reputation over the years. As Yogi Berra reputedly remarked, “I didn't really say everything I said.”)
    I first heard the quote attributed to Bax by one of my professors in library school around 1980, in a class on fine-arts reference materials. Somehow, I’m more inclined to trust the authority of my old library professor than the preponderance of opinion on the Internet. Call me old-fashioned.
    (For the record, in his 1943 book Farewell My Youth, Bax himself attributed the incest quote to “A sympathetic Scot,” which may be a fabrication, may allude to a Bax acquaintance, or may suggest that it’s some folkish proverb. Perhaps someday I’ll pursue this … in the library.)

DOING WHAT COMES NATURALLY

posted by James Reel

    In all the blogging about how to save classical music from extinction, this is the most sensible comment I’ve seen so far:

I think we are what we are. I think it's a good idea to try new things, but it's a bad idea to try new things that are silly, cheap, or make us the laughing stock of the younger generation because we are trying so hard to be hip with a non-hip product. There's a reason popular music is called popular. We aren't pop music. There's pop fiction. There's pop culture. Fine. Let them be. They are popular now. They will not be popular later. Eventually they'll either be gone all together, or move into the "classic" realm.