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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: The first time

February 16, 2005 by Terry Teachout

I went last week to hear the premiere of Morph, a wonderful new piece for string orchestra by Paul Moravec, whose Pulitzer-winning Tempest Fantasy is now out on CD. A couple of days later, Paul sent me this e-mail:

A great experience for a composer to invent something–two-dimensional, in black-and-white in the studio, I-think-it’s-going-to-work-but-who-knows?–and then suddenly there it is in 3-D, living color, and it works like gangbusters. The piece made me listen as a disinterested audience member to a considerable extent. Of course I know how it goes, but as they were playing I was sitting there thinking, Gee, what happens next?

Boy, do I ever know how that feels. Writing a book is one thing, but holding it in your hand is something else again, though the really big moment comes when you first see the text set up in type. All at once your words have a life of their own–they’re not just pixels on a screen–and you can feel them slipping out of your control and into the world, there to make their way among strangers. It’s terrifying. It’s also thrilling.


All of which reminds me to do something I originally intended to do a couple of weeks ago. I wrote the liner notes for Paul’s Tempest Fantasy CD, and it occurs to me that those of you who haven’t yet heard any of his music might be interested in reading what I had to say about it. (If you’ve already bought the CD, pardon my redundancy!)


* * *


Paul Moravec lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, two blocks north of me, and whenever I bump into him on the street, I say, “Is that a Pulitzer laureate I see strolling down the sidewalk?” He always laughs and looks embarrassed–but pleased, too, as well he should. Winning the Pulitzer Prize for music, as Paul did in 2004 for Tempest Fantasy, is no small thing, especially when you’ve been laboring in relative obscurity for years. To be sure, Paul is well known and respected within the tight little world of American classical composers, but a household name he isn’t. Yet not only did winning the Pulitzer get his name into every major newspaper in the United States, it also gave him permanent entr

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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