Author Archives: Scott Foglesong

On my first visit to San Francisco (1971 or thereabouts) I recognized a lot of street names: Montgomery, Sansome, Haight, Bush, Leavenworth, Grant. That’s not because I had been boning up on SF geography prior to my visit. My acquaintance … Continue reading →

Ah, Thanksgiving. Relatives gathered. Mom, grandma, and sisters toiling away in the kitchen. Dads, brothers, uncles, and granddads in the living room boo-yah-ing incoherently over the TV’s earsplitting football-bloodlust blare. Kids running around. Dogs yapping. Kids yapping. Babies crying. Smells … Continue reading →

Cody’s Books, iconic mainstay of elite-intellectual Berkeley, long a fixture at the corner of Telegraph and Haste, closed in 2006. That spurred the Berkeley mayor into action regarding Telegraph Avenue, that erstwhile beacon of the Summer of Love now turned … Continue reading →

Funny how we pidgeonhole composers with buzzwords or catchphrases. Heroic seems to be the most commonly encountered adjective around Beethoven. That’s the accepted image of Ludwig van, as he storms against fate and writes majestic works that burst the boundaries … Continue reading →

Back in my teen years in suburban Denver, when the wonders of the larger musical world seemed about a million miles away from the secure blandness of middle America, I took comfort in my occasional splurge on a Deutsche Grammophon … Continue reading →

Ah, San Francisco. Oasis of culture and refinement set within the cars-and-cheeseburgers mentality of California. City of fine restaurants, opera and symphony, ballet, theater, museums. Liberal and tolerant, home to artists both renowned and wannabee, square hole for the square … Continue reading →

I’m a techie. I make lavish and frequent use of computers in a lot of arenas including presentations, audio, video, animation, music notation and production, and more. I even wrote software at one point in my life. But when all … Continue reading →

This past election buttered few parsnips for me. I just wasn’t all that engaged. But several items, both of them local, jumped out at me as being worthy of attention, while the rest of the whole shebang puddled around in … Continue reading →

One of my areas of interest-cum-expertise is the San Francisco Symphony’s long and distinguished history on record, a catalog that dates back an impressive eighty-five years to late January 1925 in a cramped studio on 78th Street in Oakland, where … Continue reading →

I arrived at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in January of 1975. Back then it had barely emerged from being a neighborhood piano school. The old Mission-style building in the Outer Sunset district was still more or less unchanged … Continue reading →