MUSIC IN THE MAIL
posted by James Reel
The Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival won’t arrive until March, but this is the time of year when we start distributing music to the participating musicians. They usually already own all the standard-rep scores, except for some of the solo string players who have been recruited to participate in a quartet or quintet especially for the festival. Still, there’s a fair amount of unusual material that these people have never played before, but have been persuaded to try through the sweet-talking of the festival’s artistic director, Peter Rejto.
It used to be Peter’sjob to make sure the scores got into the right hands, but since he moved to Australia a few years ago, antipodal mailing rates have proved exorbitant, so for the past few years Peter has had me send the material to our musicians scattered across North America. Usually, I make a photocopy of each part before I put it in the mail, because inevitably some musician will claim not to have received a score and will need a backup. (Said score usually turns up behind her couch a few months later.) This year, Peter has directed me to send the copies and keep the originals, because some of the scores can be rather expensive ($53.95 for the Henle urtext edition of three Mozart quintets) or difficult to track down (Harry Freedman’s Trois Poèmes de Jacques Prévert, which is available only from the Canadian Music Centre, not the usual music shops). Peter just doesn’t want to run the risk of losing any of this material—or, rather, letting the musicians lose it.
Now, you can say what you want about irresponsible, immature musicians not being able to keep track of some of the basic tools of their trade, but I’m inclined to be more forgiving. These people have a lot more on their schedules than the Tucson festival. Many of them teach and/or tour, which means their juggling a lot of other scores and responsibilities. Some have even more to deal with. Cellist Antonio Lysy, besides teaching, also runs a summer music festival in Italy; violinist Joseph Lin, who has spent the past few months on sabbatical in China and Japan, exploring and composing, will soon have to return to the U.S. to put in the last few months of his professorial gig at Cornell before becoming the new first violinist of the Juilliard Quartet. They have a few things on their minds.
So I’m packing up the photocopies and sending them off to Bardonia, Santa Monica, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Ithaca. Next question: How many of the musicians will actually practice the music before March?
