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February 18, 2004
TT: Ancient history
Not long ago, a reader wrote:
I was reading a few of your articles and noticed biographical details scattered throughout the prose. My suggestion is that you gather them all
together, fill in the gaps and post the expanded "about me" as a permanent addition to your blog. Where are you from, why did you become a critic, and where did you get your first break, long-term goals, etc. What could be more interesting for your regular readers?
A lot of things, actually. It's not that I'm averse to autobiography--indeed, I once went so far as to commit a memoir--but like most natural-born short hitters, I find that I prefer as a rule to salt my writings with personal detail rather than serving it up as a main course. I did try squashing the story of my professional life into an annotated resumé, but the results came out sounding so stiff that I decided not to post them. I'd just as soon keep on telling my tale, such as it is, in dribs and drabs.
Since we're on the subject of me, my brother and his daughter were looking at Smalltown High School yearbooks at the dinner table last night, some of which were published back when I edited the high-school newspaper. That was--gulp--30 years ago. As my niece made fun of the hair styles of 1974, I found myself recalling some of the ways in which I first became aware of the larger world of art and culture, and it occurred to me that in lieu of a more formal chronicle, it might be interesting to draw up a list of cultural firsts:
I bought my first adult hardcover book, The Complete Sherlock Holmes, in 1966 or 1967. I still own that copy, minus the dust jacket but otherwise intact.
I bought my first classical LPs in 1968 at Collins Piano, the local music store, which stocked a few dozen assorted albums alongside the usual upright pianos, guitars, saxophones, and drum kits. If memory serves, they were Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony, performed by Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and an Isaac Stern album that coupled the Berg Violin Concerto with Bartók's First and Second Rhapsodies--rather exotic fare for a boy from southeast Missouri. That same year, Wal-Mart opened a store in Smalltown (the first Wal-Mart outside Arkansas) that sold budget classical LPs for $2.98 apiece, about $16 in today's money. I bought most of them.
I saw my first play, Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit, in 1968, performed by the Smalltown High School Drama Club during a daytime assembly in the junior-high gym. It made such a powerful impression on me that I auditioned for the Drama Club the following year, and spent the rest of my schooldays acting in and working on plays.
I heard my first classical concert, a piano recital by David Bar-Illan, in 1969 or 1970. (It took place in the same gym where I saw Blithe Spirit.) Bar-Illan appeared on the Smalltown Community Concert series, playing the Weber A-Flat Sonata, the Liszt B Minor Ballade and Dante Sonata, and his own solo transcription of the Masque from Leonard Bernstein's Age of Anxiety. I met him many years later, and he claimed to remember the concert, to my amazement and delight.
I didn't see any paintings, ballets, or operas in Smalltown, there being none to be seen. In 1977, I took a school-sponsored trip to New York City, where I saw Boris Godunov and Il Trittico at the Metropolitan Opera and Mikhail Baryshnikov at American Ballet Theatre. This was shortly after Baryshnikov defected from the Soviet Union, and he danced Fokine's Spectre of the Rose. I still remember him leaping through the window, though I was more impressed by the last piece on the program, Jerome Robbins' jazzy Fancy Free. (What really impressed me, though, was that Lauren Bacall was sitting directly in front of me.) A few months ago, I covered the opening of Wicked for The Wall Street Journal, and was quietly amused by the fact that it took place in the same theater where I first saw Baryshnikov dance.
I also went to the Museum of Modern Art, a visit about which I remember barely more than being surprised by the sheer size of Picasso's Three Musicians and the Monet water-lily triptych. Many more years would pass before the visual arts started to make sense to me.
Strangely enough, I can't remember the first time I heard a live performance by a well-known jazz musician. My guess is that it must have been in 1976, when I saw Count Basie in Kansas City. My real introduction to jazz had already come through my father's record collection, which contained LPs by Basie, Dave Brubeck, Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, and Stan Kenton, plus several hundred dusty 78s of similar vintage.
By 1977, I was starting to give serious thought to the possibility of becoming a music critic, and I published my first concert review in the Kansas City Star that fall. Four years later, I reviewed Raymond Sokolov's biography of A.J. Liebling for National Review, my very first magazine piece. I didn't yet know it, but I'd started down the road that led me from Missouri to New York, and to the rest of my life.
Posted February 18, 2004 12:00 PM
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